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>even if you don't believe in the Singularity This makes "the singularity" sound very much like a religion.
It's faith-based handwaving bafflegab. So, yes, only without the intellectual credibility.
Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet, and we can safely assume he's aware of even very obscure research projects in the field, both inside and outside academia. Joining Google gives him ready access to data sets of almost unimaginable size, as well as unparalleled infrastructure and skills for handling such large data sets…
Singularity U as far as I understand is not really there so people can more quickly get to the point of uploading their brain to the cloud or anything - it's essentially for business strategists who want to have a better grasp of where things will be in 5-10+ years out. If the Goog believes strongly in the Kurz's ability to do this then it seems like a pretty nice score for the Goog.
It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hof... I see what DRF means, and The Singularity is Near did seem mostly a perfunctory literature review, with important issues not discussed, just skimmed over. (For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accel…
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>I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description. Really? Because if so, then they stole that quote almost verbatim from Mitch Kapor when he was discussing the singularity in 2007. And it seems to have a lot less relevance to a book about how the brain works than it does to an imagined singularity. >Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called…
In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...
The singularity reeks of religious concepts. Kurzweil even called his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" before it was "The Singularity is Near." He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime). Yada yada... basically what I'm saying is the the quote fits that book perfectly.
Now we're talking about his new book "How to Create a Mind", which is a theory about how the brain works and how reverse engineer it, and the quote doesn't seem to fit. I'm guessing someone was just trying to sound intelligent... but then why does the OP agree with them?
Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet, and we can safely assume he's aware of even very obscure research projects in the field, both inside and outside academia. Joining Google gives him ready access to data sets of almost unimaginable size, as well as unparalleled infrastructure and skills for handling such large data sets…
I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this working out well for Google, unless they just want a famous figurehead.
You know, it would be wonderful if Ray Kurzweil actually works on software/hardware projects, and he's just hush-hush because he doesn't want to release experiments. Maybe he does more than writing books and speaking at conferences, and he secretly provisions ec2 clusters to experiment with Hadoop or whatever. Maybe he's not just some old geezer that pops lots of pills, maybe he's an old geezer that pops pills and writes Go.
At least, that's what I tell myself to not be as angry about his "prediction from a distance" branding.
On a somewhat related note, http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ has some old emails someone sent to Ray, exploring his lack of involvement in the open source transhumanist hardware/software community.
I'm somewhat surprised there are comments debating what use he could be to Google or what interest they might have in him - Google is one of the primary backers of Singularity University. They already have a working relationship. Now he's an employee. Don't get how this could be a stretch. Singularity U as far as I understand is not really there so people can more quickly get to the point of uploading their brain to…
Maybe because of his role at Google, "Director of Engineering". That's not a good description of what Singularity University offers their customers. They do maybe one or two field trips to BioCurious and call it quits.
Also, why is Singularity University managing TedxAustin? That was a bizarre email to see.
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So he gave a tech-talk at Google, around 2008, and yes he had lots of graphs and such but during the Q&A session he kept retreating into generalized ideas rather than data. I recall the question about how he came up with his numbers for machines to hold a consciousness as one such exchange. The impression I certainly got was that his approach is to theorize about something, then design experiments to test out his the…
> The impression I certainly got was that his approach is to theorize about something, then design experiments to test out his theory. As opposed to running a bunch of experiments and then figuring out a theory that would explain the collected data. There's nothing wrong with this, as you've written it. (There might be a problem with his implementation.) All else being equal, I trust a theory which has made ten accur…
I wonder if this will be a wake up call for some of the people who think his predictions of super-human AI are a joke. I mean even if you don't believe in the Singularity, you must believe in Google, right?
Believe that they'd never be mistaken?
I wonder how the blind allocation process will treat him. His domain expertise is AI, but he didn't do any of that At Google, which means it doesn't exist. So is he going to have to spend 18 months maintaining a legacy ad-targeting product while the 26-year-old Staff SWE next to him works on its replacement? How is he going to handle that?
Stop trolling! I'm not even an ex-Googler and know about your constant complaints. Move on! Life's too short buddy.
Google is badly managed but they're not going to subject a heavyweight like that to their typical nonsense (blind allocation, manager-as-SPOF) and if they do, I'm sure he'll be just fine.