Ray Kurzweil joins Google

Yes, and the second coming will happen real soon now, where the faithful will be rewarded. We can pretty much see the steps there...

But this is not the same, famed people established themselves at Microsoft and AT&T. There wasn't this sort of hiring of celebrity. Someone of Kurzweil's stature could be doing his own research and simply hired on as a board member.

There are plenty of widely known people at Google, but seemingly in spite of Google rather than because of. Maybe that's a consequence of 20% time too. But if people's reputations are staked in things other than the company, the company seems to borrow more reputation than it makes.

In 2008, Ray Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.

lololololol

But this utopian resurrection and transcendance story is just one version of the singularity. There are many people who think AI is not physically impossible, nanotech is not physically impossible, and so recursively self-improving AI with strong abilities to act in the physical world is a possibility. Many of those people think that is a very dangerous possibility.

You can agree or disagree with the detailed arguments, but you cannot accuse these people of allowing wishful thinking to cloud their judgements.

I like MacLeod as a writer, but that slogan is damaging because many people hear it, laugh, and stop thinking.

Kurzweil also does a reasonably unbiased job of grading his own predictions here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Fari...

Quite a few of your statements relate to technological adoption vs. technological capability, such as everyday use of speech recognition and ebooks. I clearly stated that Kurzweil is not perfect at predicting what technologies will catch on with consumers and organizations, nor is anyone for that matter. To me, and to most of the people reading this, the most interesting aspect of Kurzweil's predictions is always what technological capabilities will be possible, rather than the rate of technological adoption.

Some of your other statements conflate science fiction with what Kurzweil does: "There have been predictions of self-driving cars for more than half a century. It's in Disney's 'Magic Highway' from 1958, for example." Similarly, most of your other points attempt to make the case that because nascent research projects existed, all of his predictions should have been readily apparent. I'm sorry, but this is pretty much the same hindsight bias displayed by gavanwoolery and Kurzweil's worst critics. Basically, Kurzweil's predictions are incredulously absurd to you, until they become blindingly obvious.

You can point to obscure German R&D projects all you want (and who knows how advanced that prototype was, or how controlled the tests were), but I was blown away by the Google self driving car, as were most of the people on HN based on the enthusiasm it received here. I thought it would take at least a decade or so before people took it for granted, buy you've set a Wow-to-Meh record in under a year.

Once again, I strongly encourage you to fire up Youtube or dust off an old computer, and really try and remember exactly what the tech environment was really like in previous decades for the average consumer. Zip drives, massive boot times, 5 1/4 floppy disks, EGA, 20mb external hard drives the size of a shoe box, 30 minute downloads for a single mp3 file, $2,000 brick phones, jpgs loading up one line of pixels a second, etc.

To be clear, I'm not a Kurzweil fanboy. He's not some omniscient oracle, bringing down the future on stone tablets from the mount. What he is is a meticulous, thoughtful, and voracious researcher of technological R&D and trends, and a reasonably competent communicator of his findings. I'm very familiar with the track records of others who try and pull off a similar feat, and he's not perfect, but he's far and away the best barometer out there for the macro trends of the tech industry. If his findings were so obvious, why is everyone else so miserable at it? Furthermore, his 1999 book was greeted with the same skepticism and incredulity that all of his later books were.

For some of your other points, I've included links below:

Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain - Kurzweil was clearly talking about an undertaking like the Blue Brain project. Henry Markram, the head of the project, is predicting that around 2020 they will have reverse engineered and simulated the human brain down to the molecular level:

http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_br...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

A 1000 dollar pc can perform about a trillion calculations per second. -- This happened. This is also an extension based on Moore's law and so in some sense predicted a decade previous. Pretty much all of Kurzweil's predictions boil down to Moore's law, which he would be the first to admit. I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls. - If you read his prediction in context, he's clearly talking about very primitive and experimental efforts in the lab, which we are certainly closing in on:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/automated-drug-design-using-synthe...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadrian_Seeman - If you've been following any of Nadrian Seeman's work on nanobots constructed with DNA, Kurzweil's predictions seem pretty close

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/101/researchers-cre...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-step-toward-creating-a-bio-robot...

http://www.aalto.fi/en/current//news/view/2012-10-18/

Three-dimensional chips are commonly used. - I guess you could quibble over them being a few years late:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17785464

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384897,00.asp