Ray Kurzweil joins Google

You seem nice; forgive me if I get too dismissive here.

As a software practitioner it seems to me obvious that we are so many light years away from the kind of software the Singularity people are talking about that the whole thing is all a fantasy club, and a little embarrassing. It's like the detailed debates 19th century radicals used to have about society after the Revolution.

Also, the Singularity people always seem to do that moving target thing where as soon as you say one thing, they go: But that's not the Singularity, that's a misunderstanding of the Singularity. Leaves me thinking: it must be awfully subtle.

He writes: “Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry.” When I wrote this prediction in the 1990s, portable computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm.

But I gave two specific counter-examples. The JavaRing from 1998 is a personal computer in a ring, and the TRS-80 pocket computer is a book-sized personal computer from the 1980s, which included BASIC. So the first part, "are available", was true already in 1999. Because "are available" can mean anything from a handful to being in everyone's hand.

Kurzweil then redefines or expands what "personal computer" means, so that modern iPods and smart phones are included. Except that with that widened definition, the cell phone and the beeper are two personal computers which many already had in 1999, yet were not "large heavy devices carried under your arm", and which some used as fashion statements. I considered then rejected the argument that a cell phone which isn't a smart phone doesn't count as a personal computer, because he says that computers in hearing aids and health monitors woven into undergarments are also personal computers, so I see no logic for excluding 1990s-era non-smart phones which are more powerful and capable than a modern hearing aid.

There were something like 750 million cell phone subscribers in the world in 2000, each corresponding to a "personal computer" by this expanded definition of personal computer. By this expanded definition, the 100 million Nintendo Game Boys sold in the 1990s are also personal computers, and the Tamagotchi and other virtual pets of the same era are not only personal computers, but also used as jewelry similar to how some might use an iPod now.

He can't have it both ways. Either a cell phone (and Game Boy and Tamagotchi) from 1999 is a personal computer or a hearing aid from now is not. And if the cell phone, Game Boy, etc. count as personal computers, then they were already "common" by 1999.

Of course, what does "common" mean? In the 1999 Python conference presentation which included the phrase "batteries included", http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/ipc7/ipc7-slides.pdf , the presenter points out that a "regular human being" carries a cell phone "spontaneously." I bought by own cell phone by 1999, and I was about the middle of the pack. That's common. (Compare that to the Wikipedia article on "Three-dimensional integrated circuit" which comments "it is not yet widely used." Just what does 'common' mean?)

Ha-ha! And those slides show that I had forgotten about the whole computer "smartwatch" field, including a programmable Z-80 computer in the 1980s and a smartwatch/cellphone "watch phone" by 1999!

I therefore conclude, without a doubt, that the reason why the prediction that "Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, ... " was true by 2009 was because it was already true in 1999.

As regards the "obscure German R&D project", that's not my point. A Nova watching geek of the 1980s would have seen the episode about the autonomous car project at CMU. And Kurzweil himself says that the prediction was wrong because he predicted 10 years and when he should have said 20 years. But my comment was responding to the enthusiasm of rpm4321 who wrote "Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then."

I don't understand that enthusiasm when 1) the prediction is acknowledged as being wrong, 2) autonomous cars already existed using the 'primitive tech environment' of the 1990s, and 3) the general prediction that it would happen, and was more than science fiction, was widely accepted, at least among those who followed the popular science press.

"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"

I started working with computers in 1983. I have rather vivid memories still of using 1200 baud modems, TV screens as monitors, and cassette tapes for data storage. I even wrote code using printer-based teletypes and not glass ttys. My complaint here is that comments like "primitive" denigrate the excellent research which was already done by 1999, and the effusive admiration for the predictions of 1999 diminish the extent to which those predictions were already true when they were made.

The Chinese Room experiment doesn't show only that. It also shows how important is the inter-relationship that exists between the component parts of a system.

We're reducing the Chinese Room to the Chinese and the objects they are using such as a lookup table. But what we're missing is the complex pattern between the answers, the structure and mutual integration that exists in their web of relations.

If we could reduce a system to its parts our brains would be just a bag of neurons, not a complex network. We'd get to the conclusion that brains can't possibly have consciousness on account that there is no "consciousness neuron" to be found in there. But consciousness emerges from the inter-relations of neurons and the Chinese Room can understand Chinese on account of its complex inner structure which models the complexity of the language itself.

He wanted the whole world to be Christian, and went to Ecuador to work as a missionary. Did that make him and my Mom (and my dad's parents (also missionaries) and various other of my extended family) visionaries? What about all of the Mormons who do their two years of missionary work?

Consider also all the people who were visionary, tried something, and failed. In part, perhaps, because their vision wasn't tenable. You don't hear about all of those visionary chefs who had a new idea for a restaurant, only to find out that it wasn't profitable.

Add all those up, and there are a lot of visionaries in the world. Enough that the non-visionaries are the exception.