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TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

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11–20 of 23 posts

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#13

IMHO this is not one of his better talks. Much better just to read the book. It's 500 pages but it's a very fast read. Lots of pretty graphs also.

Some criticism of Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near: [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmodis/Kurzweil.htm]

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#14

IMHO this is not one of his better talks. Much better just to read the book. It's 500 pages but it's a very fast read. Lots of pretty graphs also.

They're big pages though! I could only get through the first 200. Does he say anything particularly important in the last 300 pages?

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#15
post #2

I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark. I heard his broham Kevin Kelly give what seems like the same boring-ass speech at the '95 Computer Game Developer Conference, where everyone was talking amongst themselves waiting for it to end. I think we were supposed to have AI by 2015 then. I'd be happy if I could play Starcraft by then without the frickin' computer cheating. Anyway, the good stuff alwa…

We need an alternative source of energy before we have flying cars. It'll never work with fossil fuels. Maybe if the ultra-capacitor batteries turn out to be real we can do it. I also think they'd need to fly themselves to really catch on.

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#16
post #13

IMHO this is not one of his better talks. Much better just to read the book. It's 500 pages but it's a very fast read. Lots of pretty graphs also.

Some criticism of Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near : [ http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmodis/Kurzweil.htm ]

Thanks for that. I'm really interested in where the fundamental limits are. Already on the machine I'm writing this on (65nm core 2 duo), the transistors are on the order of 100 atoms long, so clearly the limits of 2D transistor density are already closing in rapidly. From there, there's frequency, efficient design (i.e. actual computing power per transistor - multicore design, stream processors etc) and 3D, so there's a lot more to improve.

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#17
I thought this was an exceptional talk. It is absolutely packed with data, and presents an exciting biological perspective on the exponential nature of the growth of human technology. If you like good research then you will probably like this. The message is basically that any technology can and most likely will get eaten by something better that comes along, and with exponentially increasing probability with time. Got it. The talk then turns into a forecast of technology through 2030 or so. Fairyland, yes. But fun.

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#18
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. It's also charming to see someone who still uses elements (non-ironically).

Rule of thumb: The smarter the person, the plainer the homepage.

Ahem:

Jaron Lanier Jaron Lanier Jaron Lanier Jaron Lanier Jaron Lanier Jaron Lanier

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#19
post #2

I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark. I heard his broham Kevin Kelly give what seems like the same boring-ass speech at the '95 Computer Game Developer Conference, where everyone was talking amongst themselves waiting for it to end. I think we were supposed to have AI by 2015 then. I'd be happy if I could play Starcraft by then without the frickin' computer cheating. Anyway, the good stuff alwa…

Kevin Kelly is not his broham. Kurzweil tries to distinguish himself from KK and others like him by being more scientific, where KK just seems to make observations. (I loved his book Out Of Control by the way). Kurzweil has been making predictions for a while, and he has been sticking to them, not keeping them 20 years away.

Re: TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029

#20
post #2

I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark. I heard his broham Kevin Kelly give what seems like the same boring-ass speech at the '95 Computer Game Developer Conference, where everyone was talking amongst themselves waiting for it to end. I think we were supposed to have AI by 2015 then. I'd be happy if I could play Starcraft by then without the frickin' computer cheating. Anyway, the good stuff alwa…

Also, the Starcraft CPU player doesn't cheat.
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