

TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029 - portLAN
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38

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zach
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 always seems twenty years away. I think that's also
when we all get flying cars, which is what I'm personally excited about.
However, if Terminator 2 is correct, 2029 is also when the machines make the
T-1000 and we all get shivved by liquid metal robots, so kinda good news, bad
news there.

But it is charming to hear someone who still uses "virtual reality" un-
ironically, even more precious to hear him refer to the telephone as the first
virtual reality technology. What the hell is that supposed to mean?!

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henning
Ray Kurzweil is nothing compared to Jaron Lanier.
<http://www.jaronlanier.com/>

His webpage doesn't look very um, futuristic.

Also he calls Wikipedia "the Wikipedia", which coming from him sounds a lot
like President Bush calling Google "the Google".
<http://edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html>

~~~
portLAN
A little background:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil>

"Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character
recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,
the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first
electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano
and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie
Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially
marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine
businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading
technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and
cybernetic art.

The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being
able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match
it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built
into a digital camera.[1]

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame,
established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the
$500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and
innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest
honor in technology.

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize
(Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from
Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of
American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of
1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing
Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in
2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007,
and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as "the restless
genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by
Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States,
calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one
of sixteen "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of
the past two centuries.[3]"

~~~
zach
Yeah, I read that too -- I was looking up when he was born. I was figuring
2029 was also going to be "before I die" to him. He certainly looks like he'll
make it to 81, but you can't expect a whole lot more, even with ten cups of
green tea a day, so it seems like a personal goal to him. You can do it, Ray!

By the way, the first paragraph of that bio should be credited as being
identical to the one on Ray Kurzweil's own site, which is considerably less
plain than Jaron Lanier's (not that it means anything, in my opinion...):

<http://www.kurzweiltech.com/>

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dappelbaum
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.

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jkush
"By 2010 computers will have disappeared. They will be so small they will be
embedded into our clothing. We will interact with virtual personalities via
signals wired into our retinas." (not an exact quote, but close)

I wish it was true, but that's not going to happen in 2 years. Maybe by 2020,
but definitely not by 2010.

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dejb
I'm a big fan of Kurzeil's ideas but my goodness how boring are his speaches!
I've seen about 5 speaches like this all with the same graphs etc.. And whats
with the constant yawning. It almost seems that he is bored repeating the same
content.

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andreyf
Sounds like a smart guy, but this kind of stuff makes me think twice:
<http://www.rayandterry.com/>

Also, does he have any technical books on the subjects he talks about?

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Alex3917
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.

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dood
Some criticism of Kurzweil's book, _The Singularity Is Near_ :
[<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmodis/Kurzweil.htm>]

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reitzensteinm
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.

