

Kurzweil: 'Exponential' Change Ahead for Games, People - paul_reiners
http://www.news.com/Kurzweil-Exponential-change-ahead-for-games%2C-people/2100-1043_3-6231644.html?tag=item

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pkaler
I was at GDC and saw this keynote. I'm not sure why it was a GDC keynote. The
talk was barely even tangentially related to game development.

The talk was similar to his TED talk but an hour long rather than 20 minutes.
<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38>

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ivankirigin
Games debatably present the best opportunities for deployed AI. The
alternatives are backend servers or aggregate knowledge across the web.

Games are the most consumer facing.

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pkaler
Yup. Agreed.

Chris Hecker's talk, Structure vs. Style, was much better regarding this
subject. His argument is that we don't have a Structure vs. Style
decomposition for AI. We have it on the web => HTML(structure) and CSS(style).
We have it in computer graphics => triangle(structure) and texture map(style).

Of course, this got the panties of all of the LISPers in a bunch.

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TheTarquin
If Kurzweil is right about even a fraction of the stuff he says, I'm fairly
certain he'll prove to be an exceptionally important thinker. Unfortunately, I
have serious doubts about almost everything the man says. He often seems to me
to be taking the canned shot approach to writing: predict as many big things
as possible and support them all as best he can, and see what hits.

In other news, this reminded me a post I saw a few years ago:
[http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/09/most-
important-w...](http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/09/most-important-
weblog-in-world-what.html)

"As the American economist Tyler Cowen points out, loony extropian and
transhuman nanotechnoartificiallinteligenceoboosterist Ray Kurzweil is,
because of his wild technoutopian prophesies, "the most important thinker
today, if only in expected value terms".

Or at least he was, until this morning when while having my breakfast, I made
the following prediction:

"Everything that Ray Kurzweil says will come true, and not only that but we
will all get a pony"."

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ivankirigin
Hype aside, he has an interesting approach to invention. He planned on
launching a tool to help blind people read. It is a digital camera with a tiny
computer. During development, people worked on algorithms on PCs knowing they
would be deployed on a portable device not yet available. There is some use to
plotting technological growth trends.

I think Cowen's comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

