

This is How Wrong Kurzweil Is - Digit-Al
http://asserttrue.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/this-is-how-wrong-kurzweil-is.html

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TeMPOraL
> But to say that we will see, by 2029, the development of computers with true
> consciousness, plus emotions and all the other things that make the human
> brain human, is nonsense. We'll be lucky to see such a thing in less than
> several hundred years—if ever.

2029 may be a bit early, but I think that actually to say it will take at
least several hundred years is nonsense.

Look at the timescales of scientific and technological progress. Pretty much
99% of all knowledge and technologies we use are less than 200 years old. Most
of it is less than 100 years old. We pretty much went from zero to space in a
single life time. And the progress is not steady, nor is it slowing down, it's
_accelerating_. One thing Kurzweil is definitely right about is that people
don't understand exponential growth. Or any superlinear growth for that
matter.

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Digit-Al
I agree with you to a point. However, one of the big problems as I see it is
that we don't have any clue what creates consciousness, and can't even agree
what defines consciousness. It is very difficult to create something when
you're not sure what the goal is.

I think the writer of the article I linked to makes some good points, but I
don't necessarily agree with everything he says.

I think the problem with trying to predict something like that is that it is
not fully a technological problem. We can make predictions about when the
technology will be potentially capable of housing an intelligence, but it is
much more difficult to predict when we might understand intelligence and
consciousness enough to duplicate it. It could suddenly happen with the next
few decades, or it might never happen.

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gosub
This is how wrong Kurzweil is:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Predict...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Predictions)

~~~
dack
I am going to assume you're being serious here, and that you believe the link
you provided proves "how wrong" he is. The other option is that you're stating
the opposite, but I can't tell.

That said, I don't see how that link proves him wrong at all. I don't think
it's reasonable to expect anyone to be exactly right with their predictions -
no matter how informed they are - so some inaccuracies in his predictions are
completely expected.

Especially when you are looking at an exponential curve, the absolute values
along the way can seem far off, but compared to a linear approach they are a
much closer fit to reality. Obviously the "singularity" is a huge point of
contention because of how ridiculous it sounds, but if we disagree, we should
come up with our own explanation. If AIs start improving on themselves in a
self-directed way with similar pattern-recognition systems as our brain, do we
not expect the advancement of technology to explode? If not, then why not?

It's really easy for us to sit back and criticize his very public, specific
predictions without making them ourselves. The questions we should be asking
are not whether the exact things he is predicting happen (although he has been
very close in the past), but whether his method of doing the predictions and
lines of logic make sense. If so, then he may be off by a constant factor, not
an exponential one.

