

Are you ready to back up your brain? Scientists say it will happen within - aggss
http://www.gobitcan.com/blog/2014-09-29-are-you-ready-to-back-up-your-brain-scientists-say-it-will-happen-within-30-years

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ColinCera
TL;DR: Go home, Kurzweil, you're drunk.

Ray Kurzweil has never been particularly good at predictions. In his book
published in 1999, he said by 2019 a $4,000 computer (in 1999 dollars) will be
able to do 20 million billion calculations per second. We're still 5 years
out, but it sure looks like he's off by several orders of magnitude.

He also said that by 2019 that humans wouldn't even be _allowed_ to drive on
highways — it would all be completely automated.

His predictions about nanotechnology, stem cells, and other medical
technologies were even more wildly optimistic.

It's not just that he (badly) misjudges the rate of growth in CPU power, he
also seems to think there can be exponential growth in all forms of scientific
knowledge, even though it's perfectly obvious that the number of scientists
isn't growing exponentially (if at all), the funding for research isn't
growing exponentially (if at all), etc.

Maybe he expected preposterously fast and magically programmed AIs to achieve
all these scientific & medical wonders? I don't know. I do know his
predictions from 1999 seem pretty silly now (and I for one thought they were
silly at the time), and I don't put much stock in his grand visions for the
year 2044.

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lutusp
> Scientists say it will happen within ...

1\. The submitter managed to leave a few key words off the title.

2\. When I read a sentence that begins, "Scientists say ...", I know I'm being
misinformed. The article's author relies on the imagined authority of a
scientist, but scientists reject authority.

A real scientist wouldn't say, "It will happen within 30 years," he would say,
"Leave me alone so I can do some science."

