

Ask HN: What do people think of Ray Kurzweil's theories (AI, etc)? - EleventhSun

Someone mentioned in another thread that Ray has a controversial reputation amongst the machine learning community. If you&#x27;re into machine learning, I&#x27;d especially like to hear from you.<p>Personally, I agree with some of his theories (eg. that humans aren&#x27;t really hard-wired to think in exponential terms). I certainly take his claims of immortality and mind uploading with a grain of salt, however.
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agibsonccc
In to machine learning, met him personally a few years ago.

Very interesting guy. I don't necessarily think all of his stuff is crazy
outlandish. The key to think about with some of his theories is that his
projections (stuff happening in the next 25 years) may not be all that
impossible. Just like predicting a startup will fail 90% of the time and
you'll likely be right, you can also say the same for crazy predictions like
this. If we map his predictions to things that people 50 years ago were saying
about our current tech now, some weren't too far off the mark, and we even
surpassed some of the predictions (See the world's fair in the 30s as a good
example of this)

That being said, he has still done some solid work in speech processing, he's
definitely not just some crazy scientist. Google hired him FOR moonshot
projects. If someone's not crazy enough to attempt them, who will?

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EleventhSun
The 90% fail / 10% success analogy is a kind of helpful way to put things in
context, thanks for your input.

Technology is a bit of a wild beast, I feel like Dr Kurzweil is almost the
personification of its unpredictability/mystery in some ways.

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danelectro
I would work for him, but what do I know?

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JohnHaugeland
I think he's a huckster.

Intelligence is not a function of CPU power, and all his AI predictions so far
have failed.

The singularity seems to me like science fiction. Theory after data, not
before.

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Houshalter
I sort of agree but I think his arguments are more complex than just CPU
power. Which isn't even entirely wrong, machine learning has advanced a lot
recently because computers are finally big enough.

Kurzweil has a pretty good prediction track record for what it's worth:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/)

The future always seems like science fiction
([http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/)).

