Kurzweil is a media scientist out to put his name about and an idiot to boot. His reasoning about reaching super human intelligence by the 2040's is wrong on so many levels.
He sees a neuron as the processing equivalent of a byte whereas a real neuron requires an entire computer to simulate. He's also ignoring the need to evolve, which adds many more orders or magnitude of processing power. And then to understand what you have evolved. Or the ability to measure what happens in real brains and then to understand the data. The limit here is how slow it takes us to figure these things out and to disseminate that information. That needs to be done in order to reach the singularity.
Kurzweil and his ilk, e.g. Kevin Warwick, also do not fundamentally understand the nature and challenge of intelligence because they are so bothered about promoting himself and their books rather than trying to create it.
One thing that you can count on with the progress of technology is that it never takes the path that is most obvious. There are always other uses or constraints that become apparent over time. For example Moore's law is already faltering and there is also the long emergency to contend with where we run out of natural resources.
That's not to say that there won't be an economic revolution because of AI, but it will be more like an economic boom like the dot com boom.
I'm convinced that the revolution that will truly be life changing for everyone will be asteroid mining if we can pull it off. Otherwise the future looks quite grim. AI will be ideal for asteroid mining.
He sees a neuron as the processing equivalent of a byte whereas a real neuron requires an entire computer to simulate. He's also ignoring the need to evolve, which adds many more orders or magnitude of processing power. And then to understand what you have evolved. Or the ability to measure what happens in real brains and then to understand the data. The limit here is how slow it takes us to figure these things out and to disseminate that information. That needs to be done in order to reach the singularity.
Kurzweil and his ilk, e.g. Kevin Warwick, also do not fundamentally understand the nature and challenge of intelligence because they are so bothered about promoting himself and their books rather than trying to create it.
One thing that you can count on with the progress of technology is that it never takes the path that is most obvious. There are always other uses or constraints that become apparent over time. For example Moore's law is already faltering and there is also the long emergency to contend with where we run out of natural resources.
That's not to say that there won't be an economic revolution because of AI, but it will be more like an economic boom like the dot com boom.
I'm convinced that the revolution that will truly be life changing for everyone will be asteroid mining if we can pull it off. Otherwise the future looks quite grim. AI will be ideal for asteroid mining.
