The thing about Ray Kurzweil is that he's basically entertainment, in the same way William Gibson or George Lucas are entertainment. He excites and inspires the lay population, but is ultimately pretty weak on the non-fiction part.
There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making technical statements that are just simply wrong. One of my favorite graphs from "The Singularity Is Near" is a plot of linear versus exponential growth with a point labeled on the exponential curve, "the knee of the curve". He was trying to make a point about how exponential growth looks slow until it hits some "knee" and then it takes off. Hey, anyone, what's the derivative of e^x? Exactly. The neuroscience background he brought to "How to Create a Mind" was first-year grad student at best.
Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google, not the director of engineering as per the article, and Google has many of them. He is an entertainer who attracts attention and sometimes asks interesting questions. I wouldn't worry too much about specific technical statements he makes today. He's way out of his research area of OCR and text-to-speech.
Some say most of his singularity stuff has to do with his personal fear of death. He's good with hardware predictions, he doesn't understand software nearly that well. And his understanding of biology is trivial.
There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making technical statements that are just simply wrong. One of my favorite graphs from "The Singularity Is Near" is a plot of linear versus exponential growth with a point labeled on the exponential curve, "the knee of the curve". He was trying to make a point about how exponential growth looks slow until it hits some "knee" and then it takes off. Hey, anyone, what's the derivative of e^x? Exactly. The neuroscience background he brought to "How to Create a Mind" was first-year grad student at best.
Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google, not the director of engineering as per the article, and Google has many of them. He is an entertainer who attracts attention and sometimes asks interesting questions. I wouldn't worry too much about specific technical statements he makes today. He's way out of his research area of OCR and text-to-speech.