Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Ray Kurzweil" in English language version.
He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II. He was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing.
He gave a 2007 keynote speech to the Protestant United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside Barack Obama, who was then a Presidential candidate.
He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II. He was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing.
He gave a 2007 keynote speech to the Protestant United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside Barack Obama, who was then a Presidential candidate.
I'm glad that Lanier entertains the hunch that Dawkins and I (and Hofstadter and others) 'see some flaw in logic that insulates [our] thinking from the eschatalogical implications' drawn by Kurzweil and Moravec. He's right. I, for one, do see such a flaw, and I expect Dawkins and Hofstadter would say the same.
I do not at all agree with Moravec and Kurzweil's predictions for an eschatological cataclysm, just in time for their own memories and thoughts and person hood to be preserved before they might otherwise die.
. . . the piano sound wouldn't win any blindfold tests against a real grand if they were pitted against one another in the same room
During the comparisons, this prompted me to start burying myself in sheet music to see how the 250 could cope with the tonal ebb and flow of Rachmaninoff and the atmospheric haze of Debussy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Bosendorfer won on both counts . . .
My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.
Kurzweil's reasoning rests on the Law of Accelerating Returns and its siblings, but these are not physical laws. They are assertions about how past rates of scientific and technical progress can predict the future rate. Therefore, like other attempts to forecast the future from the past, these "laws" will work until they don't.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) Chartattack.com October 25, 2000. Retrieved 2009-11-16{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)viaIt's an end-of-history notion, and like most end-of-history notions, it is showing its age.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)I do not at all agree with Moravec and Kurzweil's predictions for an eschatological cataclysm, just in time for their own memories and thoughts and person hood to be preserved before they might otherwise die.
Still, a lot of people think Kurzweil is completely bonkers and/or full of a certain messy byproduct of ordinary biological functions. They include P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has used his blog to poke fun at Kurzweil and other armchair futurists who, according to Myers, rely on junk science and don't understand basic biology. "I am completely baffled by Kurzweil's popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination," writes Myers. He says Kurzweil's Singularity theories are closer to a deluded religious movement than they are to science. "It's a New Age spiritualism—that's all it is," Myers says. "Even geeks want to find God somewhere, and Kurzweil provides it for them."
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) via{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)...it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil...