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I read Kurzweil's earlier book, The Age of Intelligent Machines" as a boy and remember how fantastical it seemed. At the time I felt like he laid out a strong c
by xiaoma 10y ago
I read Kurzweil's earlier book, The Age of Intelligent Machines" as a boy and remember how fantastical it seemed. At the time I felt like he laid out a strong case for his predictions but every adult I knew, including my teachers, thought it was nuts... especially his predictions of a chess AI beating a the world chess champ and of sequencing the human genome by the year 2000.
Both of those things ended up happening a couple of years before 2000. While practically the entire world was saying that Kurzweil's far too optimistic, it turned out on the whole they were slightly too pessimistic.
It would be foolish to discount this.
- goatlover 10y agoSequencing the genome always comes up as an example of underestimating the application of Moore's law, but mapping the genome is not the same as understanding how specific genes work, or the epigenome and the interplay with the environment, which is a lot more important than merely sequencing genes.
- xiaoma 10y agoYes. A chess AI defeating Kasparov also always comes up as an example of Moore's law, but creating an AI capable of using bruteforce to examine all plausible moves dozens of plies deep into tree of potential games is not the same as creating one capable of making more strategic assessments of a board needed to win games such as go or Texas hold'em. Kurzweil has done great work mapping out when AI is likely to reach each of these milestones and so far has been far more successful in his public predictions than anyone else.