Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems. I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we ca

Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems. I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we can simulate brain function by 2020. We can already simulate simple organisms and neural networks. You can already accomplish quite a bit of complex emergent behavior with those. Simulating the entire brain would require an enormous amount of processing (though surely feasible some day, if not 10 years, how about 20), but most likely we'd make some trade-offs and sacrifices and still get a close approximation (like we do with virtually every simulation). Of course simulating a brain and simulating a human are not the same thing. You can't really avoid having to simulate the entire body and its interactions with the environment. And of course we wouldn't suddenly "understand" the brain just by simulating it. It would still be the same complex system, it's just we'd be able to inspect it more closely. Such a simulation would at least help us understand a good bit more about the brain's role in our cognition and actions. And yeah, who knows, maybe in 20 years we could have some kick-ass AI in counterstrike.