I lost a good friend to the Kurzweil cult. They genuinely dropped everything to join a "think tank" about how to handle the imminent singularity. They simply co

I lost a good friend to the Kurzweil cult. They genuinely dropped everything to join a "think tank" about how to handle the imminent singularity. They simply could not process the fact that Kurzweil's empirical claims are juvenile fantasy at best, outright willfully ignorant at worst, nor could they deal with the idea that it is meaningless to create elaborate closed-system logical deductions in a fundamentally open world. For context, I have a background in neuroscience and computer science... the claims about brain modeling are particularly ferociously ignorant in an era when we don't even have the foggiest macroscopic clue about the neurobiological mechanisms that enable reasoning, and in which fundamental neuroscience hasn't evolved substantially at any level above protein expression pathways in the last 25 years. If you have a thick illusion of understanding regarding how the brain works, don't feel alone - it plagued professionals in neuroscience for the 40-50 years who felt that the big breakthrough in unifying AI, systems neuroscience, and neurobiology must be right around the corner. Every new decade just deepens how crude these original notions were, and how blatantly false our estimates of our knowledge were. The singularity is not near. It wasn't near in 2000, it won't be near in 2100, and my guess would be that it will never be near, in the same way the end times in Revelations won't be near anytime soon. Frankly I'm happy to have people around who care about preventing improbable catastrophes, but biological and nuclear warfare, running out of water, collision with a sufficiently destructive meteor, a freak volcanic eruption off the known charts... even for the love of god encountering hostile extraterrestrials (? why not) are higher on the likely threat list in my head. I think the attraction lies mostly in the fact that the argument avoids the "nasty bits" of reality that make real systems hard. Epidemiology, for example, has a lot to say about preventing the spread of humanity threatening diseases. But the truth is in the gritty details, not in high flown logical deductions.