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Remind me why anyone listens to Kurzweil? Anyone can read a bunch of sci-fi and make wild, scattershot extrapolations into the future, and do as well or better
by dTal 6y ago
Remind me why anyone listens to Kurzweil? Anyone can read a bunch of sci-fi and make wild, scattershot extrapolations into the future, and do as well or better than he does.
- newyankee 6y agoNot true, although he seems like he is doing crazy speculations, there is a method to his madness. It is driven by all the exponential growth laws which he documented and extrapolated very well.
- nradov 6y agoExponential growth is not a law, nor is extrapolation a valid scientific technique.
- dalbasal 6y ago"Not a valid scientific technique" is not a valid objection to a nonscientific process.
- fnord123 6y agoKurzwel is making predictions. Extrapolation is like the only method of making predictions.
- ben_w 6y agoThey can be, when used appropriately. To give a particular example, the exponential growth of computing power has been a close-enough match to exponential since Kurzweil became famous: It was about 20 years ago that Apple was boasting that their latest PowerMac was banned from export to Cuba because a 1 gigaflops computer counted as a weapon, now they boast their phones do 11 teraflops — compatible with 1.5 year doubling time. (That said: while I have met someone who expected the exponential to continue past single atom transistors, I do expect it to stop soon-ish; superconducting/3D/quantum computing may replace classical transistors, but I never expect to see multiple transistors on a single atom).
- thechao 6y agoAn atom can’t be a transistor. That’s like saying “a single atom banana”. An atom can encode spin state, which can be used for computation.
- ben_w 6y agoI don’t make any claim of being a material scientist, I just wish to note that there is something with the name “single atom transistor”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor
- postalrat 6y agoMaybe an atom can be something more powerful than a transistor and be able to emulate the properties of a transistor.
- _jal 6y agoIt is a "law" in the same sense as the MacDonald's Rule (countries that host MacDonald's franchises don't go to war.) It works until it doesn't.
- ben_w 6y agoTrue, and I can say the same about Hooke’s law, Newton’s law of gravity, and so on. Extrapolation outside your dataset is only a problem if you take it too far, and how far is “too far” depends on how well you modelled reality with your dataset in the first place.
- Footkerchief 6y agoExtrapolation, as the general act of generalizing from observed events to not-yet-observed events, is necessary for making any kind of prediction about the future, and for any awareness that goes beyond direct sensory perception. I think that's within the purview of science.
- newyankee 6y agoMoore's law, Wright's law may not be natural laws but have mostly proved to be consistently true observations.
- orwin 6y agoYeah, still not taking into account the energy we're using and the manpower this energy liberate. But this energy is not infinite. Despite all innovations in solar/wind, and assuming efficient storage that does not exist yet, EU won't be able to absorb a 3% decrease in oil+gas importations by 2030. Rystad (https://www.rystadenergy.com/ https://www.rystadenergy.com/), pre-covid, was forecasting a 2 to 8% decrease in oil and gas import from the EU according to the think tank "the shift project" [0][1]. I won't talk about manpower much because there is still a chance that nothing more heavy than Covid will hit us in the near future, but meals will be hard to get this year in eastern Africa and while this year India did not suffer as much as in 2019, another drought like 2019 next year would be even more disastrous. For information, this winter could have been worse for Africa than 2011, luckily the wildfires and drought in russia were localized further north than a decade ago. But well, we still have two silver bullets: fusion and renewable hydrolyse. [0] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Study_Risk-supply-Europe_TSP-with-Rystad-Data.pdf https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Study... complete data analysis [1] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fig40.jpg#main https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fig40... short graph.
- wazoox 6y agoIn the real world, any period of exponential growth is part of an S-curve (coming to a plateau) or a bell curve (reaching a maximum, then decreasing) of some sort. You can't cheat with the law of physics and entropy.
- wadkar 6y agoI don’t think Moore’s law are laws in traditional scientific sense but more of a boardroom driven agenda that’s more of a self fulfilling prophecy
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _jal 6y agoBecause he wrapped a combination of nerdy sci-fi and a theory of ever-ending economic growth around an updated Christian-ish proto-religion. A certain type of person is basically wired for it.
- ilaksh 6y agoEveryone is wired to have a worldview. And although people think that their brains are different and have some special type of rationalism supporting their belief systems, that's not the case. I think that the reality is that worldviews are necessarily reductionist at some point. Think about just literally looking down a road far into the distance. If you can see far enough the stuff at the end of that road just looks like a tiny dot which you can't make out. No one can actually predict the future. Some people like me think that technology will probably shortly change things dramatically. I would be interested to hear your worldview and predictions for 2029 and the 2030s. But just a warning, I am going to classify those predictions as beliefs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wardnath 6y agoIt's inspiring. I consider Kurzweil, Diamandis, etc. to view the impact of technology with wildly rose-colored glasses. I view this as one possible trajectory of our future - being on the extreme positive end, whereas a very negative outcome may be akin to a "great filter" event. I think the extreme negative or positive outcomes are both unlikely long-tail events but having a "singularity" that benefits the wellbeing of humanity is definitely worth striving for.
- bryan0 6y agowell put.
- stainforth 6y ago>benefits the wellbeing of humanity If it even happens it will not be shared equally. A regular person will have to login with a Facebook account with the right amount of social credit to vicariously experience a part of the ascended's experience, with ads. And no, trickle down isn't real.
- wardnath 6y agoI definitely think a cyberpunk-ish future is more likely than a pure kurzweil outcome. That is, the increase in wellbeing of an average joe will be more linear and that of the well-off will be more exponential.
- justin66 6y ago> Remind me why anyone listens to Kurzweil? In general, people do not adhere to the egalitarian message board nerd ethos that all opinions are equally important. The opinions on technological progress of someone who has invented as much technology as Kurzweil carry extra weight. (I agree that he's wrong about, you know, a ton of stuff...)