"These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I f

"These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I find it offensive that this guy continues to sell us on it happening within our lifetimes. It almost certainly won't." So, I am assuming you think the EU's Human Brain Project is a waste of $1.6B? From my point of view, our ability to engineer, augment and replicate intelligence has very little to do with our understanding of biology. I really don't see your expertise in the complexity of biology as lending any insight into the ability to predict the evolution of intelligence capacity of our species. Strong AI based on emulating biological design is only one of many, many approaches to engineering intelligence.. Additionally, both your links and the basis of your arguments attempt to make a strawman of Kurzweil by attacking auxiliary points that are not critical to his primary empirical insights - rather you chose to attack choice speculative predictions. I'm no Kurzweil fanboy, but I think his empirical insights have done nothing less than frame the discussion of the technology singularity, and I enjoy his predictions for what they are - speculation. If you are presenting yourself as a scientist looking at this argument critically, I would expect 2 things: 1) an understanding of where your expertise has, and does not have relevance, 2) a critique of Kurzweil's empirical observations, not his speculative predictions.