5 ms·

Have you read Ray's books? I recommend 2005's The Singularity is Near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The

Have you read Ray's books? I recommend 2005's The Singularity is Near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

vkou 5y ago
I've read Ray's books. He's a big talker that writes speculative science fiction, but he doesn't do anything. As the parent poster said, there is zero reason to take him seriously.
- tech-historian 5y ago
  He was inventor of: the first CCD flat-bed scanner first omni-font optical character recognition the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind the first text-to-speech synthesizer the first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano
  - vkou 5y ago
    I'm aware of his track record prior to becoming a science fiction author. But what has he invented after he started writing about the singularity?
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It's been 16 years. Is the singularity any nearer? Is there any evidence that the singularity is any nearer? So, how "near" was the singularity in 2005? How accurate was Kurzweil?
- Tenoke 5y ago
  He has timeliness on the optimistic side but people were skeptical of his claims in the 80s that a computer will win at Chess by 2000 or that the internet will become ubiquitous. He did think a US company will reach 1 trillion $ by 2010 and that speech recognition will be more widely used but even in cases like that he wasn't massively off. As far as I can tell for decades he's been consistently more right than his critics and often on issues that are a lot harder to get right than simple coin tosses.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    He's been right (approximately) on how fast the tech improves. That doesn't tell you anything about how likely he is to be right about the singularity, though, unless you think he actually has a handle on how much tech would have to improve to get us there, which means that he would have a handle on where "there" actually is, in technical terms. I don't see evidence that he (or anyone) has that.
- tech-historian 5y ago
  His prediction is that a machine will pass the turing test in 2029. And yes, there's evidence of incredible machine learning discoveries all around us. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see those. AlphaZero in Go & Chess, the protein folding miracles of Deepmind, all the amazing work being done today. The field is racing ahead. Human minds are good at seeing linear progression. Our brains aren't particularly good at exponential growth, which is what is happening in this field.

Have you read Ray's books? I recommend 2005's The Singularity is Near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

vkou 5y ago

I've read Ray's books. He's a big talker that writes speculative science fiction, but he doesn't do anything. As the parent poster said, there is zero reason to take him seriously.

tech-historian 5y ago
He was inventor of: the first CCD flat-bed scanner first omni-font optical character recognition the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind the first text-to-speech synthesizer the first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano
- vkou 5y ago
  I'm aware of his track record prior to becoming a science fiction author. But what has he invented after he started writing about the singularity?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

It's been 16 years. Is the singularity any nearer? Is there any evidence that the singularity is any nearer? So, how "near" was the singularity in 2005? How accurate was Kurzweil?

Tenoke 5y ago
He has timeliness on the optimistic side but people were skeptical of his claims in the 80s that a computer will win at Chess by 2000 or that the internet will become ubiquitous. He did think a US company will reach 1 trillion $ by 2010 and that speech recognition will be more widely used but even in cases like that he wasn't massively off. As far as I can tell for decades he's been consistently more right than his critics and often on issues that are a lot harder to get right than simple coin tosses.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  He's been right (approximately) on how fast the tech improves. That doesn't tell you anything about how likely he is to be right about the singularity, though, unless you think he actually has a handle on how much tech would have to improve to get us there, which means that he would have a handle on where "there" actually is, in technical terms. I don't see evidence that he (or anyone) has that.
tech-historian 5y ago
His prediction is that a machine will pass the turing test in 2029. And yes, there's evidence of incredible machine learning discoveries all around us. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see those. AlphaZero in Go & Chess, the protein folding miracles of Deepmind, all the amazing work being done today. The field is racing ahead. Human minds are good at seeing linear progression. Our brains aren't particularly good at exponential growth, which is what is happening in this field.