Allen writes that "the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). . . is not a physical law." I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but re

Allen writes that "the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). . . is not a physical law." I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but result from the emergent properties of a large number of events at a finer level. A classical example is the laws of thermodynamics (LOT). If you look at the mathematics underlying the LOT, they model each particle as following a random walk. Oh that's a terrible point! Thermodynamics laws are nothing like predictions about the future. I would have thought linguistic slight of hand like this is beneath Kurzweil. Allen's statement that every structure and neural circuit is unique is simply impossible. That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome. The design of the human brain is not entirely contained in the genome! As soon as we mapped the human genome we were faced with a paradox. How come the complexity difference between us and mice for example, is NOT proportional to the difference in our genomes? Here's an article form 2002 "Just 2.5% of DNA turns mice into men": http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2352-just-25-of-dna-turns-mice-into-men.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2352-just-25-of-dna-tu... In other words, if you look at just how the genomes are different then humans and mice ought be a lot more similar than we are. We have since come to find out just what a huge role the feedback-interactions of DNA and its products, like proteins and all kinds of RNA, play in the development of life. This staggeringly complex feedback mechanism is why despite the mapping of the human genome, medical progress still remains excruciatingly slow. Much, much faster the before! But not nearly as fast as we had hopped when the human genome was first mapped. Note that epigenetic information (such as the peptides controlling gene expression) do not appreciably add to the amount of information in the genome. This is true in that they don't add much to the genome. But it is profoundly wrong in that they do add hugely to the actual resulting phenotype. Kurzweil continues in this same vane for a while. I don't know if he has just never bothered to look into the latest research or if his understandably strong desire to not die has resulted in a huge confirmation bias. When Kurzweil talks about the general trend of scientific progress I tend to agree with him. But neither Paul Allen nor anyone else disagrees with the notion that we will reach the singularity at some point in the future. The argument is about the timing. And timing the future, is like timing the stock market, something I don't care to try to do. But when Kurzweil attempts to convince the reader that the singularity is near, by using specific examples, that's when I start do disagree with him. Because once he starts being specific, it becomes easy for me to see where he is wrong, factually, objectively wrong.