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I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this wo

I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this working out well for Google, unless they just want a famous figurehead.

kanzure 14y ago
> Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. You know, it would be wonderful if Ray Kurzweil actually works on software/hardware projects, and he's just hush-hush because he doesn't want to release experiments. Maybe he does more than writing books and speaking at conferences, and he secretly provisions ec2 clusters to experiment with Hadoop or whatever. Maybe he's not just some old geezer that pops lots of pills, maybe he's an old geezer that pops pills and writes Go. At least, that's what I tell myself to not be as angry about his "prediction from a distance" branding. On a somewhat related note, http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ has some old emails someone sent to Ray, exploring his lack of involvement in the open source transhumanist hardware/software community.
rpm4321 14y ago
I'm reposting this comment I made a couple of months ago. He's no John McCarthy, but he was a true pioneer in the commercial applications of AI: ================================== I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology. He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton. As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of. "Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!" "Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!" "Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!" "Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!" I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.
- etrain 14y ago
  He's also an ACM Fellow, from it's first class - along with people like Knuth, Cerf, Rivest, Codd, etc.
  - rpm4321 14y ago
    In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict. http://howtocreateamind.com/ http://howtocreateamind.com/
    - etrain 14y ago
      To put it another way - if a visionary isn't controversial, she's probably not a visionary.
      - dalke 14y ago
        I believe your summary suffers from selection bias. I think most people have views that are controversial. Only when one is famous do others hear about those controversial views. Furthermore, just about every famous project has its distractors, leading to controversy. Take Stephen Hawking as an example. He doesn't believe there was a god who created the universe. That's a controversial view to many. But when an non-famous atheist says exactly the same thing, few take notice, so you don't hear about those people. Take Alan Kay as another example. He's one of the key people behind OLPC, which given its criticism could be considered controversial. But name any big project which has neither criticism nor controversy. Ole Kirk Christiansen founded Lego. He was visionary in that he saw a future in plastic bricks as toys for children. What were his controversial views? I have no clue. But he probably had some. Perhaps his motto "Only the Best is Good Enough" is controversial to someone who believes that that second best may be good enough for some cases.
rpm4321 14y ago
Here's Norvig himself on Kurzweil: “Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”
noonespecial 14y ago
>Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. He was weird then too. That's why he did such interesting work. His work, combined with a lack of fame at that time, just kept the weird from showing through. I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.
- xianshou 14y ago
  Rather, genius is the subset of crazy recognized by society as useful. The moment of recognition is the point at which it becomes venerated instead of derided.
mtgx 14y ago
A lot of visionaries are misunderstood because they can "see" things the others can't at the time, and it doesn't make sense to them, which is why they think they are "weird" or "crazy". From that point of view, Richard Stallman was also a visionary, even if it took 2-3 decades before his visions of states or companies putting backdoors in your proprietary software became true.
- nnq 14y ago
  Manager to programmers: "Hey that weird free software guy thinks we put "backdoors" in our software, whatever that means. Maybe he's right and our competitor do this already!! ...Quick, code a backdoor into our system too, we don't want to fall behind!"
  - mtgx 14y ago
    Yes, that's probably exactly what the Skype managers said. "Let's do it first before our Chinese competition does it".
trimes 14y ago
I'm more reluctant to trash Kurzweil, but this image hiring policy is taking on the look of some sort of bizarre Victorian menagerie where they keep old famous computer scientists in wrought iron cages for Googlers' amusement. It's like the Henry Ford museum, but they're collecting people. That's more than a little weird.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Much as Microsoft did in the 1990s. And AT&T in the 1960s.
  - trimes 14y ago
    It could be argued that such things happen in academics too. But this is not the same, famed people established themselves at Microsoft and AT&T. There wasn't this sort of hiring of celebrity. Someone of Kurzweil's stature could be doing his own research and simply hired on as a board member. There are plenty of widely known people at Google, but seemingly in spite of Google rather than because of. Maybe that's a consequence of 20% time too. But if people's reputations are staked in things other than the company, the company seems to borrow more reputation than it makes.
slacka 14y ago
> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI. Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language. [1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...
- raverbashing 14y ago
  " the use of statistical models that have no biological basis." this is irrelevant This is like saying a computer using an x86 processor is different, from the point of view of the user than an ARM computer, beyond differences in software Or like saying DNA is needed for "data storage" in biological systems and not another technology Sure, you can get inspiration from biology, but doesn't necessarily mean you have to copy it. ""I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, " It's not really a fault of statistical translations (more likely quality of data issue), even though it has its limitations. Besides, google translation has been successful exactly because it's better than other existing methods (and Google has the resources, both in people and data to make it better)
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    I think that the google translator did pretty good on that fragment. Garbage in, garbage out! If you use 'I' in a sentence fragment when you mean to use 'We' then you can't really blame the translator for getting it wrong. 'We need to meet up' is a sentence with a completely different meaning from the incorrect and semantically confusing 'I need to meet up', it really does sound as if you need to meet up to some expectation.
mtgx 14y ago
You do realize Ray Kurzweil is behind the initial technology of Nuance, which Apple uses for Siri now.
- archangel_one 14y ago
  That's roughly correct, but IIRC Ray sold that company 30 years ago; it later went on to buy Nuance, and subsequently quite a few more speech-related companies before hooking up with Apple for Siri. So while your comment is correct, I'd be surprised if any of that initial technology was actually being used for Siri.

kanzure 14y ago

> Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. You know, it would be wonderful if Ray Kurzweil actually works on software/hardware projects, and he's just hush-hush because he doesn't want to release experiments. Maybe he does more than writing books and speaking at conferences, and he secretly provisions ec2 clusters to experiment with Hadoop or whatever. Maybe he's not just some old geezer that pops lots of pills, maybe he's an old geezer that pops pills and writes Go. At least, that's what I tell myself to not be as angry about his "prediction from a distance" branding. On a somewhat related note, http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ has some old emails someone sent to Ray, exploring his lack of involvement in the open source transhumanist hardware/software community.

rpm4321 14y ago

I'm reposting this comment I made a couple of months ago. He's no John McCarthy, but he was a true pioneer in the commercial applications of AI: ================================== I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology. He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton. As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of. "Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!" "Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!" "Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!" "Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!" I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.

etrain 14y ago
He's also an ACM Fellow, from it's first class - along with people like Knuth, Cerf, Rivest, Codd, etc.
- rpm4321 14y ago
  In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict. http://howtocreateamind.com/ http://howtocreateamind.com/
  - etrain 14y ago
    To put it another way - if a visionary isn't controversial, she's probably not a visionary.
    - dalke 14y ago
      I believe your summary suffers from selection bias. I think most people have views that are controversial. Only when one is famous do others hear about those controversial views. Furthermore, just about every famous project has its distractors, leading to controversy. Take Stephen Hawking as an example. He doesn't believe there was a god who created the universe. That's a controversial view to many. But when an non-famous atheist says exactly the same thing, few take notice, so you don't hear about those people. Take Alan Kay as another example. He's one of the key people behind OLPC, which given its criticism could be considered controversial. But name any big project which has neither criticism nor controversy. Ole Kirk Christiansen founded Lego. He was visionary in that he saw a future in plastic bricks as toys for children. What were his controversial views? I have no clue. But he probably had some. Perhaps his motto "Only the Best is Good Enough" is controversial to someone who believes that that second best may be good enough for some cases.

rpm4321 14y ago

Here's Norvig himself on Kurzweil: “Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”

noonespecial 14y ago

>Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. He was weird then too. That's why he did such interesting work. His work, combined with a lack of fame at that time, just kept the weird from showing through. I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.

xianshou 14y ago
Rather, genius is the subset of crazy recognized by society as useful. The moment of recognition is the point at which it becomes venerated instead of derided.

mtgx 14y ago

A lot of visionaries are misunderstood because they can "see" things the others can't at the time, and it doesn't make sense to them, which is why they think they are "weird" or "crazy". From that point of view, Richard Stallman was also a visionary, even if it took 2-3 decades before his visions of states or companies putting backdoors in your proprietary software became true.

nnq 14y ago
Manager to programmers: "Hey that weird free software guy thinks we put "backdoors" in our software, whatever that means. Maybe he's right and our competitor do this already!! ...Quick, code a backdoor into our system too, we don't want to fall behind!"
- mtgx 14y ago
  Yes, that's probably exactly what the Skype managers said. "Let's do it first before our Chinese competition does it".

trimes 14y ago

I'm more reluctant to trash Kurzweil, but this image hiring policy is taking on the look of some sort of bizarre Victorian menagerie where they keep old famous computer scientists in wrought iron cages for Googlers' amusement. It's like the Henry Ford museum, but they're collecting people. That's more than a little weird.

dredmorbius 14y ago
Much as Microsoft did in the 1990s. And AT&T in the 1960s.
- trimes 14y ago
  It could be argued that such things happen in academics too. But this is not the same, famed people established themselves at Microsoft and AT&T. There wasn't this sort of hiring of celebrity. Someone of Kurzweil's stature could be doing his own research and simply hired on as a board member. There are plenty of widely known people at Google, but seemingly in spite of Google rather than because of. Maybe that's a consequence of 20% time too. But if people's reputations are staked in things other than the company, the company seems to borrow more reputation than it makes.

slacka 14y ago

> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI. Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language. [1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...

raverbashing 14y ago
" the use of statistical models that have no biological basis." this is irrelevant This is like saying a computer using an x86 processor is different, from the point of view of the user than an ARM computer, beyond differences in software Or like saying DNA is needed for "data storage" in biological systems and not another technology Sure, you can get inspiration from biology, but doesn't necessarily mean you have to copy it. ""I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, " It's not really a fault of statistical translations (more likely quality of data issue), even though it has its limitations. Besides, google translation has been successful exactly because it's better than other existing methods (and Google has the resources, both in people and data to make it better)
- jacquesm 14y ago
  I think that the google translator did pretty good on that fragment. Garbage in, garbage out! If you use 'I' in a sentence fragment when you mean to use 'We' then you can't really blame the translator for getting it wrong. 'We need to meet up' is a sentence with a completely different meaning from the incorrect and semantically confusing 'I need to meet up', it really does sound as if you need to meet up to some expectation.

mtgx 14y ago

You do realize Ray Kurzweil is behind the initial technology of Nuance, which Apple uses for Siri now.

archangel_one 14y ago
That's roughly correct, but IIRC Ray sold that company 30 years ago; it later went on to buy Nuance, and subsequently quite a few more speech-related companies before hooking up with Apple for Siri. So while your comment is correct, I'd be surprised if any of that initial technology was actually being used for Siri.