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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: ==============

• 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.
        • etrain 14y ago
          Controversial views are a necessary but not sufficient condition for visionary status.
          • dalke 14y ago
            While I believe that everyone has controversial views. Do you think god exists? Do you think there should be more gun ownership? Or less? Do you think abortion should be banned? Only available for a few cases. Up to the mother to decide? But only until the third trimester? Should there be public drinking of beer? Public nudity? Public urination? Public displays of affection? Should women always have their heads covered while in public? What about men? Should we ban male circumcision until the male is old enough to make the decision for himself? Should we have the draft? What about mandatory civil service? Do you believe in mandatory bussing? Separate but equal? Co-ed schools or sex segregated schools? State income tax or not? Legalized gambling? What if it's only controlled by the state? Should alcohol sales only be done by the state, or can any place sell vodka? What about beer? Should alcohol sales be prohibited within a certain distance of schools? Are exceptions allowed? Do vaccines cause autism? Was the Earth created less than 10,000 years ago? Can you petition the Lord with prayer? Is the Pope God's representative on Earth, or the anti-Christ? Should non-believers be taxed at a higher rate than believers? Should I go on? All of these are controversial. If you have views one way or the other, then your views will be controversial at least to some, if not to most. And if you have no views on a topic then that itself can be controversial. As the morbid joke goes, during the height of the Troubles in Ireland: "yes, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew"? If everyone has controversial views, then of course they are precondition for being a visionary. They are also a precondition for not being a visionary. Name one famous (so I have a chance of knowing something about that person) non-visionary who did not have controversial views. But first, name a controversial view of the founder of Lego ... who is definitely described as a visionary.
• gavanwoolery 14y ago
  Not to be a downer, but text-to-speech, speech recognition, music synthesis, and so forth are all fairly obvious applications of computer science that anyone could have pioneered without being a genius. Likewise, predicting self-driving cars is nothing science fiction has not already done. I'm sure he is a smart guy, but I think we have put him on a pedestal when he probably is not as remarkable as we want him to be.
  • rpm4321 14y ago
    I don't mean to pick on you (and I certainly didn't downvote you), but you seem like a posterboy for just how easy it is to take inventions and innovation for granted after the fact. I find it instructive to occassionally go to Youtube and load up commericals for Windows 95, 3.1, the first Mac, etc., or even to dust off and boot up an old computer I haven't touched for decades. Not to get too pretentious, but it's a bit like Proust writing about memories of his childhood coming flooding back to him just from the smell of a cake he ate as a child. When you really make a concerted effort to remember just how primitive previous generations of computing were, I think it puts Kurzweil's predictions and accomplishments in a much more impressive context. This was the state of the art PC back when Ray was forming his first companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAhp_LzvSWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAhp_LzvSWk I posted some other thoughts about Ray's track record awhile back: ========================================== I read his predictions for 2009 only a couple of years before they were supposed to come about (which he wrote in the late 90s), and many seemed kind of far fetched - and then all of a sudden the iPhone, iPad, Google self-driving car, Siri, Google Glass, and Watson come out, and he's pretty much batting a thousand. Some of those predictions were a year or two late, in 2010 or 2011, but do a couple of years really matter in the grand scheme of things? Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then. Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment. Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.