"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I take Kurzweil with a grain of salt, and generally think he's waaaay too optimistic, and just p

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I take Kurzweil with a grain of salt, and generally think he's waaaay too optimistic, and just plain ignorant [1][2] about entire bodies of knowledge intimately related to his predictions. I think anyone who's spent some time doing machine learning, and has seen just how time consuming and tedious it is to get a relatively reliable answer to a relatively simple prediction problem is not going to be brimming with confidence that we're going to have strong AI in our lifetime. [1] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-d... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still-doesnt-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still...