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Ask HN: What do people think of Ray Kurzweil's theories (AI, etc)?
Someone mentioned in another thread that Ray has a controversial reputation amongst the machine learning community. If you're into machine learning, I'd especially like to hear from you.
Personally, I agree with some of his theories (eg. that humans aren't really hard-wired to think in exponential terms). I certainly take his claims of immortality and mind uploading with a grain of salt, however.
- agibsonccc 12y agoIn to machine learning, met him personally a few years ago. Very interesting guy. I don't necessarily think all of his stuff is crazy outlandish. The key to think about with some of his theories is that his projections (stuff happening in the next 25 years) may not be all that impossible. Just like predicting a startup will fail 90% of the time and you'll likely be right, you can also say the same for crazy predictions like this. If we map his predictions to things that people 50 years ago were saying about our current tech now, some weren't too far off the mark, and we even surpassed some of the predictions (See the world's fair in the 30s as a good example of this) That being said, he has still done some solid work in speech processing, he's definitely not just some crazy scientist. Google hired him FOR moonshot projects. If someone's not crazy enough to attempt them, who will?
- EleventhSun 12y agoThe 90% fail / 10% success analogy is a kind of helpful way to put things in context, thanks for your input. Technology is a bit of a wild beast, I feel like Dr Kurzweil is almost the personification of its unpredictability/mystery in some ways.
- JohnHaugeland 12y agoI think he's a huckster. Intelligence is not a function of CPU power, and all his AI predictions so far have failed. The singularity seems to me like science fiction. Theory after data, not before.
- Houshalter 12y agoI sort of agree but I think his arguments are more complex than just CPU power. Which isn't even entirely wrong, machine learning has advanced a lot recently because computers are finally big enough. Kurzweil has a pretty good prediction track record for what it's worth: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/ The future always seems like science fiction (http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/).
- danelectro 12y agoI would work for him, but what do I know?