Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain

jamie writes "There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced..."

Comments

It would be nice..

[djlemma]

Would be nice if the summary even hinted at what the ridiculous claim actually WAS...

Namely, that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain in the next 10 years.

Re:Because the Article Breaks Down the Claim Fully

[Khazunga]

Moore's law, the base of his argument that technology is evolving exponentially is pretty much on schedule. We are now on the Petaflop (10^15) range, with the transistor count following the predicted exponential.

Cost of DNA sequencing, another of his examples, is today at 0.000008(USD) per base pair. Fits the curve.

RAM cost is now at 28000kB/USD, also fitting the curve

GDP per capita also is within schedule (note that the scale is logarithmic), even with the wealth transfer east (which is bound to be limited in time to ten more years give or take)

And, lastly, the core of all atacks on Kurzweil, so is life expectancy on track.

You may still believe these exponentials will hit some kind of ceiling somehow. That might be true. The numbers, however, support Kurzweil's theory. And predicting from the number of times Moore's law depletion was announced in the last twenty years, I'd wager my bets on Kurzweil.