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Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-want-futurist-business-cards dept.

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..."

4 of 830 comments (clear)

  1. ahh, the "singularity"... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The singularity is to nerds what the rapture is to fundamentalist protestant wackjobs....

    1. Re:ahh, the "singularity"... by benjfowler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There surely has to be a Rule 34 for pseudoscientific crap.

      "If it exists, there is woo of it".

      There's physics and quantum woo (Deepak Chopra), food and nutrition woo, health woo, laundry woo, automotive woo, fortune-telling and divination woo, religious woo.... wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?

    2. Re:ahh, the "singularity"... by Raindance · · Score: 5, Insightful

      PZ Myers wasn't there; he based his whole critique on gizmodo's writeup.

      Speaking as someone who was there and heard Kurzweil's full speech, I can confidently say that PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.

      First off, a significant factual mistake: Kurzweil -clearly- never said we'd reverse engineer the brain by 2020. He argued against exactly that (his prediction was late 2020s, shading into 2030-- perhaps also unbelievable, but if you're going to critique someone, why not get the facts right?). Sure, gizmodo's writeup was entitled "Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020". It'd be an understandable attribution mistake for say, an undergraduate.

      Second, Myers is critiquing Kurzweil's ontological position based on a throwaway writeup dashed off by gizmodo. (Really, Myers? And you wonder why you're a magnet for shitstorms...)

      Third, Myers' criticism is essentially that the brain is an emergent system, and we'll have to understand all the protein-protein interactions, functional attributes of proteins, etc. in order to actually model the brain.

      This third assumption is arguable, but Kurzweil wasn't actually arguing against this. All Kurzweil meant with his comment about bytes and the genome was there's an interesting information-theoretic view of how much initial data gives rise to the wonderful complexity of the brain.

      I had a lot more respect for Myers before I read this rant.

  2. Re:It would be nice.. by rotide · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're looking for a level of effort above pure copy'n'paste and as such are asking for way too much. Slashdot submissions and editing have gotten so bad that the summaries are generally misleading if not entirely wrong. The summaries tend to be nothing more than the submitter taking the most polarizing sentence/paragraph from TFA and pasting it into the summary field. RTFA is no longer to glean more details for the sake of learning more or backing up your opinions in comments... RTFA is now necessary to understand just what the fuck the submitter wants us to learn. The term "summary" appears to be _entirely_ lost now, at least in the Slashdot story submission crowd.