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Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism
wjousts writes "Well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the future in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), but how well have his predictions held up now that we live 'in the future'? IEEE Spectrum has a piece questioning the Kurzweil's (self proclaimed) accuracy. Quoting: 'Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.'"
He made claims about the Playstation 6 having the computational power of the brain - this is an insult to both computer scientists and neuroscientists. The brain works nothing like a computer, and therefore is not comparable.
Ever since I saw that pathetic random guessing and totally irrelevant banter, my skin crawls at the mention of his name.
I was a singlularity denier, for one thing. But I have to reverse myself and admit that I'm wrong... Try living without today's technology and internet and see how far you get.
Many folks live "off the grid" and have no problem doing so. You had better hope that mankind is not as inflexible as you say, because computer technology is relatively brittle and a catastrophe that brings down the internet (and, according to you, civilization and Ray's vaunted singularity with it) is not that implausible.
Ray takes a lot of flak but he deserves respect, even when you think he's wrong.
Horse. Shit.
Ray is a hack that spouts inexact and mainly non-confirmable crap who deserves about as much respect as Nostradamus. Maybe he can get a show on The "History" Channel, together with the ghosts and aliens who seem to live there with Nostradamus...
That is all.