251
Followers
4
Following
Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
As an AI person, I have mixed feelings about this book. Half of me says that it's nonsense: the author come across as ludicrously optimistic, indeed quite out of touch with reality, and saturated with hubris to the point where it's starting to crystallize out in his hair. Who could ever take this crap seriously?The other half points out that, even though AI has a terrible history of overhyping itself, the errors are often not as bad as they first appear. People in the 50s did indeed make themselves look stupid when they said that a computer would be the world's best chess player within 10 years. But if you compare them with Dreyfus, who wasted a lot of time arguing that computers would never, even in principle, be able to play Grandmaster-level chess, I know who I think came out looking dumbest. The AI people were off by a factor of at most 10, really nothing very serious.
So when Kurzweil says that the Singularity's going to be here by September 2014, or whatever his latest projection is, sure, he's dreaming. But I don't see why it's so obvious that it won't happen by, say, 2150. If you plot rate of technological progress over the last 50,000 years, is "exponential" really a crazy word to use?
I think his hyper-optimistic projections are largely driven by his hope that the Singularity will get here in time to make him personally immortal. He's quite upfront about this. And although the thought of an immortal Kurzweil is indeed pretty scary, I'm not sure it's enough to justify dismissing all his ideas out of hand.
