I’m tired of Ray Kurzweil being touted as the King of Transhumanism. Yeah, I guess he defined and popularized the Singularity concept. But he spews predictions like a pez dispenser, rarely sparing a moment to back up anything he says with reasoning. And if he’s not going to show the thinking behind his predictions, then all that’s left to judge are the predictions’ accuracy. Now that the calendar is advancing far enough, we can actually do that. And it turns out his predictions suck.
See this article from IEEE Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism/0
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Kurzweil’s predictions remind me of writing an essay on a test in high school, throw enough stuff at the wall, and something will stick.
A bunch of his predictions are right, it’d just be nice if he stopped being a pompous ass about them.
Yeah, have you ever heard him talking too? He acts incredibly bored with the things he’s saying, despite them being very ambitious statements. I think it’s a speaking technique to make himself sound more credible. Noam Chomsky does it too. Anyhow, after stip-mining some interesting ideas from the prediction torrent, I think I’m about done with the guy.
Much of the trans/posthumanism content out there seems to be written for and by people with comic book power fantasies. Getting a little tired of the wide-eyed believers and their prophets.