I'd call him a charlatan, but he's still influential so it's worth paying some attention to him. Agreed. I'm not sure that makes it a bad thing; wild speculation has been useful to science and technology in the past, and making ourselves and our world better is more palatable to me than the speculating about ways to sell lots of advertising. It is a little disturbing how cultlike it can get though.Oh come on Kurtzweil is pop-fiction.
futurology is certainly not a science
Cult-like like Lesswrong or cult-like like Heaven's Gate and Scientology? I think a lot of futurology (and all of Kurtzweil) comes from a religious impulse and has more to do with new-agery and eschatology than science. I guess it is fine enough as a hobby. Since the class is about pop-culture and AI Kurtzweil is a good fit.
Yes. Also, this. I look at these things as an outsider inclined to be hostile, but this stuff looks uncomfortably close to Scientology. And I've seen Ben Goertzel give a talk at an AAAI conference!Cult-like like Lesswrong or cult-like like Heaven's Gate and Scientology?
I think a lot of futurology (and all of Kurtzweil) comes from a religious impulse and has more to do with new-agery and eschatology than science. I guess it is fine enough as a hobby.
It was on Cyc as a precursor to strong AI. It would have been a legit, if controversial, talk in 1984 when Lenat published his book, if Lenat himself had given it. I think this was 2008, and he didn't add anything to what Lenat wrote back then but updated jargon and mentioning OpenCyc. It was very strange, but not really nutty. I don't think it was well received, but I was a lowly undergraduate and didn't talk to many people for fear of making a fool of myself.
Cyc uses a really bizarre definition of Intelligence.
The folks involved seem to think Intelligence = knowing a bunch of stuff. of course there is no good definition of Intelligence and it is better than Kurtzweil's moronic "intelligence is pattern recognition". (I feel I left that looking a bit like a ad hom. It is not because the of the direction of the inference. Kurtzweil believes dumb stuff != the stuff is dumb because Kurtzweil is but may well imply that Kurzweil is dumb because he believes dumb stuff.)
When Cyc started there were a lot of successful rule-based expert systems that the AI community was really exciting about, doing things like medical diagnosis and credit card fraud detection. It's a very good way to automate making the sort of routine decisions experts in a particular domain make within that domain. As weak AI, that model is excellent for modeling what it models. Using the informal definition that an intelligent program is one that does what an intelligent person would do, I have no problem calling those programs intelligent. The techniques we use in AI are all just magic tricks though. They're really cool and really useful magic tricks, but they don't tell us anything about our own minds, or about how to write programs that are intelligent in the way we are. Maybe they will, eventually, but we're far from that point. I don't think any of these guys are dumb, they've all done clever work, they're just making assertions way beyond what they're justified in asserting as scientists. When people do that with quantum physics or Gödel we call them cranks.
I stand corrected but Ray's confusion of strong and weak AI does not point at genius.
He is quite clever at OCR it is a bit of if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail issue.
I see a future chock full of weak AI and completely devoid of artificial humans. This sort of thing comes up all the time people clever at one thing usually medical doctors become horrible cranks at another in my experience evolutionary biology, human origins etc. If I see M.D. next to an author of a paper in anthro my eyes tend to roll unless of course it is medical anthropology.