You are much too kind. Kurzweil is a loon, full stop. The fact he once made brilliant contributions to computer science is quite irrelevant to the essential craziness of his more recent delusions.
In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near and predicted this would be the state of the world in the year 2030: "Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body."
That is not happening by the year 2030. It is so starkly delusional that anyone who seriously affirms a belief that it will happen probably needs psychiatric help.
It is akin to Eric Drexler's loony visions back in the 1980s that nanobots would cure all diseases and continually restore our bodies to perfect health. We were supposed to all be immortal by now.
None of this is happening, probably not ever, and certainly not in the lifetime of any human being currently living. Kurzweil is going to die, Drexler is going to die, everybody is going to die. Adopting a pseudo-scientific religion to avoid facing mortality is kind of sad.
I agree many of his predictions are bad but you should calm down with the gaslighting, it's ignorant of science history (the same was said of Aristotle, Semmelweis, Wright Brothers...) and is an impotent way of debating, especially in the context of science.
The thing is, even if someone is a genius, some of their output may have been total quackery. See: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Tycho Brahe, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Jack Parsons, Howard Hughes, James Watson, etc. Things that sound crazy are a good indicator to be skeptical and verify claims.
It's interesting to consider the parallels between this stuff and the fountain of youth, or alchemists turning lead into gold. Explorers were constantly uncovering unimaginable new things with no real idea of where it might end. Similarly alchemists who were finding that various combinations of compounds created ever more unimaginable results. So they, too, simply extrapolated outward.
I grew up with Drexler as a sort of hero. It's amazing how rapidly nanotech went from the imminent thing to change all things to, 'huh - what's that supposed to be about?' Wonder if 20 years down the line we might look at AI similarly.
Your last paragraph reminds me of FM-2030. A "transhumanist" born in 1930, he hoped to live until 2030 and wrote that "in 2030 we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever." He died in 2000 from pancreatic cancer.
You can differentiate the Moore's law / AI stuff which seems fairly sensible to me and the nanobots and vitamin pill stuff which I've always thought a little nuts. Hans Moravec did a much more down to earth analysis on the Moores/AI stuff if you'd rather avoid Kurzweil.
The AI stuff isn't sensible either. In the very simplest example, there is no AI that understands natural language. There's speech-to-text that can identify words (which is a difficult problem), but none that can understand what you actually mean. Synthesized human intelligence is just way too hard a problem for us to solve in the near future without some sort of Ancient Aliens-level technological advancement.
Anything that depends on such an advance, such as "building a biological simulator", is basically impossible. But even if it were possible, market forces still dictate whether a new technology is adopted or not. (see: the electric car vs the electrified train)
> In the very simplest example, there is no AI that understands natural language.
Come on, now - understanding natural language is pretty much the 0 yard line when it comes to AGI, the fact that it's not solved now doesn't tell us anything about how far away it is.
And I'd be on the lookout for massive advances in NLP over the next couple of years; there have been enormous leaps in 2018 alone when it comes to how good we are at understanding text (better applications of transformer models, high quality pre-trained base models, etc.), and now that there have been a few high-profile successes we're likely to see that field evolve just like computer vision has, even though I grant that it's a much harder problem in general.
In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near and predicted this would be the state of the world in the year 2030: "Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body."
That is not happening by the year 2030. It is so starkly delusional that anyone who seriously affirms a belief that it will happen probably needs psychiatric help.
It is akin to Eric Drexler's loony visions back in the 1980s that nanobots would cure all diseases and continually restore our bodies to perfect health. We were supposed to all be immortal by now.
None of this is happening, probably not ever, and certainly not in the lifetime of any human being currently living. Kurzweil is going to die, Drexler is going to die, everybody is going to die. Adopting a pseudo-scientific religion to avoid facing mortality is kind of sad.