4 comments

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  Lincoln

  1 year ago

  The trouble with Kurzweil’s first graph is that he needs some way to determine which turning points in technological development are significant enough to include. The development of language, art, cities, and computers are all obvious choices. Even so, he may be giving us a false picture of technological change by omitting significant events in the past. Things would look different if, for instance, he had decided a slew of Renaissance accomplishments should be added between his points for “city states” and “printing.” The more events we add during any given period the shorter the amount of time elapsed between significant events will be, and that’s why picking the “correct” historical turning points is so crucial to his argument. The trouble is that there is no set of points that is obviously correct.
  
  I think that Kurzweil is taking some plausible and interesting observations and then using numbers and graphs to lend them a false credibility.
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  Jarred

  1 year ago

  Good point, Lincoln. Kurzweil actually responds to that criticism with this graph, using lists of "paradigm shift" events and their dates from fifteen other sources. I didn't use it in the post because it is important to look at the chart beneath the graph at that link. The references include Carl Sagan, the American Museum of Natural History, and Encyclopedia Britannica. While obviously there is no authoritative source on paradigm-changing events, it is interesting that these all seem to correlate in a similar way...
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  Joel

  1 year ago

  One of the issues other scientific thinkers have with Kurzweil's projections is that computing already exceeds the capacity of the human mind, quantitatively speaking. Even the massive, hundreds-of-cubic-feet mainframe computers out-computed the human brain exponentially. I think Kurzweil himself admits, though, that the human brain cannot be measured in terms of mere computing capacity. I like his writings and the concept of the Singularity as an abstract (though still quite grounded) explanation of the ride of computing power; the devil here is in the details, when one tries to apply it too strictly.
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  Richard

  1 year ago

  I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
  
  Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
  If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
  
  There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
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