Talk:Ray Kurzweil

This article contains information about one or more living persons. Articles about living people must be handled carefully, because they are more open to legal threats. Reference any contentious allegations solidly; unreferenced allegations should be removed. If legal threats are raised on this page, please direct the potential litigant to RationalWiki:Legal FAQ; do not interact with them.

I haz one of his Peye-an-os. C®ackeЯ

http://amultiverse.com/2010/08/19/ - David Gerard (talk) 10:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh good, the fans have noticed - David Gerard (talk) 13:22, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Ah, you clearly beat me to it. I do like Extropia DaSilva's response. Should we adopt the "hard" and "soft" distinctions used there? I never considered it before but it's interesting because currently our nanotechnology stuff is really clunky between describing realistic and unrealistic nanotech. ^bomination 21:56, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Even tagging the woo "Drexlerian" feels like a concession to woomongers. "Soft nanotech" is an attempt to retcon nature as a justification of the word "nanotech" so as to implicitly make the woo version seem less like bollocks. But you work with stuff with the dreaded "nano" prefix, so I'll leave it to you ;-) - David Gerard (talk) 01:27, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

While I consider RK far off in his predictions, claiming he considers the genome a blueprint for the brain is a plainly incorrect statement reported by Pz Myers a couple years ago after reading it on a report of K's speach. Kurzweil wrote a response to that: "I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain." ^{— Unsigned, by: 2.227.66.211 / talk / contribs}

Huh?

"He thinks that the genome contains all the information needed to grow a brain, therefore it is a problem of Kolmogorov complexity[wp] and computer science, therefore we will be able to simulate one on computers by 2030."

Yet the reference for that sentence says exactly the opposite:

"goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain." ^{— Unsigned, by: Hmmph / talk / contribs 01:35, 30 May 2013‎ (UTC)}

Then why didn't you remove it? It's still there now, 11 years after you posted this. I know, I originally thought that complaining on talk pages would get something done, but that's not the way it works. You find the problem, you fix it. FairDinkum (talk) 10:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Predictions?

The list of failed predictions and it's 2010 report contradict, as many of the claimed "failed predictions" are convincingly explained in "How My Predictions Are Faring". ^{— Unsigned, by: 178.176.176.172 / talk / contribs}