Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 09:00:36AM -0400, John Zabroski wrote:
Kurzweil addresses that.
As far as I know Kurzweil hasn't presented anything technical or even detailed.
Armwaving is cheap enough.
Kurzweil addresses that.
Do you have literature references for that?
As for biology, it is an iterative approach. The biggest insights are
coming from better medical imaging techniques that allow us to see inside
living systems' organs and better understand how they work. Kurzweil sort
of discusses this too, and relates it to how it helped him develop better
and more scalable algorithms even when the underlying hardware did not
change.
When was the last time Kurzweil did design something? 1990? Prior to that?
It looks like Kurzweil is mainly using an "outside view" perspective
when making his predictions. Moore's law for instance comes from such
a perspective: we observe a past trend (number of transistors doubling
every 18 months), and conclude that this trend will very likely go on
for a while. (Note that we use similar methods for the laws of physics:
we let an apple fall a millions times, and we predict that it will fall
again if we try one more time.)
Yet Moore's law doesn't by itself increase the power of our computers.
Researchers do, and their findings don't exactly come out of thin air.
Yet we don't need to know how they work to be able to derive accurate
predictions, such as Moore's law.
Now we could debate the validity of the outside view when making
predictions for the next few decades. I for one am not as confident as
Kurzweil seems to be about the regularity of the exponential growth in
technology, and what it tells us about a technological singularity.
However, the outside view doesn't require its wielder to have as much
expertise as the experts in the field. For instance,One doesn't need
to have designed anything to notice that things are regularly being
designed.
Does Kurzweil have relevant expertise? Did he demonstrate understanding
of the subjects he talks about? Did he earned authority? As long as
he is using an outside view, those questions don't matter much. What
matters is whether the outside view is a valid method or not, and how
accurately does Kurzweil uses it (we could meta-recursively apply the
outside view on Kurzweil predictions: look at his past predictions to
predict the accuracy (and bias) of his present ones).
Of course, if Kurzweil does use the inside view, then his expertise
suddenly becomes much more relevant.
Loup.
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