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Originally Posted by Micturition Man
Subfallen -
I think you're kind of fetishizing intelligence here.
Making specific extrapolations about a vastly complex open system (human civilization) far into the future is a fool's (or a charlatan's) game. There are both empirical and theoretical reasons we know this.
I don't think 40 years qualifies as "far into the future"; other than that I agree.
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And the suggestion that anyone is too smart to fall into a basic fallacy of argument is just wrong. Every human is subject to cognitive biases, attachment to theories, rationalization, etc.
True, but I don't see any evidence that Kurzweil is committing a
basic fallacy. Douglas Hofstadter put it this way: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because [Kurzweil] is a smart person; he's not stupid."
If a Pulitzer Prize-winning cognitive scientist can't muster a simple refutation of Kurzweil, I'm bloody certain that durkadurka33 can't.