Hmmm, maybe I should use less irony the next time...

The most significant philosophical criticism ever directed against Kojeve (by Strauss, in his correspondence with Kojeve) was that Kojeve's "Universal Homogeneous State," instead of being the pinnacle of human history, would only produce "Last Men", whom Nietzsche accurately describes in the opening part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and hence would be disastrous for human creativity and thought.

Cheers

Near enough, you're just nit-picking

Its ridiculous to demand precise predictions or objective measurements, save that for people predicting the date jesus is wandering back by, or when the world will end. Getting the general flavour is what its about and at least on the above he has done pretty well.

It is your fault that you use the wrong measure.

Near enough? It's still not true in 2011!

But that's a tame one that's at least party debatable. Let's examine some of his other predictions for 2009 (from Wikipedia), made in 1999:
Reasonable on the first, hilariously wrong the second.
Far from it, more are being sold than ever. They won't be on their way out for another 5 years at least. In fact, far from being on the way out, the Blu-Ray standard was invented not long ago.
This prediction is proof the guy is an ass clown. This was his field of expertise, and he got this one hilariously wrong. Probably off by a decade, which in an exponentially increasing timeline is MONSTER fail.
Hard to say, very ambiguous. I don't think I'd call it commonplace.

I think we have to call this another failure. They do exist in Japan but aren't reliable enough to help the disabled yet.

Another monster fail, again in his area of expertise.
Not true at all.
Useless prediction. 50/50 chance of being right.
No, no, yes I think in 2010.
Dominated? A decade or more off on this one.
Certainly not widely used.

In conclusion, it's failbird time with Dr. Kurzweil.

The guy has zero credibility.

Oh, I got the joke. I've been kind of Last Man-y myself, lately. Have not been to the gym in two weeks.

Yep, pipe dream, but didn't all agree on this in the last Kurzweil thread?

This "immortality in our lifetimes!" singularity stuff basically seems like it's religion for the science-minded.

LOL. What the **** is wrong with YOU that you can read a prediction about books being typically downloaded wirelessly as "kindles will be common". That's not what he says AT ALL. And despite kindles growing in popularity, ebooks were under 6% of sales in 2009. GG. QED. STFUADIAF. If you wiped his stuff out of your eyes, your reading comprehension might improve to a 2nd grade level.

Both of these statements are premature. There is not anything man can do that we know a deterministic machine can't do. And there might not be anything a quantum computer can do that a classical computer won't be able to.

He's got to be talking about a master copy, otherwise, no digital anything has a physical object associated with it. Unless you mean some kind of cartridge delivered with it?

Kurzweil has perfected non-physical means of data storage? Badass.

This is of course super nitpicky and obviously not what anybody means, but that sorta seems in keeping with the spirit of the thread.

Yeah, it is clear the music prediction is essentially correct baring crazy interpretations... but there are much, much better ways to argue against the singularity than saying his previous predictions were wrong even if they were.

This is a perfect example of Quackweil.

Quackweil can't admit that that prediction is a loser, and Knobomo thinks *I'm* the one with problems.

What would be news would be if someone had come up with some kind of design for software/hardware whereby the computer does something even remotely resembling thinking for itself just a tiny tiny bit. As far as I know, noone has even come up with an idea for such a design. The bottleneck for AI is probably not lack of computing power - although we won't know for sure until we actually get an idea for a design and apply it. The bottleneck is with our capability for coming up with ideas for a design. So far we have none and we really have no idea how hard the problem is. But more computing power will be about as much help giving us ideas for the design problem as it is in giving us ideas for solving say Goldbach's Conjecture. It's certainly possible that the design problem is more difficult.

There are those who say we will just reverse engineer the human brain and then program a computer to simulate what the brain does. That's at least a plausible direction but I'm afraid that's about all it is. We have only the crudest of tools at this time for attacking that problem. And we really have little idea how difficult the task will end up being. There are unknown unknowns. Computing power will help but we also need better technological tools and in the end we still have to interpret the data. The interpretation problem may prove more difficult to solve than the Theory of Everything in Physics.

It's probably a mistake to think we will never solve these problems - although that could be the case. But it just doesn't make sense to tie a prediction for their solution simplistically to the rate of growth in computing power.


PairTheBoard

tAoIM was written in the 80's. He was simply saying digital music will be common. You live in 2011 and are taking for granted how obvious it is what digital music is like. He wasn't trying to describe what digital music will be like, he was just saying we'll be able to listen to music without a physical cassette tape and player.

Typical does not mean > 50%.


"God, I've lost all-in preflop with aces the last 3 times I've had em. So typical."

"Jon got another DUI last week." "Oh that's typical. It's his 4th one."


Also, out of all the things mentioned, books happen to be the least common download, but fastest grower in terms of % annual increase of previous years total. I'd say for all other forms of media, his prediction was correct, and for books he was off by just a few years.

Jesus christ, I've met actual downies who were less dense.


Care to give the breakdown for movies between digital-only downloads and hard-copy forms in 2009? Or is that sentence beyond your comprehension?

The quoted prediction is from tAoSM, page 790, published in 1999, and I told you this in the other thread. Clearly you and your boyfriend have a lot in common.

So what.

I know nothing about him and care even less about his credibility. The above was still a good prediction. The singularity is an interesting idea worthy of consideration. If its clearly on the way in 1950 no doubt some bozzo will insist kurzwell was wrong. Some will keep insisting he was wrong until they say that it was obviously true.

^^^ should say 2050 not 1950

I don't understand how it's a "good prediction" to recognize an obvious trend, make a vaguely-worded prediction consistent with that obvious trend, still be wrong on much of it despite the nonspecificity and vague wording of the prediction, but be directionally correct because of the trend.

+1

This is what I'm thinking. Why is this thread about bashing/defending Kurzweil's earlier predictions (which you've clearly done before) and not about the singularity?

I don't care if Kurzweil is right or wrong in predicting the date of the singularity (or any other stuff for that matter), it could still be interesting to discuss the possibility of it.

That's what they will say about the singularity if it happens.

I spend much of my day thinking about trends that later people will say were obvious. Wish it was easy, i'd be so rich.

In this area one gets rich not by predicting the future but by writing and then successfully marketing books that purport to predict the future regardless the value of the predictions.

maybe, seems like he has some good ideas as well.

edit: either you believe trend spotting is impossible which contradicts your previous post or the way to get seriously rich is to back the trends with cash.