Comment by drb91
8 years ago
He’s also been wrong his entire life. There’s a reason Google hired him: to make AI look good, despite being a near meaningless term.
Edit: diction.
8 years ago
He’s also been wrong his entire life. There’s a reason Google hired him: to make AI look good, despite being a near meaningless term.
Edit: diction.
He predicted computers beating humans at chess by 2000 and it happened in 97 so sometimes he's not that far off.
I would like to claim I thought similarly, but that’s such a milquetoast claim I don’t think anyone would remember. Chess is simply a search problem, trivially scalable if you just throw cash at the problem.
It was not viewed as so obviously tractable at the time. In the future, solving the game of Go will seem easy too, but it was unknown just a few years ago if we would ever solve it.
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I think it was fairly easy to predict the chess thing. You could even plot a graph of Elo rating of chess programs by year and see it would intersect the human max of 2800 or so at some point. I think some polish guy did that before Kurzweil and predicted 1988. Some of Kurzweil's stuff isn't that original and what it original with him is often a bit nutty. He's a good populariser though.
More controversially I'm not sure AGI is that hard to predict either. I wrote about it in my college entry essay 37 years ago and didn't thing it takes any great intellect to say if the brain is a biological computer and electronic computers get more powerful exponentially then at some point electronic ones will overtake. Of course a basic chess algorithm is fairly simple and an AGI one will be far more complicated but it can't be that mega complicated to fit in a limited amount of DNA building proteins building cells.