[unoti]

I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.

[rpm4321]

Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future.

It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption.

Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.

[saraid216]

Your defense of Kurzweil amounts to "He came up with an AI version of Schrodinger's Cat." That's a lot less impressive than I think you intended.