| > It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality. His age had probably little influence on his predictions. The Maes-Garreau law, as fun as it sounds, is probably not true[1] > So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike. I'm personally skeptical of b), except for frozen people (cryonics). If entropy wiped out the information, there's no way to resurrect someone. a) and c) however seem to be merely obvious consequences of Friendly AI (I assume immortality and wicked IQ are good things). And intelligence explosion is quite plausible. You're a bit quick to dismiss those ideas just because they happen to pattern-match religion. (Now, I agree more with this[2] than with the specifics of Kurzweil ideas.) > As far as I know, neither is God. Current physics are reductionist. A supernatural God wouldn't fit into that. Current physics are deterministic (modulo the many-world lingering controversy), and universal. Miracles, as direct violations of the laws of physics, wouldn't fit into that. A Lord Outside the Matrix, maybe, but that's a different beast. [1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_g...
[2]: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html |