[dude_abides]

Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."

I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.

[ot]

The irony is that you could say the exact same thing about Douglas Hofstadter himself.

[Lost_BiomedE]

He may have noticed this in himself first, then applied it to others. In fact, he may consider it a limitation of genius and part of the current human condition.

[samstave]

This is an interesting point.

One thing about good ideas - is not so much the novelty, but more-so ideas that are far enough out there that they are semi-novel, but based on an extrapolation of the current state of things such that a path to getting the idea implementable is possible.

Sometimes, this means that you're able to foresee the trajectory of industries and technology that others miss or can't.

However - its also important to have the resources avaialble to be able to implement/execute/foster that which is needed to make those ideas become reality.

In this case, he has immense resources which can make the ratio between rubbish and great ideas shift significantly.

Its easy to simply be a daydreamer - even if a greatly informed day dreamer - when you have no resources.

[Kekeli]

I am going to insert this piece into my pitch. It touches on the basic and salient rationale that access to resources is a given to derive inertia for for certain ideas

[nrlucas]

I haven't read his new book, but "I am a strange loop" sure as hell didn't acknowledge it.

[coldtea]

Really? I don't think so.

For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about their workings. Like, you know, every scientist.

Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a normal writer, no more or less strange than, say, Marvin Minsky.

[lukeschlather]

How could anyone hope to accomplish anything halfway great without being grandiose, obsessive and deluded?

Kurzweil has already done enough to prove he's not simply deluded. It seems like every week there's an article that comes across HN about how all great innovators have a capacity for self-delusion. Kurzweil has consistently shown himself to be a great innovator, and yet people dismiss him as a crank because he has the gall to continue to reach for "impossible" goals.

[coldtea]

>How could anyone hope to accomplish anything halfway great without being grandiose, obsessive and deluded?

That's a Hollywood cliched idea of creativity. The "mad scientist" idea.

People have created great things without being "grandiose, obsessive and deluded". Genius and/or hard work will do.

Einstein wasn't either grandiose, obsessive or deluded. Maxwell too. Feynman was mostly playful and humble. Turing. The list goes on.

Great scientists and inventors are not necessarily of the Emmett "Doc" Brown type.

[AnthonyMouse]

Genius or hard work will get you a solution to the problem you set out to solve. You need "grandiose, obsessive and deluded" in order to set out against a sufficiently ambitious problem.

And you're listing people who have made discoveries. Kurzweil isn't trying to discover an equation or a law of nature, he's trying to build strong AI. That's a different category of endeavor. It's the work of Henry Ford or Steve Jobs rather than Einstein or Feynman.

[aswanson]

Wow. Henry Ford or Steve Jobs. So, the discovery of the nature of cognition, a scientific endeavor that has stumped tens of thousands of the most brilliant people who ever lived for thousands of years, is on the order of setting up assembly lines and setting up shiny packaging for other people's engineering work. I learn new things here everyday.

[saraid216]

Well, I suppose it's nice to know that anyone who actually tries anything hard is, in fact, insane and probably should be kept away from real people.

[esahione]

Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, has accomplished jack shit.

Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.

It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something. Then nobody holds the critics accountable for their negative attitudes towards the visions, and the critics probably would claim that the progress was obvious (in hindsight everything is obvious).

[coldtea]

>Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, has accomplished jack shit.

Why would he have to accomplish anything else? He is not an inventor, he is a writer.

>Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.

I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked and had results too.

And things that, even now, 3 and 4 decades after his inventions, are miles BEHIND of his expectations of them, and somewhat of a disappointment still.

>It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something.

And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

[hdxuyx]

>>I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked and had results too.

It only looks like low hanging fruit after it is done.

>>And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

What exactly is your overall point? Most visionaries will fail because that is just how things are. Leonardo da vinci was a great visionary that could not fulfill any of his visions. Visions that were fulfilled hundreds of years latter. Eventually somebody will fulfilled those visions. Again, I don't understand what you are bitching about.

All this irrational hate against the guy for daring to dream what would be one of the greatest achievements of human history is unnerving. Eventually we WILL have strong AI, we are living proof that it is possible just as birds were living proof that things could fly.

[joe_the_user]

You are correct that Hofstadter doesn't have grand assertions at the level of The Singularity but there is still something like a "Hofstadter" mix - say all the ideas in Godel, Esther and Bach with the implication that these are related and important. One might reasonably say this a somewhat grandiose admixture.

All that said, I think Hofstadter's "mixture of good ideas and rubbish" description isn't a good characterization of the thinking behind The Singularity. Rather, Singularity thinking is extrapolation of growth trends which might easily be false but since it is made on a broad level, it is not easy to formulate why it is false. And Kurzweil, in particular is popularizer of the singularity with a particular version of it.

One could argue there are limitations to the expansions that Singularians have been extrapolating from but characterizing these limitations is itself quite a tricky problem.

I think the best refutation to the Singularity idea is the argument of Paul Allen, that software and the understanding of intelligence simply haven't been amenable to increased computing power.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425733/paul-allen-the-s...

It's a good argument but I feel the tone isn't quite fair, the sense that you could more fairly say the singularity looks plausible until you really focus on the software barrier.

[dave_sullivan]

As with so many things, it takes one to know one

[joe_the_user]

As I recall, Hofstadter said this about "the singularity" in particular. I don't Kurzweil is claiming he will bring this about at Google, at least not before his rough projected arrival date of 2030-40.