[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.

[coldtea]

Not to mention that neither Steve Jobs nor Henry Ford were dellusional or grandiose in the Kurzweill sense.

They were rather pragmatic and market based -- not foaming at the mouth for some pie in the sky tech of 2100.

[StavrosK]

Heh, not only that, but it implies that discovering the fundamental secrets of the universe isn't "sufficiently ambitious" compared to making things more efficiently or making easier-to-use gadgets.

[kbenson]

It depends. If that discovery is a logical next step in the continuation of our current understanding, then yes, it may be less ambitious than something that positing something a few steps removed from what is currently provable, and attempting to fill in those gaps, whether it be a discovery in the scientific sense, or just achieving something heretofore thought impossible.

It's easy to forget that sometimes a discovery will languish for a long time (or even be forgotten and rediscovered) before someone invests time and effort in determining how it can usefully be exploited.

Who deserved credit "discovering" the assembly line? Adam Smith, who wrote about division of labor in 1776, or Eli Whitney, who implemented it manufacture muskets, or Henry Ford for using it to such great effect that he changed how industry operated? Or maybe the first Chinese Emperor, who's creation of a terracotta army is said to have used techniques reminiscent of assembly lines? Or perhaps the Venetian Arsenal? How many times in history was it discovered again, but never put into practice?

Another example, I really don't care who discovered it was possible to go to the moon, I do care about the people that acted on that discovery and actually did it.

[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.