I can see why you might feel their claim about being a “leading dialog” was slightly dishonest and be piqued by that, but do keep in mind that their strategy of increasing the status of futurism helps your career and research interests. They are contributing to an unusual public good that benefits you – shouldn’t you mix some appreciation in with your criticism?

Better not to have gotten into the whole mess in the first place – but essentially, yes: perpetuating the dopey “Singularity” terminology is a bad thing to be doing – and I think that all those involved should cease at the earliest opportunity.

I don’t really see how anyone can argue that the things Kurzweil actually claims are accelerating are not actually accelerating.

Robert: trying to correct terminology can be easily counterproductive. Look at Richard Stallman; how many people discount him as a crank solely because of his efforts to get people to make a legitimate distinction like Linux vs. GNU/Linux (or ‘intellectual property’ or…)? Quite a few. And his attempts have helped him or the FLOSS movement not in the slightest.

I don’t think we could ask it “solve quantum gravity” or “create a being more intelligent than yourself” and expect much.

And how much can you expect if you asked humans to do the same thing? Humans have had 200,000+ years to do those things. So far, nada. I’m not impressed.

I mean, even if we could simulate the brain properly, which we barely understand at this point, we would need to sift through all the information associated with it. Efficiency of information processing at every scale and level is essential (our brains are amazing in this regard).

This is going to be a herculean task. Certainly technology and computers can do wonders now and I believe they will continue to integrate with daily human activity and help promote rapid exchange, analysis, and creation of information.

However, creating and understanding “intelligent” entities is a different beast all together. It’s not going to pop into existence on its own. The equations aren’t going to write themselves. Someone (or something I suppose) needs to do some error checking.

And now that I think of it. I can foresee us generating “quasi-intelligent” machines which can may mimic intelligent behavior, especially in terms of retrieving/processing information for human users (think of some hyper advanced context-relevant Google), or also facsimile type androids which have emotion-like responses etc.. But these will essentially be high-tech toys.

I don’t think we could ask it “solve quantum gravity” or “create a being more intelligent than yourself” and expect much.

The break through will be managing to link this ocean of organized information directly with the human brain (cybernetics). Once humans become experts or trained to make use and behold a gigantic amount of extra information, analysis on the fly, then they could guide themselves to deeper discovery. But this will not happen overnight.

Like I mentioned earlier we don’t even understand our own intelligence and brain, and then we would need to engineer our cybernetic interlink to our brains properly without frying it!

Lots of HARD WORK ahead, just like anything else meaningful in this world.

Cheers.