Rough Rebuttal to a Kurzweil Critic

This is very much an 'off the top of my head' response to a blog post by my friend, found here: http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/FlawWithTheFuture

A) Nit picking - I guess you are probably just simplifying matters for the sake of a concise introduction paragraph there but:

Vinge popularised the term 'singularity' in this context in 1983, but Stanislaw Ulam talked to von Neumann privately of singularity well before (1958), and Turing spoke of machine thinking taking over (1951). [1]

More significantly, Vinge's expectations for singularity are distinct from Kurzwiel's in that he expects the more sci-fi friendly course of events, with an AI spontaneously boot strapping itself towards super intelligence. He also estimates an early to mid 2030s time scale.

Kurzweil's vision, on the other hand, needs no Skynet (Terminator) type event. He sees little/no distinction between us and our machines. Our computers already form a kind of inseparable hybrid intelligence with our biological selves, and the level of integration will only increase in future (no clear machine/human divide). Kurzweils brand of future fantastic is about as boringly down to earth as his speaking style.

Also, I believe Kurzweil expects human level AI well before 2045 (as you stated), he in fact estimates that one could acquire (for $1000) computing power equivalent to all the brains of all the humans currently alive Earth by that date.


B) Given that the graph of his that you included goes back 10^11 years (most the way to the beginning of the universe) you can't really get away with saying we could be at the * beginning* of the growth curve! ;op  Also, remember that curves are mathematical structures that approximate the real world, not the other way around. Reality is not pootling along trajectories inscribed by God or gods. The 'laws' of the universe emerge from it's increasing complexity, they do not exist outside/before it's existence.

In defence of Avatar

While I superficially agree with all of Kurzweil's criticisms of Cameron's Avatar (via Singularity Hub), I feel more strongly that making them in the first place is falling into a trivial trap, one that may as well have been set just to catch earnest Futurists, hanging them out to dry like pedantic comic book nerds.

Of course the movie only shows a handful of technological advancements over the present day, which makes its supposed setting, 140 years from now, pretty unrealistic. But there's the anthropic principle of popular movies to consider: the masses must be able to identify with (and mostly understand) what's going on, in order for a feature to be popular. There's a reason high concept 'hard' sci-fi novels (feasible imaginings of our future) are such a niche market, making a Hollywood budget film that emulates this literary genre would be financial suicide.

However, unlike most movies shoehorned into the sci-fi genre, Avatar appears to have been *very* carefully crafted to make the necessary 'anthropic compromise' plausible (for those who care to think about such technicalities; myself and you). Of course, if one understands the consequences of accelerating returns, you still just have to ignore the lunacy of the time frame; it's there to help suspend the disbelief of the ignorant majority.

Cameron has deliberately found context that justify the compromised details, working around some explicitly in dialogue and leaving hints about others lingering in the background details:

[1] The whole story takes place on, and around, a planet almost untouched by human kind. Hence it's impossible to say that