: What's the ONLY difference to me between the Xtians constantly predicting, being wrong about, and then changing the date of the Rapture and Ray Kurzweil constantly predicting, being wrong about, and then changing the date of the Singularity?
Nowhere near enough people call him and his adherents out on that bullshit the way they do the Xtians about theirs. Different species, genus, and family, yes. Same order and class.
True-Believers (class)
Wrong AF (order)
Most folks don't see Ray...
: ...as a danger the way they see the Xtians (and other doomsday religions), but I do. Ray's all about hope and progress, sure, but so what? Lots of people are. He's done a LOT of useful tech stuff, absolutely. Why is it so deeply unfashionable, even oft seen as, I'm told, mean or even immoral to call him out and down on obvious bullshit? We all routinely call total strangers, coworkers, celebrities, family members, etc. on theirs? Why not Ray? Is it because his is a "nice" message, one we like?
: Kurzweil isn't a danger like Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Alex Jones, etc., but once upon a time they were thought of as harmless cranks, too. That recently orange President was, too. Remember? So was Elon. Joe Rogan was "just a comedian" and a "big, dumb jock", too. "Nobody'll listen to [them]." Reminds me of when I warned of what I saw coming in 1990 in re: US politics and specifically political rhetoric, the parties, the media, and the GOP.
I was only one Senate term off, really, and...
: ...back then I was told "Nobody will let it ever get to that" and stuff. Kurzweil drives a lot of the fringe nutjobs, as sometimes does Michio Kaku, to believe shit that isn't gonna happen within any of our lifetimes. (I'm going with the odds, because look back. How many world-changing techs in the past two decades were gonna change the world by today? China's colossal carbon scrubbers. Low-energy, cheap desalinization of ocean water. Carbon credits. Lithium-ion powered cars. Loads more, too.)
: While woefully unexciting, unfashionable, embarrassingly unhip/square, and seen as unprofitable, living in reality with optimism based on what's doable, practical, etc. is the best arrangement. Just because someone's wrong, like Ray, doesn't mean they're evil. They're juat wrong, and sometimes the best thing, really, is for someone to speak up and call the baby ugly.
@thedisasterautist I would argue, not strongly, that the downsides might be outweighed by the upsides. Much of it depends on who's reading the optimism and the societal and geopolitical state of the world. Think back to Star Trek. Along with other scifi, it spawned an entire generation of engineers and dreamers. The caveat of course is limiting progress by insisting on your vision alone. But once the spark arrives, that's hard to control.
@hallmarc: The comparison to Star Trek, while admirable and understandable, no not an address of the statement or point I was making. Star Trek didn't make real-world predictions, push them very hard, proselytize them, and then when none of the predictions came to pass simply hand-waved it away and said, in effect, "Well, maybe next week; see, I just found a new interpretation of the Inerrant Word". Star Trek was fiction that gave hope. That is not what Kurzweil does.
@hallmarc: Whenever I make this the point of this thread, Star Trek and "it inspired kids to do math and go into engineering" is almost invariably the counter. It's an emotional answer and wholly understandable and one to which I am not unsympathetic in the slightest.
@thedisasterautist I will say this is a bit personal for me. I went to college in the late 80s as someone with incredible optimism around AI, VR, etc. SciFi and the microcomputer revolution and teachers had instilled that in me. I spent two years studying everything I could about the technologies that might be required for AGI. It was hopeless to me because those technologies seemed decades off. Ultimately the biggest problem was that I didn't know what I didn't know. Today, I'm amazed...
@hallmarc: Understandable. The same went for me with audiovisual (tv and film). I came in too late for Super 8 and too early for affordable VHS camcorders and way, way earlier than computer video and editing technology. Everything became cheap and easy and "everyone could do it" *and* get it out to millions of people online. By that time, in my mid-30s, I was seen as "too old" and "too behind the times" to get in. Also, geography had some to do with it, but primarily it was the rapidity of...
@hallmarc: ...the changes. That said by the two of us, I will formally ask:
Do you honestly, candidly believe it is actually going to happen by 2040 or 2050 that humans will no longer require physical bodies and will be able to upload their conscious minds to a kind of internet and live forever, no more need for organic physical bodies?
(That's just a tech variation on The Rapture.)
@thedisasterautist from what I've studied of biology, physics, and computer science, no. Not by those dates and maybe, like teleportation, not ever (although I wouldn't underestimate the desire of soon to be trillionaires trying to extend their lives in any way possible). I do expect with little doubt that once we create an AGI, which *will* happen, its evolution will be so rapid as to make tech advancement in the last 50 years seem like babies playing with toys.