Kurzweil: 'Exponential' Change Ahead for Games, People | Hacker News Reader

Kurzweil: 'Exponential' Change Ahead for Games, People

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14 pointspaul_reiners6 comments

I was at GDC and saw this keynote. I'm not sure why it was a GDC keynote. The talk was barely even tangentially related to game development.

The talk was similar to his TED talk but an hour long rather than 20 minutes. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38

Games debatably present the best opportunities for deployed AI. The alternatives are backend servers or aggregate knowledge across the web.

Games are the most consumer facing.

Yup. Agreed.

Chris Hecker's talk, Structure vs. Style, was much better regarding this subject. His argument is that we don't have a Structure vs. Style decomposition for AI. We have it on the web => HTML(structure) and CSS(style). We have it in computer graphics => triangle(structure) and texture map(style).

Of course, this got the panties of all of the LISPers in a bunch.

All the speaches of his I've seen are pretty much the same thing. Wish he would come up with something new.

If Kurzweil is right about even a fraction of the stuff he says, I'm fairly certain he'll prove to be an exceptionally important thinker. Unfortunately, I have serious doubts about almost everything the man says. He often seems to me to be taking the canned shot approach to writing: predict as many big things as possible and support them all as best he can, and see what hits.

In other news, this reminded me a post I saw a few years ago: http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/09/most-important-w...

"As the American economist Tyler Cowen points out, loony extropian and transhuman nanotechnoartificiallinteligenceoboosterist Ray Kurzweil is, because of his wild technoutopian prophesies, "the most important thinker today, if only in expected value terms".

Or at least he was, until this morning when while having my breakfast, I made the following prediction:

"Everything that Ray Kurzweil says will come true, and not only that but we will all get a pony"."

Hype aside, he has an interesting approach to invention. He planned on launching a tool to help blind people read. It is a digital camera with a tiny computer. During development, people worked on algorithms on PCs knowing they would be deployed on a portable device not yet available. There is some use to plotting technological growth trends.

I think Cowen's comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

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