"What I want to say is that Kurzweil and the singularitarians are indulging in some sort of para-science, which differs from real science in matters of methodology and rigor. They tend to overlook rigorous scientific practices such as focusing on natural laws, giving precise definitions, verifying the data meticulously, and estimating the uncertainties. Below I list a number of scientific wrongdoings in Kurzeil’s book. I try to rectify some of them in order to properly present my critique of the Singularity concept." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

brilliant. - AdRiX

"Kurzweil is possessed by the exponential function. He criticizes people who make forecasts by simply extrapolating straight lines on linear trends. But he does the very same thing on logarithmic paper." - Doug Beeferman

I read part of the book, but gave up when I decided his thesis was "Everything can be fit to an exponential curve, but sometimes, the exponential curve needs to be on log paper (aka "double exponential")" and wasn't going to change if I kept reading. And talking about a "knee" (aka inflection point) of an exponential curve is absurdly stupid. - Alex Power

I read a similar argument by Saul Griffith (via Tim O'Reily) a few years ago: http://radar.oreilly.com/2007... - Carlos Andrés Rocha

"The acceleration of paradigm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the "knee of the curve," which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable." - TSIN, p.9. He does not define "knee" to mean an inflection point. - Tim Tyler

... as the article says, "becomes noticeable" is a meaningless term, in proportion to the current value, the growth rate of an exponential is always the same; that's what an exponential curve is. I guess it's not an inflection point, but it's certainly suggesting a change in the first derivative. - Alex Power

Wouldn't it technically be semi-log paper? (Or I guess you can call it log paper since it comes from logs...) But yeah, "knee" is a meaningless term, particularly when plotting a semi-log graph. - Jim Norris

When Kurzweil came to give an author talk at Google, I asked him whether his exponential graph couldn't be explained by the fact that the further an event is in the past, the less likely it is to remain in our collective memory. He was silent for a noticeable time, and then did not actually answer my question. At least my copy of _TSIN_ was free... - Ruchira S. Datta

I prefer the way Vernor Vinge presents the singularity in his books (incidentally, way before Kuzweil popularized it). Give more and more people a decent education, put more and more information and computing power into their hands, and increase the density and speed of their interconnectivity, and you can't predict the disruptive result (even in Marooned in Realtime, it's unclear if humanity just killed itself or something else happens), Vinge doesn't explicitly say 'progress' happened. - Ray Cromwell

It's certainly possible for the Singularity to indicate catastrophe rather than progress. I heard Vinge speak about this in the SALT (Seminars About Long-term Thinking) series http://www.longnow.org/seminar... three years ago. According to this blogpost http://seekerblog.com/archive..., the print version is here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme... - Ruchira S. Datta

Catastrophic singularity = Skynet ? - Andrew C (✓)

"Becomes noticeable" does mean *something* - it refers to some time after the point when the first person notices it. - Tim Tyler

Ray: Agreed about Vinge! In 'Marooned in Realtime' we have no idea what the actual outcome of the singularity was. Even those who lived very-near-but-not-through the disruption have no clue what actually happened and can only guess. I suppose that is the nature of observing a singularity from outside its event horizon though, right? He also deals with that sort of phenomenon in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' as "Powers" which start off as software systems under human control boostrap themselves beyond all human ability to comprehend and inexplicably transcend right before the humans' eyes. They see it happening from the outside but have no clue what is really going on and their only way to do anything is nuke the planet/moon it's happening on into oblivion in hopes that they catch it before it escapes. - veo