For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about their workings. Like, you know, every scientist.
Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a normal writer, no more or less strange than, say, Marvin Minsky.
Kurzweil has already done enough to prove he's not simply deluded. It seems like every week there's an article that comes across HN about how all great innovators have a capacity for self-delusion. Kurzweil has consistently shown himself to be a great innovator, and yet people dismiss him as a crank because he has the gall to continue to reach for "impossible" goals.
That's a Hollywood cliched idea of creativity. The "mad scientist" idea.
People have created great things without being "grandiose, obsessive and deluded". Genius and/or hard work will do.
Einstein wasn't either grandiose, obsessive or deluded. Maxwell too. Feynman was mostly playful and humble. Turing. The list goes on.
Great scientists and inventors are not necessarily of the Emmett "Doc" Brown type.
And you're listing people who have made discoveries. Kurzweil isn't trying to discover an equation or a law of nature, he's trying to build strong AI. That's a different category of endeavor. It's the work of Henry Ford or Steve Jobs rather than Einstein or Feynman.
Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.
It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something. Then nobody holds the critics accountable for their negative attitudes towards the visions, and the critics probably would claim that the progress was obvious (in hindsight everything is obvious).
Why would he have to accomplish anything else? He is not an inventor, he is a writer.
>Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.
I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked and had results too.
And things that, even now, 3 and 4 decades after his inventions, are miles BEHIND of his expectations of them, and somewhat of a disappointment still.
>It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something.
And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.
It only looks like low hanging fruit after it is done.
>>And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.
What exactly is your overall point? Most visionaries will fail because that is just how things are. Leonardo da vinci was a great visionary that could not fulfill any of his visions. Visions that were fulfilled hundreds of years latter. Eventually somebody will fulfilled those visions. Again, I don't understand what you are bitching about.
All this irrational hate against the guy for daring to dream what would be one of the greatest achievements of human history is unnerving. Eventually we WILL have strong AI, we are living proof that it is possible just as birds were living proof that things could fly.
All that said, I think Hofstadter's "mixture of good ideas and rubbish" description isn't a good characterization of the thinking behind The Singularity. Rather, Singularity thinking is extrapolation of growth trends which might easily be false but since it is made on a broad level, it is not easy to formulate why it is false. And Kurzweil, in particular is popularizer of the singularity with a particular version of it.
One could argue there are limitations to the expansions that Singularians have been extrapolating from but characterizing these limitations is itself quite a tricky problem.
I think the best refutation to the Singularity idea is the argument of Paul Allen, that software and the understanding of intelligence simply haven't been amenable to increased computing power.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425733/paul-allen-the-s...
It's a good argument but I feel the tone isn't quite fair, the sense that you could more fairly say the singularity looks plausible until you really focus on the software barrier.
