alt Hacker NewsRay Kurzweil and his "Age of Spiritual Machines", which I read in 1999, is much more to blame than the others like Goertzel that came after him but Kurzweil doesn't get a mention. Kurzweil is also a MIT grad closely associated with MIT and possibly the MIT Technology Review.
Yeah totally, not a single mention of Kurzweil in this article. I also read “Age of spiritual machines” in 1999 (in college), and skimmed most of his subsequent books
Then Kurzweil became my manager’s peer at Google in 2014 or so (actually 2 managers). I remember he was mocked by a few coworkers (and maybe deservedly so, because they had some mildly funny stories)
So I have been wondering with all the AGI talk why Kurzweil isn’t talked about more. Was he vindicated in some sense?
I did get a partial answer - one reason is that doomer AGI prophecies are better marketing than Kurzweil’s brand of AGI, which is about merging with machines
And of course both kinds of AGI prophecies are good distractions from AI ethics, which is more likely to slow investment than to grow it