Peter Thiel

First in the biography list of people you should know about:  Peter Thiel.  Chess prodigy, co-founder of PayPal, venture capitalist behind Facebook, gay, Libertarian, supporter of journalists, opposer of multiculturalism, supporter of seasteading and singularity research and life extension, member of the Bilderberg Group, he doesn't fit into any kind of neat category.


But like him or not, he's a big player in what's to come.

Kurzweil and Singularity

Raymond Kurzweil is undoubtedly brilliant, but his prediction that we will reach singularity in 2045 (with artificial intelligence so much smarter than humans that it can improve itself) suffers from the same flaws as predictions of flying cars in the 1950s.  It turns out that flying is orders of magnitude more complicated than driving, and not just the next step in personal transportation.  Moonshot in 1969 gives us outposts on the rings of Saturn by 2009?  Again, the devil’s in the details, and the same goes for artificial intelligence.

Will we get there?  Most certainly.  But 2045?  In my opinion, that’s too soon, too many devils waiting in the details.  We might build something that can reliably pass the Turing Test 99% of the time, but we won’t outpace ourselves (at least on the inventiveness scale) until some time later than that.  2085?  2125?  2165?  These sound a little more reasonable to me.