Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity: visionary genius or pseudoscientific crank?

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity: visionary genius or pseudoscientific crank?

by Massimo Pigliucci

Everyone keeps telling me that Ray Kurzweil is a genius. Kurweil has certainly racked up a number of impressive accomplishments. Kurzweil Computer Products produced the first optical character recognition system (developed by designer-engineer Richard Brown) in the mid-‘70s, and another of his companies, Kurzweil Music Systems, put out a music synthesizer in 1984. A few years later Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (the guyreally likes to see his name in print) designed a computerized speech recognition system further developed by Kurzweil Educational Systems (see what I mean?) for assistance to the disabled. Other ventures include Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet, Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies, and Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader. In short, the man has a good sense of business and self-promotion — and there is nothing wrong with either (within limits).

However, the reason I’m writing about him is because of his more recent, and far more widely publicized, role as a futurist, and in particular as a major mover behind the Singularitarian movement, a strange creature that has been hailed as both a visionary view of the future and as a secular religion. Another major supporter of Singularitarianism is philosopher David Chalmers, by whom I am equally underwhelmed, and whom I will take on directly in the near future in the more rarefied realm of academic publications.