Thursday, December 10, 2009

Kurzweil and homeopathy: now crackpot certified

Ray Kurzweil made a bundle on speech recognition and speech related software. He's also done some good work with assistive technologies.

In later life he wandered off into the cultish fringes of the Singularity. He's seemed less anchored to reality in recent years, and now he's nuked the fridge (emphases mine) ...
Amazon.com: Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (9781605299563): Ray Kurzweil Ph.D., Terry Grossman M.D.: Books

According to futurist Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) and homeopathic medical doctor Grossman (The Baby Boomer's Guide to Living Forever), medicine is transforming into an information technology, which by its nature advances at an exponential rate..
Homeopathy is fundamentalist crackpottery (and "homeopathic medical" is an oxymoron). Kurzweil has really lost it.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

2 comments:

Charlie Stross said...

Kurzweil and his fellow-travelers are one of the major reasons I back-pedal like crazy when anyone asks me about the singularity.

It's the extropian equivalent of snake-fondling and speaking in tongues; there's no empirical basis for believing it to be true, and besides, you risk over-exciting the snakes.

Don said...

I'm disappointed by this. I'm a transhumanist myself, and I've noticed more of my peers in the movement becoming obsessed with the "singularity" and treating it with reverance and mysticism, abandoning their scientific principles.

How can Kurzweil, a noted scientist and inventor, accept homeopathy? I fear the answer may be economic, and that he has sold out any principles he may have had to make money with the woo woo "medicine" crowd.

Disappointing.