From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 22:55:30 MST
At 08:51 PM 3/30/02 -0800, Rob Bradbury wrote:
>> In the light of this, I'm starting to think that the Kurzweil version (no
>> doubt borrowed from elsewhere!)
>I think Ray's ideas are derived from Moravec's "Bush Robots" which
>were discussed in Mind Children (though I've never seen him credit
>Moravec as "good" scientists should do).
I respect Ray Kurzweil's recent PR efforts, but I have to say it bothered
me a lot to read the EDGE essay where he says with a straight face:
< We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." >
Hey, no shit. I drove a self-powered vehicle the other day. I call it "a
bicycle". It has two "wheels".
There's no acknowledgement in his essay that this term "the Singularity"
was coined by Vernor Vinge and has been in discursive use for 15 years now.
On the other hand, his EDGE post responding to John McCarthy's lofty scorn
*does* acknowledge Moravec ("widely regarded as having made major
contributions to three-dimensional machine vision and robotics"), and
Drexler ("widely acknowledged as having laid the theoretical foundations of
nanotechnology").
Damien Broderick
[actually I call it "the Spike" and have done so since 1997 but hey]
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