The Hurdles to Kurzweil's AI Fantasies

In April Wired magazine had an article about Ray Kurzweil, AI/futurist/singulartarian, and his hopes for Artificial Intelligence to extend his life. Indeed, he takes a couple hundred pills a day in the hopes he will live long enough to see the day when computer technology will have advanced enough that his "personality" can be uploaded and hence, he claims, he'll achieve immortality.

While the main Wired article linked above was mildly interesting (i.e., as an update to what Kurzweil is doing these days), what I was really glad to see was the shorter sidebar: Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science. This was an excellent overview of five scientific hurdles that Kurzweil and others like him will need to solve -- and they won't be easy! I found the first four to be especially compelling. I highly recommend this sidebar to anyone interested in this topic.

NOTE: I have decided to remove the second paragraph of this posting, wherein I made some offhand remarks about my opinions on Strong AI vs. Searle's views on it (Chinese Room Argument and so on). This generated some interesting comments, but I just don't have time to get into a debate with anyone on this topic right now -- I'd need to do a lot of catching up from 15 years away from the subject to have an intelligent debate, and I just don't have the time/interest at present. So I've removed that part of this posting, and I've deleted the comments and my replies as well. (My apologies to those who spent time on composing those comments.)