A Quick Refutation of Kurzweil
Kurzweil says that there is an exponentially accelerating trend towards "order" and his evidence for this is here. Notice how up until 100,000 years ago most of the data points are origin dates for our taxonomic classifications, namely:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. sapiens
Subspecies: H. s. sapiens
The refutation of this is that ALL SPECIES will tend to show exponentially accelerating trends if you just use their taxonomic branching points as data points as Kurzweil does for our species. The reason is simple: there has been more time for Genuses to go extinct than Species; there has been more time for Families to go extinct than Genuses; there has been more time for Orders to go extinct than Families; and so on. So there will tend to be more time between earlier taxonomic branchings than later ones, regardless of the species.
Therefore, all species will have their own Singularities. It's that simple.
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. sapiens
Subspecies: H. s. sapiens
The refutation of this is that ALL SPECIES will tend to show exponentially accelerating trends if you just use their taxonomic branching points as data points as Kurzweil does for our species. The reason is simple: there has been more time for Genuses to go extinct than Species; there has been more time for Families to go extinct than Genuses; there has been more time for Orders to go extinct than Families; and so on. So there will tend to be more time between earlier taxonomic branchings than later ones, regardless of the species.
Therefore, all species will have their own Singularities. It's that simple.
Comments