artificial intelligence), Kurzweil’s ideas have generated much criticism within the scientific community and in the media. Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people…This proposition that we’re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably differentt’s fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can’t obscure that fact for me.”
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has been one of the strongest critics of Kurzweil ideas, describing them as ybernetic totalism (totalitarianism), and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a Manifesto.
Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gdel, Escher, Bach, has said of