I recently finished "The Singularity Is Near" (2005) by Ray Kurzweil. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.

Super optimistic author and indeed a great book to think about after reading it.

I'm just reading 'The Singularity Is Near' at the moment and am finding it fascinating finding ideas, such as 'reversible computing' and interesting information relating to cellular automaton.

Insightful perspective on what might happen if you gradually augmented your brain. Kurzweil covered a lot in The Singularity is Near; this narrative on consciousness is more playful. The brandy in the chocolate here is his existential musings on the Omega Point - blew my mind.

- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (a fun read. Pretty insightful. One of the best books about success, I think.)

- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (opened my mind to what the world could be)

Penrose certainly popularized the idea. Kurzweil addresses this issue in his book "The Singularity is Near."

To fully appreciate the movie one needs to read Ray Kurzweil's "The singularity is near".

The idea that exponential growth has been happening long before Moore's law is one of the main themes of Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

I was referring specifically to Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near. He covers various current and future techniques to analyze the brain, including imaging technologies and extremely thin physical slicing. His view is that this knowledge will inform model development.

Indeed. If you ever read Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, that's what we'll end up as at some point in the near future.

It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us.

I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.

Some criticism of Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near: [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmodis/Kurzweil.htm]

I don't know that any one book exactly changed my life, but a handfull of titles do stand out in my mind.

Zero To One by Peter Thiel

The Art Of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Getting Things Done, by David Allen

anything by Edward Tufte

The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

Dip, by Seth Godin

As I recall, Ray Kurzweil wrote extensively about this - minus the tax aspect - in his book The Singularity is Near.

The central argument from the book The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil is on his website ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 ). It was almost completely ignored when it was posted to this forum a few days ago ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126183 ).

I only read non-fiction that's counterintuitive. I figure, hey, I'm pretty smart, so if it's intuitive then I can probably figure it out on my own. A list of stuff I cite most often:

No Contest & Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

PG's essays & ITConversations interviews

The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil

This graph: http://alexkrupp.com/picture_library/plot.jpg

Dee Hock's essay on leadership

A handful of blog posts by Mark Cuban

All Marketers are Liars & Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. All of the books that Seth recommends are also worth reading.

Bruce Schneier's interview on ITConversations

Magic Ink, an essay by Bret Victor

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

The Cluetrain Manifesto (the book)

I'm sure there's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right now.

Summary of the article is in this paragraph:

> This is actually quite impressive! Although 9 out of 25 is only a 36% accuracy rate, I still remember when reading The Singularity is Near for the first time that almost all of the predictions seemed wildly optimistic and sort of crazy. It seemed a bit unlikely that it would be possible to have a high speed internet connection from a touchscreen super-computer everyone has in their pocket that can also act as a personal assistant that you can speak to in natural language and it will usually understand and respond appropriately, albeit unable to have a full conversation at this point.

So his best record is in making predictions about the internet and ubiquity of portable computers (smartphones), but he's been less successful in his optimistic predictions for full-immersion virtual reality, and the jury is still out on the singularity.

You are much too kind. Kurzweil is a loon, full stop. The fact he once made brilliant contributions to computer science is quite irrelevant to the essential craziness of his more recent delusions.

In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near and predicted this would be the state of the world in the year 2030: "Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body."

That is not happening by the year 2030. It is so starkly delusional that anyone who seriously affirms a belief that it will happen probably needs psychiatric help.

It is akin to Eric Drexler's loony visions back in the 1980s that nanobots would cure all diseases and continually restore our bodies to perfect health. We were supposed to all be immortal by now.

None of this is happening, probably not ever, and certainly not in the lifetime of any human being currently living. Kurzweil is going to die, Drexler is going to die, everybody is going to die. Adopting a pseudo-scientific religion to avoid facing mortality is kind of sad.

Some of his predictions are impressive but others tend to feel quite obvious, particularity with the amount of momentum within those fields already. Sadly, to me, Kurzweil and his works all seem to reek of a man who is just scared to die and attempts to create self fulfilling prophesies to extend his life. He also tends to base many of his predictions off the advancements in technology rather than the human side of A.I. When the number in the amount of transistors chips comes to fruition according to Kurzweil predictions, devices will not magically pass the Turing test. I attempted to read 'The Singularity is Near' and had to stop. Reading and perpetuating his work will inspire and change the worlds path and I would rather it not become self fulfilling.

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

Code by Charles Petzold

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Surfaces and Essences - Douglas Hofstadter

How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

-- One of my favorites is How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenbreg

I have that on my list of "to read real soon now". Sounds fascinating.

I'm curious how many people have actually read his books before attacking his positions. A lot of the criticisms about his predictions seem to be based around the charts and graphs he's used in his Ted talks and articles.

In his books, he goes into great detail describing each aspect of the GNR (Genetic, Nano, Robotics) revolutions that will contribute to the singularity. He's actually addressed a lot of the criticisms that seem to crop up in HN, etc. over and over.

Forgive me if your position was based on having read his books (especially The Singularity is Near), but it didn't seem like it. Especially considering that cracking general AI is specifically mentioned as not being a requirement to obtain greater than human intelligence (for example, augmentation of biological human intelligence, specialized AI coming together to solve general problems, etc.).

Also, his prediction for the Singularity is 2045 (32 years from now), so your figure of 16 years seems to be incorrect.

Edit: D'oh, you were talking about the 2029 figure mentioned in the article, not the date of the technological singularity. I'm an idiot.

I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why.

Something like moving a cursor around by thinking about it, or thinking about making a call and having it happened requires a hell of a lot of bits of information to be produced by the brain computer interface. With the current state of the art we can distinguish between something like 2-6 classes of thoughts sort-of reliably, and even then it's typically about thinking of particular movements, not "call mom".

Importantly, what most people look for in the signal (the feature in machine learning terms) are changes in signal variance. And there are methods to detect these changes that are in some sense mathematically optimal (which is to say they can be still be improved a little bit, but there won't be any revolutionary new discoveries.) There may be other features to look for, but we wont be getting much better at detecting changes in signal variance.

Some methods can report results like a 94% accuracy over a binary classification problem. Such a result may seem "close to perfect", but it is averaged over several subjects, and likely varies between for example 100% and 70%. For the people with 70% accuracy, the distinguishing features of their signals are hidden for various reasons. And this is for getting one bit of information out of the device. Seems like such a device would need to work for everyone to be commercially successful.

In computer vision we have our own brains to prove that the problems can be solved. For EEG based brain computer interfaces, such proofs don't exist. There are certain things you probably can't detect from an EEG signal, meaning the distinguishing information probably isn't there at all. I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.)

This Koomey guy better have a conversation with Ray Kurzwiel before he go's around naming this "Discovery" after himself. Considering Kuyrzwiel's book "The Singularity is Near" already covered this phenomenon 7 years ago. I didn't see anything in this article that I hadn't heard before. That chart is nearly identical to ones in Kurzwiel's book.

Ray Kurzweil's book: "The Singularity is Near"

My copy isn't so near, but I think my "intuitions" were informed somewhere in one of his "Reverse Engineering the Human Brain" sections. (Sorry I can't provide a more precise reference.)

His book is well footnoted, and if there are in fact scientific studies reinforcing what I claim to remember him having written, I'm sure they would be documented there.

If you haven't read it, and your looking for some hyper-tech sort of inspiration, I highly recommend it. It is maybe a bit exhaustive for the casual reader, but well worth it considering it's detail and scope.

(And my apologies to RayK if I'm entirely mistaken in my understanding.)

Of course, Kurzweil took this into account. The first link for a "kurzweil malthus" Google search is directly to a page in The Singularity is Near, via Google books. He seems to think the energy requirements are not significant.

Here's the URL, but might just work better to do the search yourself.

http://books.google.com/books?id=88U6hdUi6D0C&pg=PA427&#...</a>

Ray Kurzweil's latest book about all this 'The Singularity is Near', was released in 2005. It has some compelling arguments is definitely worth a read if you are interesting in the longer term implications of computer technology and networking. He hasn't said all that much new in the years since then and this article doesn't really contain any new information.

I thought that R. Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, really had a compelling argument against space travel in the short term. There's nothing more ridiculous than sending biological life into space. Let's shed some of our biological baggage, merge a little more with technology, and then work on sending a much more versatile and durable human v3.0 into space.

I was skeptic at first too. Read the first few dozen pages of The Singularity Is Near and you'll be impressed the quality of the data. By almost all accounts, technological progress datapoints match very closely an exponential curve.

Here's a good mashup from a number of third party sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events....

This is hardly a wishy washy thesis by a history major. The data are pretty robust.

  To: Femur

Kurzweil does not claim to know what will happen. I have read several of his books and he mostly seems to talk about how these trends will cause major changes. He then outlines more than one possible outcome. And, he more cautiously says what he thinks may happen. I think his analysis is a little too simplistic in places, but that he is likely to be right about the general trends.

If you are interested in learning more, I recommend "The Singularity is Near". Or, for free, go to http://singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2008 and download videos from the conference last year.

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

The Ultimate Question 2.0 - Fred Reichheld‎

The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Moonshot! - John Sculley

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

Republic - Plato

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

False Memory - Dean Koontz

NOS4A2- Joe Hill

Revival - Stephen King

Barbarians At The Gate - John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

Into Thin Air - John Krakauer

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Awesome (in the archaic sense) that the size estimate is only 200x what Google has currently. Seems trivially within reach in, what, only 8 doublings of performance? They guess at 10 years for "one machine", so what, 15-20 years before it's pda size/priced? An extra full-real-thinking-feeling-creating-art-type-brain in my laptop?! Holy shit.

I was actually just wondering why this project wasn't happening yet while reading "The Singularity is Near". If you haven't read it, I recommend it. It's hella dry and boring in parts, but overall worth reading if only to make you think about what a startup might look like in only 5 or 10 years.

IMHO, relevant reading would include The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil and Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

I bet everyone here knows the former book. Kurzweil's exploration of the ramifications of thinking machines is fascinating, but his response to the question of ethics can best be summed up as between "meh" and "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

The other book takes place in a future where consciousness can be digitized, and mankind has already surpassed the threshold of computing power represented by the ability to simulate/host consciousness. The fictional treatment of this technology and its impact on society -- especially on crime and law enforcement -- is fascinating.

I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction:

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

A New Kind of Science - Wolfram

The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter

Atlas Shrugged - Rand

The Fountainhead - Rand

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Yes, you need to survive today to see tomorrow, that's true. Two reads that border on fringe speculation that I happened to enjoy thoroughly were:
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank J. Tipler, and The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil.
Now, I am an atheist, and I fully know the zaniness of Kipler's Omega Point and its ties to Christianity, but there are discussions in there like in Kurzweil's book about how we will expand throughout the cosmos all based on hard science. It only gets trippy in some places. Still more fun to read than junk fiction.
I do believe that we are in the period of 'accelerating returns', and that things will come sooner than we think with space mining, colonization and humans spreading throughout the universe. And, yes, we will try to preserve the Earth in the process, but moving it, performing climate engineering on it, etc... will probably fall by the wayside when we are living on other worlds. It's artifacts and history will be preserved I believe. I don't think we will recreate it per Tipler due to having mastery of information, his 'resurrection' discussion which involves everything, not just people! Fun stuff.

Really interesting.

Mid-2003 is when I started at Microsoft. Though: out in MSN, not where the action was. :)

Has Moore's Law really broken down that severely 'lately'? I'm reminded of one of Kurzweil's books that shows 'Moore's Law' holding since before digital computers. But - the book shows - zoomed in, the trend line is actually a succession of periods of fairly rapid growth followed by stagnation. (Obviously though one question is how cherry-picked the underlying data was...)

Edit: The book was The Singularity is Near.

>"Have a problem? Science and tech will eventually find the answer."

I used to believe this myself when I was first getting into tech in school and reading Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near.

Then I got into the real world and realized the hardest problems to solve are not technical problems, but people problems.

The thing about Ray Kurzweil is that he's basically entertainment, in the same way William Gibson or George Lucas are entertainment. He excites and inspires the lay population, but is ultimately pretty weak on the non-fiction part.

There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making technical statements that are just simply wrong. One of my favorite graphs from "The Singularity Is Near" is a plot of linear versus exponential growth with a point labeled on the exponential curve, "the knee of the curve". He was trying to make a point about how exponential growth looks slow until it hits some "knee" and then it takes off. Hey, anyone, what's the derivative of e^x? Exactly. The neuroscience background he brought to "How to Create a Mind" was first-year grad student at best.

Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google, not the director of engineering as per the article, and Google has many of them. He is an entertainer who attracts attention and sometimes asks interesting questions. I wouldn't worry too much about specific technical statements he makes today. He's way out of his research area of OCR and text-to-speech.

There are of course quite a few crazies among singularitarians, however some are not. On the other hand, almost all critiques of the singularity are squarely in the "they have to be wrong, or I would need to sit down and read a book" genre, case in point, this article. Clearly the author did not bother to read The Singularity is Near, otherwise they would have noted that the entire argument is carefully crafted to subvert the critique that singularitarians need to hit a specific roadmap.

I can't remember the exact article, but if I recall correctly there was a blog post by Derek Sivers [1] how at CDBaby he entered similar albums manually by listening to them all (I presume back when they didn't have so much albums). The blog post was about other large companies asked him for the algorithm he was using while he was just entering them manually. I believe he also wrote that if he'd have to scale that process up he would hire more staff to do it, instead of automating it.

But I'm not trying to make a point or anything here, I do believe that in time AI will keep improving to the point more and more can be automated. For those who like thinking about technology is improving and things like that, there are very interesting books written on the topic, like "The Singularity is near" [2].

[1]: http://sivers.org/
[2]: http://www.singularity.com/

One of my CS professors is heavy into Kurzweil. He had me read "The Singularity is Near". I decided Kurzweil's arguments are the rhetorical equivalent of those algebra jokes where you "prove" 1=2 but it goes through a step that hides a divide by zero. Similarly, "The Singularity is Near" uses steps that seem logical to come to a ridiculous conclusion.

This is described in The Singularity is Near (edit: or How to Create a Brain. I dont' remember which) as the Law of Accelerating Returns, and is exactly what this journalist falls prey to. Human brains are accustomed to viewing the world linearly, not exponentially. Cascading technological breakthroughs are exponential, and therefore highly unlikely to be able to be predicted correctly without accounting for that bias.

Fascinating analysis!
The section "Building devices that approach physical limits" reminds me of a rock Kurzweil mentions in "The Singularity is Near" [1]. Although it's not as a cosmic scale, it's a similarly interesting exploration of the limits of computation!

>“How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.51 Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.”

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1284270-how-smart-is-a-rock...

I read non-fiction related to business strategy, sociology, economics, and technology constantly. In fact I went down the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these:

- Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT]
- Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone]
- Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff]
- Co-opetition [Nalebuff]
- Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls]
- Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly]
- Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen]
- Net Worth [Hagel]
- Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel]
- Fooled by Randomness [Taleb]

Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-)

All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff.

The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is ironically much drier). Other very influential books on me include The Wealth of Networks, Shaping Things, and Free Culture. In fact, all 3 of those were given to me at different times in my life by the smartest person I know (a family friend of my parents)

Maybe the key to the non-fiction reading is having an agenda. I always feel like I'm downloading knowledge that is going to help me make bank and/or help people so that keeps me riveted (beyond the intellectual stimulation, which I'm a total whore for, too ;-)

The value of reading The Singularity is Near in 2005 (I read it in 2009, a little late to the game) wasn’t the predictions themselves. The way he thought about the development of technology was fundamentally different, and by reading his explanations for his prediction other people were learning how to think about the future as well. 2000 started with clunky desktops and dial up. 2009 ended with 3G iPhones. I can forgive him for being overly optimistic about future progress given the time.

He doesn't assume all that much. In his book The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil looks at the physical limits of computing, to determine how long we can go before Moore's Law comes to an end. He concludes that we've got another fifty years, or possibly seventy if certain technologies prove feasible. As I recall he doesn't count on quantum computing much, but does think we'll manage reversible computing to solve heat dissipation issues.

That's just computation, but computation drives much of our other technology, and will even more once computers get smarter than people. Kurzweil estimates the timeframe for that based on a range of estimates for the computational capacity of the brain.

I recommend reading "The Singularity Is Near".

Sure, maybe Kurzweil doesn't understand the brain on any deep level and indeed maybe even those who understand the better than him don't understand it well enough at this point.

But Kurzweil's basic argument really isn't about that, it's about the exponential advance of tools and technologies and understanding on multiple level. Will the blue brain project succeed? Will some lesser known project succeed? Will the process take twenty instead of ten years? All unknown but not crucial to the implications of exponential change. When you have tool that are improve exponentially, what you can do tends to improve also. And then the whole process builds on itself. Do I know where this will go? No but I don't you do either.

My introduction to Kurzweil was this lecture he gave at MIT in 2005:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/327/

I then read The Singularity is Near.

I tend to agree more with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Anissimov than Kurzweil about this stuff, but the video above is still worth watching (much much better than his TED video, which was too short to allow him to make his main points).

As Kurzweil writes in the article, this is exactly one of the arguments against the singularity that Kurzweil brings up and discusses in his book.

Lots of people argued that if space exploration or car engineering continues growing at an exponential pace we'll have flying cars and space colonies. They didn't explain why the growth should continue to be exponential and not end up as an S-curve.

In "The Singularity is Near" Kurzweil argues and shows why computation and reverse engineering of the human brain are subject to exponential growth. Short answer: there are lots of competing technologies and researchers that have different ways of ensuring that current computational advances continue well into the future - we are far from reaching any physical laws that will stop us.

I think he's trying to make the argument that AI need not be limited to automating tasks that directly replace human jobs but can also augment human labor in a way that enables people to do new things that couldn't previously be imagined. It's a variation on the old economics story of how the bulldozer does not replace humans with shovels, it enables those humans to build skyscrapers instead of being limited to building shacks.

He's making a valid argument in the abstract. However, like so many authors from outside the field, his concept of AI is primarily informed by works like The Singularity Is Near and Superintelligence, and completely disconnected from the current state of the art and its development for the foreseeable future.

Again, I really recommend that you read The Singularity is Near before arguing against it (actually not sure if you are arguing against it anymore). But one of the topics there is a long argument on how the pace of change is increasing.

(Eg compare the difference in life between someone born in the 13th century to someone born in the 14th century - not much of a difference. But compare how life have changed in just the last 50 years).

In Ray Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he makes the argument that progress begins slowly and then the majority of results occur near completion. An example given was the Human Genome Project in which the cost and progress of sequencing began slowly but 90% of the results were obtained in the last 10% of the duration - and at less than 10% of the project cost. He makes a similar argument about strong AI and with conservative figures.

When Kurweil says 2029, he means 2019.