He and Searle are the only ones on the list whose views I see as completely idiotic. Penrose has done a few impressive things, but for some reason he has always been insane when it comes to anything involving philosophy of mind or philosophy of mathematics.

All of the rest of the opinions I think represent reasonably plausible scenarios. Kurzweil is too overconfident about his "definitely going to happen in 15 years" but I still think he and Bostrom have made the best guesses about what we'll see over the next century of anyone on the list.

Yeah, I whiffed on Searle my first pass through, since the Chinese Box Problem has some points of interest; but ended up coming back to him when I couldn't convince myself that your second guy was Bill Joy.

Someone's other accomplishments have never mattered to me much when calling someone an idiot because they said something idiotic. Which I think is a good thing. And I sure hope that, regardless of what I accomplish in life, people never stop calling me an idiot when I say stupid things.

And this is a really, really stupid thing to say:

Consciousness cannot be duplicated in computational machines, because it depends on “noncomputational physical processes.” Does not know what these might be but suggests it emerges from “large-scale” quantum-
mechanical phenomena in microtubules in the brain’s neurons. “ I’m not saying that consciousness is
beyond physics...although I’m saying that it’s beyond the physics we know now.”

It's one small step from believing in witchcraft, in my book. He's practically positing a soul, even if he wraps it in pseudoscience.

There is nothing remotely beyond today's physics about consciousness.

I used to think that the term "technological singularity" referred to some kind of infinity showing up in a graph of technological progress. But after I started talking to the people at the Singularity Institute, and went to the Stanford Singularity Sumit and listened to most of the world's experts on the singularity speak, I found out that none of them actually believe this. In fact, of all the reading I've done online about it at this point, and of all of the singularitarians I've met or encountered on singularity mailing lists (such as SL4), I've never encountered a single one who says this--although that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't people out there who believe it.

Kurzweil, Bostrom, Yudkowski, et al are all very aware and familiar with the limits on information imposed due to black holes and the holographic principle. Vernor Vinge, who originally proposed the term "singularity" it appears was making an analogy to when a coordinate chart ends and cannot map the rest of the manifold... in other words, our current extrapolations about what will happen to the future of technology may only extend to the point where super-human AI takes over, at which point our chart ends and anything afterwords could happen. I think that if Vinge were a physicist rather than a mathematician, he probably would have used the word "event horizon" instead of singularity since that is a more accurate analogy to what he's talking about--even though event horizions *do* represent a coordinate singularity.

Regarding Moore's Law not being able to maintain for more than another 100 years... as I mentioned, most singularitarians are aware that the information density (and processing power density) are limitted by the laws of physics. But as Kurzweil is fond of saying "the limits aren't all that limiting". His view is that we will reach what he calls the technological singularity long before we run into this limit. This is expected to happen once AI's are self-improving their own IQ's at such a rapid rate that there's no possible way a normal unmodified human could keep up or comprehend the changes that are happening to the planet after that.

Pointing out that we'd reach complete saturation of the Bekenstein bound in 100 years only serves to illustrate how fast the current exponential progress is... and how fast we will get closer to that bound and could transform the entire planet and solar system before that time.