Why do people like Kevin Kelly? Everything i've ever seen him say is consistently misinformed and poorly thought out. I tried to read one of his books recently, because I heard a number of people recommend it, and I couldn't even finish it (highly unusual for me).

Basically every point he makes in this post is just fundamentally wrong in one way or another. He clearly has no understanding whatsoever of what he's talking about, on the technical, biological, or psychological sides. He's just saying things that seem true to him, with zero context or understanding of any of the issues involved.

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

Multi-dimensional vectors have magnitudes just like scalars do. When will people get over this whole "intelligence is not one thing, therefore you can't say anything at all about it" nonsense?

> Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

False absolutism. Human minds are certainly more general purpose than an AI. When an AI has a mind that is more general purpose than ours, I think its fair to call it a general purpose AI.

> Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

According to who? The only person that could answer that would be someone who already knew how to emulate the human brain. Although, come to think of it, some 50% of the human population are able to create new brains, at quite little cost. So it is empirically possible to synthesize new brains extremely cheaply.

> Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Lol, according to who? What does this even mean?

> Intelligences are only one factor in progress

Sure. So what?

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate, well thought out, informed critiques of AI fear mongering. This, however, is not one of them. This is garbage.