Robert A. Heinlein was an Engineer and SF writer, who created many stories that hold up quite well. He put in his understanding of human interaction, and of engineering to make stories that are somewhat realistic. But no one should confuse him with someone researching the actual likelyhood of any particular future. He did not build anything that improved the world, but he wrote interesting about the possibilities and encouraged many others to per-sue technical careers.
SF has often bad usage of logic, and the well known hero bias, or scientists that put together something to solve a current crisis that all their colleagues before had not managed to do. Unrealistic, but fun to read.
SF writer write for a living, hard SF writers take stuff a bit more serial, but still are not actual experts on technology.
Except when they are. Vinge would be such a case. Egan I have not read yet. Kurzweil seems to be one of the more present futurists, (Critiquing his ideas can take its own place.) But you will notice that the air gets pretty thin in this area, where everyone leads his own cult and spends more time on PR, than on finding good counter arguments for their current views. It would be awesome to have more people work on transhumanism/​lifeextension/​AI and what not, but that is not yet the case.
There might even be good reasons for that, which LWers fail to perceive, or it could be that many scientists actually have a massive blindspot in regards to some of the topics.
Regarding AI I fail to estimate how likely it is to reach it any time soon, since I really can not estimate all the complications on the way. The general possibility of human level intelligence looks plausible, because there are humans running around who have it. But even if the main goal of SIAI is never ever reached I already profit from the side products.
Instead of concentrating on the AI stuff you can take the real-world part of the sequences and work on becoming a better thinker in whichever domain happens to be yours.
Robert A. Heinlein was an Engineer and SF writer, who created many stories that hold up quite well. He put in his understanding of human interaction, and of engineering to make stories that are somewhat realistic. But no one should confuse him with someone researching the actual likelyhood of any particular future. He did not build anything that improved the world, but he wrote interesting about the possibilities and encouraged many others to per-sue technical careers. SF has often bad usage of logic, and the well known hero bias, or scientists that put together something to solve a current crisis that all their colleagues before had not managed to do. Unrealistic, but fun to read. SF writer write for a living, hard SF writers take stuff a bit more serial, but still are not actual experts on technology. Except when they are. Vinge would be such a case. Egan I have not read yet. Kurzweil seems to be one of the more present futurists, (Critiquing his ideas can take its own place.) But you will notice that the air gets pretty thin in this area, where everyone leads his own cult and spends more time on PR, than on finding good counter arguments for their current views. It would be awesome to have more people work on transhumanism/​lifeextension/​AI and what not, but that is not yet the case. There might even be good reasons for that, which LWers fail to perceive, or it could be that many scientists actually have a massive blindspot in regards to some of the topics. Regarding AI I fail to estimate how likely it is to reach it any time soon, since I really can not estimate all the complications on the way. The general possibility of human level intelligence looks plausible, because there are humans running around who have it. But even if the main goal of SIAI is never ever reached I already profit from the side products. Instead of concentrating on the AI stuff you can take the real-world part of the sequences and work on becoming a better thinker in whichever domain happens to be yours.