Nature reviews Ray Kurzweil’s latest tome of foolishness, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They came up with the perfect illustration for the review.

Ray Kurzweil’s future is bad haircuts and silly gadgets stuck to your head.

The text is no less scathing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you know I despise everything Kurzweil publishes. I appreciate this pithy summary of Kurzweil’s bullshit.

Kurzweil repeatedly muddles computation with intelligence and consciousness. He flirts with materialism, dualism and panpsychism, contending that consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe”. Kurzweil then states that “it is the kind of information-processing complexity found in the brain that ‘awakens’ that force into the kind of subjective experience we recognize”. The words ‘complexity’ and ‘emergence’ are too often used in contexts in which ‘abracadabra’ might do as well.

That’s all muddled up with quasi-religious eschatological crap about the end of the world as we know it in the very near future. The singularity is imminent!

Kurzweil’s hyperbolic technological fetishism does not stop in ‘the cloud’. Apparently, the soul is digital and the body is mechanical. And so, the litany of fiction science, as I call it, goes on: the hype is squared as AI meets nanoengineering, in a revolution that “will enable us to redesign and rebuild — molecule by molecule — our bodies and brains and the worlds with which we interact”. He also argues that diligent people will achieve “longevity escape velocity”, living for much longer than we do now, by 2030. I can only hope that we would have reached bullshit escape velocity by then, too.

OK, you heard him. 2030. The eschaton will be here in 6 years. Maybe we’ll all live to see the prophecy go kablooiee, so we can all laugh at goofy ol’ Ray.

What? I’ve been so neglectful of the ID gang that I completely missed an announcement five years ago that they were establishing something called Intelligent Design 3.0. Seriously, you can’t rely on me for news about the Discovery Institute because I fucking don’t care anymore. They shot their wad 20 years ago, and right now they’re a limp, exhausted pseudo-movement that thinks raising a number on their label makes them innovative.

Here’s what they announced in 2019.

After the Discovery Institute staff Christmas lunch last week, Stephen Meyer sat down with me for a quick video discussion of an extensive research project that, until now, has been deliberately kept from public. It’s Intelligent Design 3.0, an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly but, instead, to use design insights to open up avenues for new scientific discoveries. It is being supported by the Center for Science & Culture, thanks to the generosity of our donors:

That’s it. That’s all they had then. They declare that they are making an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly, so that’s the non-news…but the really important news is that they have generous donors. So it was a gimmick to raise money.

In 2024, they are now claiming major advances. The first is that they made their annotated bibliography longer.

It’s a talking point for evolutionists that in the past two decades, intelligent design has stalled. Hardly! On the contrary, I’m delighted today to share with you two very impressive measures of how much ID has advanced in that time. One is the latest update of our “Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design.” Go to the link to download the full bibliography, with annotations, which is the length of a book — 186 pages in total. That’s not bad for such a young field.

It’s pretty bad when you take into account that a lot of the articles are from their in-house fake journal, BIO-Complexity. I also notice that they still have a huge number of articles by the prolific David L. Abel, head of the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.. It’s easy to pad a bibliography if you have no standards and no quality control.

Their second major accomplishment is…they’ve created an Intelligent Design 3.0 website! If you’re wondering what’s on it, they’re bragging about publishing more garbage papers. They don’t have any real revelations, but just list a lot of legitimate fields that they claim to have contributed to.

The third and current phase of ID research extends ID 2.0 to new systems and fields, showing the heuristic value of intelligent design to guide scientific research. This research includes not only testing the origin of new systems, but also using ID to answer questions and make novel contributions in burgeoning fields, such as epigenetics, synthetic biology, systems biology, genomics (e.g., investigating function for junk DNA), systematics and phylogenetics, information theory, population genetics, biological fine-tuning, molecular machines, ontogenetic information, paleontology, quantum cosmology, cosmic fine-tuning, astrobiology, local fine-tuning, and many others.

I looked deeper to see what they claim to have innovated in one topic, junk DNA, and this is it: one paragraph, plus two citations to papers by Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro, published in 2002 and 2005.

Evolutionary scientists have long-claimed that the vast majority of our DNA which does not code for proteins is useless genetic “junk.” Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, have long-predicted that much of this non-protein-coding DNA likely has important biological functions. This prediction flows naturally out of the fact that intelligent agents typically design things with function and for a purpose. Because of this ID prediction, quite a few ID proponents have been involved in research investigating function for non-protein-coding DNA—what was previously considered “junk.” Many of these scientists are part of our Junk DNA Workgroup, a collaboration of scientists who are seeking function for “junk DNA.” Many of these researchers are in sensitive positions so we do not list their names or publications.

They’re doing this research, but they can’t tell you who’s doing it! Yeah, I am filled with confidence.

I can at least praise their synergy: one goal is to pad their bibliography, and their second goal is to name a bunch of fields and buzzwords that they can use to pad their bibliography. Empty filler for the win!

They do have a long list of contributors to ID3.0, but it’s almost entirely the same old tired faces that have long been associated with the Discovery Institute. There’s a lot of rehashing of the same moribund nonsense.

I was amused to see Paul Nelson’s name listed again. One of his projects is “waiting time” and I will concede that he’s an expert on making people wait, but he’s not doing any research at all.

I woke up this morning with terrible sharp pains in my knee — I guess I’d been sleeping too hard. Naturally, an article titled Assessment of the efficacy of alkaline water in conjunction with conventional medication for the treatment of chronic gouty arthritis: A randomized controlled study caught my eye. Maybe it wasn’t about sleeping in an awkward position at all, but rather, I hadn’t been drinking sufficiently alkalized water! That would be easily fixed. I waded through all the statistics to get to the final summary diagram.

Mechanism diagram of alkaline water treatment for chronic gouty arthritis.

I am reassured that my tibia and fibula, and that unexpected third lower limb bone, have not yet begun to regress and break up into little tarsal bones. I don’t know about whether I’m full of pink and purple crystals, but who knows? Maybe my knee crystals were triggered into deaghtin citcliaell geucis.

This paper was the work of the Guangdong Provincial Hydroelectric Hospital & Paper Mill. How can you not trust it?