Very enlightening post!
Kursweil is a Noah Chomsky. Very good, as you said, at the fundamentals (although I find Chomsky's "revolutionary thesis" that humans have an innate capacity for language to be fairly obvious). But when they overreach the basic, they discredit themselves.
I have not read his latest books, but they all seem to be clones of his early 90s and 80s material, the Age of the Spiritual Machines being one example. I say this based on what he states in his interviews.
But when they overreach the basic, they discredit themselves.
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Such as when they get into politics and the Middle East. :)
Chomsky is very respected as a linguist. I believe he is one of the most cited scientists EVER. Besides that german mathematician, Arros? or Orros? Eros? I believe they did networking experiments on his papers with who cited them.
Steve Pinker's 'the language instict' is a great read which is easy for the lay person to understand. It is largely a continuation of Chomsky, although i seem to recall Pinker critiquing him on some things. Most interesting is some of the research on Creol - it never became a language until the children spoke it, most probably becasue of the 'learning primed' structure of their brains. A similar phenomena took place with sign language in an isolated deaf school in south america.
Also of interest was the fact that 'hood speak', African American Ebonics type slang is actually more gramatically correct then regular english (if viewed from a certain more fundemental linguistic perspective).
Pinker says the most ungrammatical speech in the world is found at academic conferences!