Norvig is a very very smart guy, however he wrote the textbook on a period of AI that is very far removed from the biologically inspired machine learning techniques (Hinton, Hawkins) that I would classify as cutting edge and 'most likely to succeed.' His decision to work with Hinton lately I think is a testament to his intelligence.
Even more disappointing is the fact that Kurzweil never bothers to do what any scientist, especially one trained in computer science, would immediately want to do, which is to build a computer model that instantiated his theory, and then compare the predictions of the model with real human behavior.
This is quite damning, if true, and reconciles the apparent discrepancy in this discussion between "Kurzweil, brilliant inventor" and "Kurzweil, futurist hack." Is it possible that Kurzweil, at some point, stopped being an implementer of ideas and became a pure pontificater?
If so, it looks like he's decided to go implementing again. Have you heard that he got hired at Google to do AI development work? I think it was mentioned on Hacker News at some point.
You make an excellent point and I agree with you. The natural route seems most promising. Maybe they can steal Hinton from the University of Toronto and have the whole package?
Thanks for bringing Numenta to my attention. It appears to be a very interesting company.
Kurzweil has recognized the value of Hawkins' ideas and based his latest book on them, though I and others (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...) don't think he did a great job on it.
Full Disclosure: I work at Numenta (Hawkins company) but these opinions are my own.