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Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

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Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#11

Post by nostromo »

schwabacher wrote: post #10
nostromo wrote: post #9

As I was reading this, I kept thinking, "Ray is really lucky Steve Jobs exists." A large chunk of those predictions seem to rely on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Nano having existed and being popular to be marked correct.

I don't think Steve Jobs can take credit for MP3 players existing. If people weren't using Ipods and Iphones, they would be using Diamond Rios and Blackberrys that were pretty similar.

I'm not talking about MP3 players really, I'm talking about all of the references to touch displays, wearable computers, solid-state drives, high fidelity ebooks, sales of digital media, etc. Apple didn't really invent these things, but they certainly played a big role in making them ubiquitous.

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#12

Post by frozenflame »

A lot of people are making him out to be too optimistic about his predictions. I agree to an extent, but no one seems to mention that the vast majority are remarkably accurate and only obvious in retrospect, hindsight bias can colour the many right ones as being trivial but I found many astonishingly clairvoyant.

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#15

Post by ghshephard »

I think he grades page 59, #10 too generously (You can see where an hour of my early morning has gone)

  "PREDICTION: keys for encrypted communication are 
  available to government authorities."
Kurzwell gives this a "Correct" - I would suggest that is "Essentially Correct", if not "Partially Correct" - My guess is that he thought Clipper Chip (or some other key escrow variant) was going to take off (he wrote this in the 90s) and that is clearly not the case. Key escrow never went anywhere.

It's not clear to me that the various government have the encryption keys to most encrypted communication - in particular, my understanding with BES (Kurzwell uses RIM key access as a justification of his "Correct") is that encryption is done on the Company's server, and decrypted on the end device. No government access to the keys.

Kurzwell goes on to talk about the "additional layer of virtually unbreakable encryption codes with no third party keys." in #11, but the two predictions, #10 and #11 are somewhat at odds to each other. He's trying to have his cake and eat it as well. "Almost everything is encrypted with keys that are available to the government except for that data which is encrypted with keys not available to the government". He was looking at the trends in clipper chip and made a partially incorrect prediction. He should just admit it - no shame in missing this one - he's still "Essentially correct"

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#16

Post by jhuni »

erichsu wrote: post #2

First, my compliments to any prophet who goes back to actually audit his predictions. Having said that, I think Ray is grading himself on a pretty generous curve. Many predictions of the form "X will be Y" are counted as correct if somewhere in the world at some cost there is technology available allowing X to be Y. As a neutral reader, those predictions sure sound like they are supposedly to be widespread rather tha…

If you are an expert in world jugglery you can even make Astrology seem true.

The trick is to use that fact that English words aren't clearly defined. That way in the future you can clarify what you meant :)

For example, Kurzweil said we would have a 20 petaflops super computer by 2009. Right now the fastest super computer is Tianhe-1 and it is capable of 2.5 petaflops. And to that Kurzweil responded that he considers Google to be a giant supercomputer, thanks for telling us after the fact what you meant by super-computer =/

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#17

Post by ghshephard »

Page 81 - #15, PREDICTION: There is a strong trend towards the geographic separation of work groups. People are successfully working together despite living and working in different places.

Kurzwell gives this a correct, I'd give this an "Essentially Correct" - for whatever reason, the most successful teams seem to work together geographically still. There is some movement towards separating things like QA, Manufacturing, Packaging to separate geographic regions - but for some reason, teams still tend to work better together.

The exception to this would be the myriad Open Source software projects in which the teams never come together - but, for each one of those, I can point to an Agile development team which harnesses the "No Cube / Open Workplace" environment (Facebook, Zynga, Atlassian) to accelerate their work.

I'd say "Essentially Correct" - Kurzwell should note that there continues to be value to the Geographic collocation of teams.

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#18

Post by henrikschroder » 

  > 4. Communication | Telephone communication has moving images
  > PREDICTION: ...and routinely includes high-resolution moving images.
  > ACCURACY: Correct
...and then he goes on to mention FaceTime and mobile video calls in the US in 2010, and calls it a success.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we've had this since 2003, all phones you buy now have the capability, but almost no-one is using it, because it is essentially an undesireable mode of communication. Voice-only allows the speaker to multi-task, to do something with hands and eyes, while talking to someone else. Video-conferencing has its uses, but it's not lack of technology that holds it back, it's the undesireability of it.

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#19

Post by reitzensteinm »

'With the advent of multi-core architectures, these devices are starting to have 2, 4, 8... computers each in them, so we'll exceed a dozen computers "on or around their bodies" very soon.'

Calling multi core architectures multiple computers is... interesting. I don't think there's much point in the document if he's going to give himself the most generous possible interpretation, wildly alternating between the letter and spirit of what he wrote. And I say that as someone who vaguely agrees with him.

Re: Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

#20

Post by ugh »

henrikschroder wrote: post #18

> 4. Communication | Telephone communication has moving images > PREDICTION: ...and routinely includes high-resolution moving images. > ACCURACY: Correct ...and then he goes on to mention FaceTime and mobile video calls in the US in 2010, and calls it a success. Meanwhile, in Europe, we've had this since 2003, all phones you buy now have the capability, but almost no-one is using it, because it is essentially an unde…

Saying it has been widely available in Europe sine 2003 is a bit of hyperbole. Far from every phone had the ability and the UI always sucked. You could but it was damn hard.
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