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Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

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Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#11

Post by abstractbill »

nzmsv wrote: post #9
ugh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity.

There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand.

Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#12

Post by RyanMcGreal »

emmett wrote: post #10
nzmsv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere…

Incidentally:

* Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s.

* Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#13

Post by MikeCapone »

nzmsv wrote: post #9
ugh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back.

You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices.

Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently.

Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has.

Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently.

We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly.

But people still think nothing is changing.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#14

Post by lssndrdn »

Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies.

But I wonder what the next paradigm change will be. Some (Thomas Friedman among them) say it's going to be energy revolution: cheap, clean, available energy for everyone. I think that's a pretty good bet.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#15

Post by randallsquared »

lssndrdn wrote: post #14

Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies. But I wonder what the next paradigm…

We could have had that energy revolution decades ago, but we threw it away. :) Hopefully there will be no such mistake made with solar, et al.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#16

Post by ryanwaggoner »

bioweek wrote: post #2

Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(

Actually, I think Kurzweil is on to something. 2010 looks a lot different to me from 2000, but what's even more interesting is that I perceive the difference between 2000 and 2010 to be greater than the difference between 1990 and 2000. Same for 1980 to 1990. I really think change is accelerating, both in terms of the more quantifiable things like bandwidth and processing power, but also in more qualitative ways, like how we consume information, or how technology is integrated into our daily lives.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#18

Post by WilliamLP »

abstractbill wrote: post #11
nzmsv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity. There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution…

You could watch high quality streaming video from the internet in 2000, (and download and watch movies illegally), on internet connections comparable to the speed of today.

Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#19

Post by michael_nielsen »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #12
emmett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere…

Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.

What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.

Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

#20

Post by jrp »

MikeCapone wrote: post #13
nzmsv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back. You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices. Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently. Cellphones went…

What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
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