Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

Point.

Not even Steve Jobs can make accurate predictions about what will/won't work without usability testing. Futurists should make distinctions about capabilities and how they are implemented.

Some thing just stop in development, waiting for a break through to be better than the alternatives. Virtual reality, chording one handed keyboards and screens in eye glasses seems to be examples. I've been waiting a long time for a nice Steve Mann-system to run Emacs.

As someone said... It's hard to make predictions - especially about the future.

Exactly, tons of different technologies are POSSIBLE. But it's a matter of what's economically feasible (what consumers will pay for, etc.)

We could have had Web TV in 1995 if it was really economically feasible... but no on figured out the business model. And it looks like it still hasn't been figured out, although Google is trying again with Google TV.

That said, I think Kurzweil, while grading himself overgenerously, did a pretty good job, and no one else is making these kinds of predictions. I actually did the same thing back in 2009, since I am a Kurzweil fan. It's a little interesting how many things came true in 2010 -- he cheated by a year but it helped him a lot!

I have only a vague idea of the concept of the Singularity (and it is that artifical intelligence will one day eclipse human intelligence), but does anyone know if Dr. Kurzweil & Co. have considered the possibility that by that time, genetic engineering will almost certainly have given humans the ability to boost their children's intelligence to astronomic levels? An Einstein in every household, literally. Thus, the Singularity prediction as it stands would be one that assumes that human intelligence is stationary.

In fact, it may well be the case that the first AI more intelligent than current human intelligence is crafted only because that generation of humans are mega-intelligent compared to us and it is child's play to them to craft such wily code! :-) Thus the stationary version of the Singularity prediction will come true, but in relative terms, organic intelligence may still be ahead of machine intelligence (in ways that dumb ol me can only imagine).

But the question that bugs me personally is : will we evolve enough along the moral, ethical, spiritual, and wisdom axes to survive that long? :-(

I am most interested in the set of genes that make each person more ethical and sympathetic to the other's POV. The Golden Rule Gene.

I'm at work, so I haven't been able to read the article thoroughly (yet I still have time for HN).

Could anyone who has read it comprehensively point out if Kurzweil talks about the recent discovery that one human brain contains more switches than the entire world's computers. Maybe that was a discovery blown out of proportion, but the finding that human brain synapses have more than two states seriously impacts the trajectory of the singularity. No?

He is being very, very liberal with his own analysis.

If you read the predictions in context, you know that he predicted a future world where we are all wearing computers that we talk to. When he pulls each prediction out, he is able to justify it with a bit of a stretch.

btw he completely missed cloud computing - his predictions have users storing everything at home on large disk arrays.

(not sure how he missed it Ellison has been banging on about it for decades)