

Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010) - kanzure
http://c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/predictions.pdf

======
davidhollander
Ray is systematically restating his opinions in much more vague manner than
his original publication of the Singularity is Near.

Originally:

"By the end of this decade, _computers will disappear as distinct physical
objects_ , with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our
clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality."

Now (from the PDF):

"Personal computers _are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes_
"..."the prediction does not say that all computers would be small devices
integrated in these ways, just that this would be common, which is indeed the
case"

Sorry Ray, I'm not convinced.

I believe Ray completely ignores economics in his predictions. Things such as
Moore's law appear when there is always constant, high economic demand. There
is always constant, high economic demand for faster computers due to the
intrinsic nature of how computers are used. There is NOT constant, high demand
for new consumer technologies that haven't been developed and extensively
marketed yet.

A corrollary is tablet computers. Development and research into touch
interfaces did not increase exponentially after it was developed. Rather, you
had to wait 9 years for an Apple to come along to do the hardwork of changing
consumer preference to create the economic demand for this improved human-
computer interface.

Ray usually seems to assume that an AI is in charge of the economic demand
leading to its creation before it is created. He ignores the "stickiness"
inherent in consumer demand. Perhaps there is a place for the post-service
economy techno-marxist cyber utopia he envisions, but I don't see it occurring
before capitalism has run its course _globally_ , which will still take some
time.

~~~
zerothehero
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!

------
erichsu
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 than merely existing.

~~~
alanh
Right. Examples:

> _PREDICTION: Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and
> shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as
> wristwatches, rings, earrings and other body ornaments_

> _ACCURACY: Correct_

> _PREDICTION: The majority of text is created using continuous speech
> recognition (CSR) dictation software, but keyboards are still used. CSR is
> very accurate, far more so than the human transcriptionists who were used up
> until a few years ago._

> _ACCURACY: Partially correct_

~~~
jrockway
Mostly depends on what a personal computer is:

<http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9266>

I could imagine a lillypad earring :)

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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.

~~~
bl4k
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)

------
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.

~~~
henrikschroder
Now that I've read through all of his predictions, this is part of a larger
trend among them. He calls his predictions a success when the technology
problem has been solved, and he is completely ignoring that forces that decide
if that technology becomes common or not. He is very bad at thinking about the
human factors, and optimistically calls success for things that saw a brief
life in the market, and then was pushed to the sidelines.

Take force-feedback in games. Ten years ago I could go into any videogame
store and buy a lot more different kinds of force-feedback controllers than I
can today. It was tried, and then everyone got bored.

Or his prediction that everyone will have several wearable computer devices on
them. Yes, we _can_ do that today, but noone is doing it, because the more
devices you have, the more often you have to recharge them. This is why most
people consolidate their wearables to _one_ smartphone that they charge every
night, rather than ten devices that have to be charged each on their
individual schedule.

Or voice-recognition input. Yes, the technology is there, but is is not, and
will probably never be, the main input mode for our computers, because it is
incredibly annoying in any group of people.

Or his prediction that cables are disappearing. This prediction will not fully
come true until we solve the recharging problem. I have a colleague who
recently bought an ordinary wired mouse to replace his cordless mouse, and he
said it's the best thing he bought for his computer in ten years, because it
always works and never runs out of power.

Or his prediction about animated virtual personalities. Yes, I've seen those
at a bunch of websites, but less and less these days as people realize that
they're just in the way. What people want is an efficient search function
where they can type whatever they want and get relevant results.

He also has a bunch of predictions involving virtual reality which are all
pretty off. World of Warcraft has over ten million active players, and allows
people to interact with each other in the virtual world of Azeroth, and yet a
lot of people play it in internet cafés or at LAN parties, they play it with
their friends next to them, because the physical experience is so much better
than the virtual one.

It's also pretty telling that if you look at professional video game players,
they are constantly rejecting reality-like immersion. The best first-person-
shooter players are all using the lowest graphical settings, and a distorted
perspective, the best world of warcraft players do the same, play with no
sound, and have lots of addons that expose as much of the underlying mechanics
and numbers as possible, which is completely contrary to the goal of immersive
systems.

~~~
berntb
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.

~~~
henrikschroder
I wouldn't hold my breath for virtual reality, however _augmented_ reality
came out of nowhere and is looking like it's going to be very important. I saw
that iphone app, Word Lens the other day, it's absolutely fantastic. It
transforms your iphone into a magic looking-glass, I think the possibilities
for technologies in that direction are endless. If/when we get good retina
displays, _this_ is what they're going to be used for, to change our view of
reality, to add things to it that helps us in our lives.

~~~
berntb
Check what Steve Mann, which I refenced, did re augmented reality. Really
cool, long ago. (His work with cameras and different exposures to handle
dark/light picture parts has gotten analogies in modern cameras the last few
years.)

~~~
berntb
I got an itch from writing a comment (no one will see) without adding a link
as a reference. :-)

See "Comparametric Equations, 1993" here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann#Ideas_and_inventions>

------
projectileboy
I guess if you write technology predictions like people write horoscopes, and
then interpret them years later like people interpret horoscopes, you can call
yourself a brilliant futurist.

------
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"

------
patrickk
_"Conversely, how much would a circa 1999 laptop be worth in 2009? It might
actually have some value as a museum piece, but it would be essentially
worthless as a compute"_ \- p.70

Not sure about a 1999 laptop, but there is a 2001 desktop PC in our living
room that is used daily. I'm typing this on a late 2009 netbook which is
arguably less usable than a 2001 desktop (cramped keyboard, small screen,
generally feels more sluggish). Funnily enough, both run Windows XP (at least
my netbook did originally until I upgraded the OS.) So technology doesn't
always change as fast as one might anticipate, or become obsolete quite as
fast either.

------
nostromo
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.

~~~
schwabacher
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.

~~~
nostromo
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
ghshephard
Interesting - The paper is dated "October, 2010", but on page 10, he talks
about the "$4.99 Word Lens iPhone App". Just how clairvoyant is Ray Kurzwell
anyways... :-)

~~~
listic
It looks like the paper was (and maybe still is) under constant revision,
which isn't reflected in the publishing date. For example, on page 7 he
mentions TSV 3D DDR3 memory by Samsung, which was announced on December,7 2010
([http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie...](http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsView.do?news_id=1213)
), and it says December in the paper.

Though I'm really happy to discover that Kurzweil is keeping in touch with the
latest developments in technology, I'm alarmed by the fact that he seems to be
eager to cut corners to put his agenda. This particular memory is just
announced in December, and it should be available in 2012, not now. Kurzweil
is supposed to be talking about the situation in 2010, isn't he? And, while
defending himself, he says that he means "commonly used", not "ubiquitous".
Maybe it's because English isn't native language to me, but I thought it is
more or less the same.

I'm worried by Kurzweil's ethics.

~~~
Someone
It is a gradual difference: 'Commonly used' is when you are no longer
surprised to see someone use a new technology, 'ubiquitous' (literally:
everywhere-ish) is when you would be surprised seeing someone still using an
older technology it replaced.

------
rms
Other link: <http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions/download.php>

------
_debug_
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.

~~~
dstein
The "transhumanist" movement advocates that in order to keep up with
technological progress in the future (and stay ahead of a singularity) we'll
have to augment our brains with cybernetics. And when that happens the lines
between human and machine start to blur. I'm convinced that this future, good
or bad, may be inevitable.

~~~
_debug_
Thank you, I didn't know about transhumanists/ism before this.

------
zdw
If you're looking for them, the 3 "wrongs" are on pages 38, 82, and 83.

He's obviously a "glass half full" kind of guy with most of his predictions.

------
aridiculous
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?

------
MikeCapone
For those who aren't familiar with Kurzweil's thesis and don't want to read
his books, this video of a presentation he gave at MIT is a good introduction:

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/327>

Running time: ±36 mins

~~~
ewjordan
The summary he gives at the beginning of this paper is actually pretty good,
too, if you want a really condensed version:

 _My core thesis, which I call the ―law of accelerating returns,‖ is that
fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and
exponential trajectories, belying the conventional wisdom that ―you can‘t
predict the future.‖ There are still many things — which project, company or
technical standard will prevail in the marketplace, or when peace will come to
the Middle East — that remain unpredictable, but the underlying
price/performance and capacity of information is nonetheless remarkably
predictable. Surprisingly, these trends are unperturbed by conditions such as
war or peace and prosperity or recession._

------
aneth
Ray is smart and very insightful. His predictions are informed and often
durable. I find his self promotional tone, constantly referring to "my" theory
and what "I" did, grating and difficult to take seriously. I haven't read much
of Kurzweil, but I did meet Aubrey de Gray, who I find to be a similarly toned
snake-oil hawking hyper-intellectual self-proclaimed messiah of this new
technological religion.

I do find these guys thought provoking and informative, but how they seem to
take some sort of credit for advances in technologies simply for predicting
their impacts, with self-promotional gibberish, is irritating to say the
least.

This article is similarly interesting, but it comes as an attempt to defend
his legacy rather than add to the debate. While he makes some strong points
that his critics are often ill informed, overall my respect for him has been
damaged by his willingness to bend his past words. How can I trust anything he
writes in the future?

