I thought this was an exceptional talk. It is absolutely packed with data, and presents an exciting biological perspective on the exponential nature of the growth of human technology. If you like good research then you will probably like this. The message is basically that any technology can and most likely will get eaten by something better that comes along, and with exponentially increasing probability with time. Got it. The talk then turns into a forecast of technology through 2030 or so. Fairyland, yes. But fun.
I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark. I heard his broham Kevin Kelly give what seems like the same boring-ass speech at the '95 Computer Game Developer Conference, where everyone was talking amongst themselves waiting for it to end. I think we were supposed to have AI by 2015 then. I'd be happy if I could play Starcraft by then without the frickin' computer cheating.
Anyway, the good stuff always seems twenty years away. I think that's also when we all get flying cars, which is what I'm personally excited about. However, if Terminator 2 is correct, 2029 is also when the machines make the T-1000 and we all get shivved by liquid metal robots, so kinda good news, bad news there.
But it is charming to hear someone who still uses "virtual reality" un-ironically, even more precious to hear him refer to the telephone as the first virtual reality technology. What the hell is that supposed to mean?!
"Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.
The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built into a digital camera.[1]
Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.
He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries.[3]"
Yeah, I read that too -- I was looking up when he was born. I was figuring 2029 was also going to be "before I die" to him. He certainly looks like he'll make it to 81, but you can't expect a whole lot more, even with ten cups of green tea a day, so it seems like a personal goal to him. You can do it, Ray!
By the way, the first paragraph of that bio should be credited as being identical to the one on Ray Kurzweil's own site, which is considerably less plain than Jaron Lanier's (not that it means anything, in my opinion...):
Kevin Kelly is not his broham. Kurzweil tries to distinguish himself from KK and others like him by being more scientific, where KK just seems to make observations. (I loved his book Out Of Control by the way). Kurzweil has been making predictions for a while, and he has been sticking to them, not keeping them 20 years away.
We need an alternative source of energy before we have flying cars. It'll never work with fossil fuels. Maybe if the ultra-capacitor batteries turn out to be real we can do it. I also think they'd need to fly themselves to really catch on.
"By 2010 computers will have disappeared. They will be so small they will be embedded into our clothing. We will interact with virtual personalities via signals wired into our retinas." (not an exact quote, but close)
I wish it was true, but that's not going to happen in 2 years. Maybe by 2020, but definitely not by 2010.
I'm a big fan of Kurzeil's ideas but my goodness how boring are his speaches! I've seen about 5 speaches like this all with the same graphs etc.. And whats with the constant yawning. It almost seems that he is bored repeating the same content.
Thanks for that. I'm really interested in where the fundamental limits are. Already on the machine I'm writing this on (65nm core 2 duo), the transistors are on the order of 100 atoms long, so clearly the limits of 2D transistor density are already closing in rapidly. From there, there's frequency, efficient design (i.e. actual computing power per transistor - multicore design, stream processors etc) and 3D, so there's a lot more to improve.
