Ray Kurzweil Responds to the Issue of Accuracy of His Predictions
nextbigfuture.com
nextbigfuture.com
Though I think anyone with a sense for usability could have told you in 1999 that speech recognition, despite its eventual technological maturity, wouldn't be anywhere near the primary mode of text entry a decade later. Ultimately, I'd chalk that up to Kurzweil understanding technology somewhat better than he understands humans.
In Kurzweil's talks he often expounds on the high predictability of technological progress (price and power of computing, etc). He does not so much cover how humans will use this tech.
Im sure that iPod Nano's (or equivalent) could easily have been embedded or sewn into clothing or hats for years now. Speech-to-text is available now and I use it in Google Voice all the time. It's a matter of choice in this case, not the technology.
PS: IMO eyewear is the final external location for electronics, but it's going to need to be extreamly light, inexpensive and useful to make it there. Some sort of adaptive bifocal technology that watches your eyes and auto focuses might be the first winner.
Jewelry tends to be expensive and retain value over very long periods of time. Electronics tend to be pricey at first (but cheap relative to jewelry) but become obsolete and thrown in the trash very quickly.
We are already seeing a huge wave in the crossover between electronics and fashion accessories. The Motorola RAZR heralded the beginning of this wave - a phone that was "cool" to have. Apple is riding this wave with it's line of designer laptops, phones, and music devices.
Accessories, which includes cheap jewelry, follow the same value path as electronics: expensive and quickly depreciating. I don't know if I would have predicted it 10 years ago, but it's certainly happening now.
So a cell phone watch is a trivial non-starter. But a bluetooth watch, subservient to the phone, delivering accurate time, calendar information and message notification without having to reach into your pocket and enter your lock code, is a different thing.
Similarly, a necklace recording device would be ideal for hands-free audio/video recording to your primary device. Who wouldn't want a trip video they didn't even have to remember to record? Not to mention a necklace/earring combo that acted as a bluetooth headset.
Eyewear definitely has a lot of promise, but I'm not entirely sold on it needing to be inexpensive. People pay a lot for stylish eyewear. So I don't doubt people will pay quite a bit for eyewear with features. However, it also suggests that eyewear electronics are dead in the water until they're stylish.
The watch and jewelry really isn't that far out there. Particularly during years when chunky jewelry is in style.
I bet if I really wanted to, I could pull a shuffle out of it's case, use more expensive and denser flash memory, and shove all this in a tiny waterproof/heatproof baggie or small and thin container, swap the USB connector for mini-USB, insulate the wires, build caps for the external wiring ends, and sew the whole thing to the inside of my shirt behind my shoulderblade. It'd have exposed ports to connect mini-USB to my computer and earbuds to my ears, and if I wanted to wash it, I'd stick the port-caps in and seal it somehow. It'd take a fair few prototypes, but it could be done with today's tech.
Edit: I don't think this is commercial viable, but if one of you guys builds it and gets rich, I expect royalties :-)
Clearly the implication of such a prediction is that the technology will be at a point where it is commercially practical.
In the absence of iPods or cell phones, it's likely that sewn-in or wearable computers would be more attractive.
Indeed they do. And there's an order of magnitude separating the computational power and cost of iPods from what we can currently incorporate into reasonably priced clothing. A friend of mine does research in the area of wearable computing. We're not at the iPod-in-shirt level yet.
Further, if we don't hold predictions to what they actually said, then there's no point. We can always manufacture an interpretation in which the prediction is true.
So basically his prediction was "there's gonna be the same stuff we have now, but it's gonna be all over the place!"
But... despite over fifty years of this progression occurring in the electronics arena, the idea that what we have now is all we will ever have remains pervasive. Very few people have internalized the concept. And so he makes predictions, and they are not met with widespread apathy and people claiming they are trivial and obvious, they are met with disbelief and mockery from many people. So you can't say they are vacuously true from the vantage point of 2009. You need to have said it in 1998 when it was published, whereupon I assure you, you too would have been met with mockery and derision.
One example of where people are not thinking this way is in our discussions about the environment. The closest thing to innovation any mainstream debate discusses has to do with taking technologies that mostly work now but don't scale, and making them fail to scale marginally less, while assuming the same baseload of resource consumption will be in place. Yet technology marches ever onward, and one way it manifests is increased efficiency. A command of nanotechnology, even if it never quite reaches the dizzying heights described in the farthest-out singulatarian literature, will still have massive consequences for the efficiency of manufacturing, manufacturing of food resources, and numerous other issues as well. I find the idea of the Kyoto protocols utterly laughable, because built into the very concept is the idea that we can have meaningful discussions of what our resource consumption will look like in 50 years, an idea so absurd that it is remarkable that it passes without comment. What's the point of negotiating a binding treaty on a world that may literally be growing houses, just to take one incredibly small example?
Compared to the general rate of prediction failure he is in a league of his own.
And again, you just claimed his predictions were trivial as if I didn't mention that issue at all. I feel you may not have read my message, as you don't seem to have actually reacted to it. It's not about the triviality apparent in 2009. It's about whether the general public he was speaking to would have considered it a trivial prediction in 1998-ish. That's easy: No. I remember that time. Many technologically-aware people like me wouldn't have blinked at most of the predictions but they were not in the public's mind.
Everything seems obvious in hindsights.
From what I remember, there weren't really any commercially available 802.11 devices until 1999.
So while these things were on the horizon, I wouldn't say they were commonplace just yet.
It's so much easier to just wear a pair of bluetooth headphones. It's far cheaper and lower risk, and it fits the rapid upgrade cycle of tech much better.
It's very far indeed. You're taking a specific prediction about how we are going to use technology and turning it into a prediction that technology will get smaller and more portable.
It's a technique shared by fabulists, fortune tellers and cold readers:
"I see a brown dog called eric..." "Well, we had a dog but he was a German Shepherd..." "Yes, that's it, I knew I saw a dog!"
I get the distinct sense that the person who made those predictions just watched far too many sci-fi movies. Nearly everything he predicted for 2020 in 1999 is something that already existed in some form, and his claim is that it will be smaller/faster/ubiquitous etc. The rest are just silly UI predictions (e.g. simulated persons, holograms, video phone calls etc.)
There are many reasons as to why I am skeptical about the singularity - primarily stemming from my experience in programming. At present we do not have the engineering tools to do so - and nobody is really working hard on it. We are lacking efficient ways of generating software and most importantly the management skills to do so for extreme, extreme as extremely large software. Secondly to simulate the way the brain works we need to have a paradigm shift in how we build computers. It is also my contention that a large part of what we call human intelligence lies in language and NLP is a hard still unsolved problem.
Kurtzweil has the general thrust of where we're headed -- the details and timing are going to work out in a manner completely unforeseen, however.
Personally I think Kurtzweil is off in his timing by about five hundred years. There's just some really tough stuff out there that needs nailing down. But that's just a SWAG on my part.
As for air travel I fail to see the problem. Take off your shirt and send it through the x-ray machine together with your shoes and jacket. Problem solved.
As far as air travel security goes, very few people fly that often and it will be dealt with like we deal with laptops and mp3 players now. Just don't show up with some homebrew contraption (MIT student LED shirt reference).
Neither implies the other.
If computing power keeps growing, but we aren't getting actual new benefits out of it, then that does drastically affect the accuracy of the 'overall' prediction.
(Even if we had literally infinite computing power, I don't know whether we could build an AI quickly; the theoretical models I've heard of like AIXI exist only as theorems, and though we would be able to brute-force the space of all possible programs, how would we know which one is the AI we want? This shows you that Moore's law likely is not the restraint on the Singularity.)
No one knows including Kurzweil. Maybe it really does take x number of flops, maybe we need better software. Maybe we need quantum computers. Anyone that pretends to know is lying.