"you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..."
Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation?
First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert.
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html
"I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor."
Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy?
What was hard to estimate was when it would happen.
"He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now."
But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve.
However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant
* that the technology could be implemented, or
* had been implemented in a lab, or
* was commonly available.
Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met.
This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions.
It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact.
However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was.
As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy.
I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one.
I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.