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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Before knocking Kurzweil's predictions, review his predictions of the 1990's and the people who mocked them. Kurzweil does not have a perfect track record. I think his accuracy in predicting the future is way above average.

Also, I find his views of the future enlightening and useful, as he illustrates lots of "just out of reach" engineering projects for me to consider tackling.

Between the years of 1990 and 2005, Kurzweil predicted the following:

    * People will mainly use portable computers.
    * Portable computers will be lighter and easier to transport.
    * Internet access will be available almost everywhere.
    * Device cables will disappear.
    * Documents will have embedded moving images and sounds.
    * Virtual long distance learning will be commonplace.

Mock his current predictions with care. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8181399/the_predict...

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Those predictions are a lot less impressive if you read the text of them rather than a short summary written after 2009 came to pass. The prediction about portable computers for 2009 that he actually made back in 1999 (in the book The Age of Spiritual Machines) reads:

"Personal computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book."

People don't really use wearable computers now, at least not powerful enough to drive high-resolution displays. And the desktop is still with us, as are laptops in the same large form factors that were all that was available in 1990.

Looking at his other predictions for 2009, I'm not sure its fair to say that cables are disapearing since you still need them for the highest speed connections, but the statement is ambiguous enough that I'll give him that one.

"The Majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition" is totally false.

"Most routine business transactions take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." No.

"Intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning". Sure, but I'd already done this back in '99 so it wasn't a hard prediction.

"Pocket sized reading machines for the blind" AFAIK these exist.

"Translating telephones are commonly used for many language pairs" well, its in development. I imagine it'll be common by 2015.

"Widespread deflation" well, both the US and Japan have had bouts of deflation recently, that wasn't due to technology but rather central bank decisions.

"The neo-Ludite movement is growing" its less of a problem than in 1999, as far as I can tell.

If you look at all his predictions rather than cherry picking the best ones and rewriting the rest to sound better he doesn't come out so well.

He's not 'mocking' the predictions, he's providing a compelling, well thought out argument as a counter to a prediction, particularly interesting due to his neuro background.

Weren't all of those just obvious in 1990? Seriously, I don't think this is the benefit of hindsight speaking.

It's not as obvious as it sounds. If it is, then this will be an easy question to answer:

What will technology be like in 2030?

Well lets see, I have high hopes for brute force computation approaches to scientific research. More IBM Watson-like systems, which teach themselves, and more full automation of complex scientific experiments. Industrialize, automate and computerize science, in other words.

If we do that, we have a chance of increasing the rate of scientific discovery. And it does not require true God like AI, just a bunch of really clever and domain specific Watsons.

Alternatively, the future looks much like today, except with a lot more and better gadgets, but people still grow old and die.

Also we've either started massive C02 sequestering actions, like fertilizing the oceans with iron, and using tons of charcoal in our farms, or nuclear power provides a much larger % of global power, or Siberia is balmy.

And lastly the US and several other industrialized nations have gone through a terrible economic/financial crisis and reform like the UK did in the 1970s and Sweden at the begging of the 19th century.

And China is the world's super power, with India close behind, and no one cares much about the EU (or what's left of it) and the US.

Tuna is extinct in the wild.

A lot of things about today weren't obvious in 1990, but they're not on that list. These would have been amazing predictions then:

1. Searching the internet will become perhaps the most profitable and one of the most important businesses in all of technology.

2. Social networking will change the way people interact with each other but "virtual reality" will not catch on. People will end up preferring a loose representation of socialization.

3. Shortened attention span with regard to communication, rise of blogs and then tweets and text messages cutting into and even in some cases replacing traditional media.

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