One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.
I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats.
And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.
If he was often right-but-early about things that weren't even in the hypothesis space for everyone else, that would be huge, even though his dated predictions would technically be wrong. But this example seems way less exciting. Facial recognition was not a new or impossible-seeming idea, so the remarkable thing about his prediction was the part where he said "by 2009". (And yeah, 15 years is a short time compared to 2000 years, but 'recorded history of people making predictions' is not really a serious reference class for his predictions. He's a guy in the computer age making predictions about what computers will do.)