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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Ray certainly seems very certain of the exact timing of future events - I have enough trouble knowing if I should take an umbrella to work or not.

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(I can't help with the Singularity predictions, but for the weather, try Dark Sky - http://darkskyapp.com/. It's pretty amazing. Hyper-local, to-the-minute weather forecasts.)

Thanks for the suggestion :)

The free BBC Weather app is excellent if you are in the UK

He has a pretty good track record for this stuff. IIRC Some of his AI predications from the 80s were accurate to +/- 3 years.

Do you have any links to this? Would be interesting to look at.

According to Wikipedia, he "extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue..."[0] There are a number of additional predictions listed on the page below as well, including things such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosion in internet use. It also lists his predictions for the coming 50 years.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...

The chess one sounds like Moore's law and knowing something about the complexity of chess. Considering the following predictions for early 2000s (made in 1990):

- Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.

- Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words.

- Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk.

- Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority.

- "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads.

he sounds a bit like a sharp shooter from Texas. Some of them are pretty cool though, but hard to judge without more knowledge of the state of things in the AI world back then. Anyone care to comment?

Here's what someone more knowledgeable had to say about the matter: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...

"Kurzweil predicts that [in a book published in 2005] supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. "

This is a great one. When I worked for IBM in 2002-2003ish they were already working on the machines for this. It was public knowledge.

Fast forward 25 years when the dates are a bit fuzzier and someone reads his book published in 2005 and they conclude "Kurzweil predicted the future of genetics!!!". Sucker.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...

No he doesn't. He does a scattershot of predictions and then never talks about the ones that failed. Just like every other futurist.

Here is another good gem from 1999:

"Most books will be read on screens rather than paper."

If he predicted e-ink and portable readers by 2009 that might be a bit more impressive. But "screens"? Just vague enough I'm sure he calls it essentially correct.

C'mon, in 1999 everyone had computers, laptops, and palm pilots. There were audio books, e-books, and project gutenberg.

Many people reading books on a screen was bloody obvious. The _most people_ part of the prediction was still a somewhat reasonable longshot bet although it certainly wasn't true in 2009 and still isn't today.

So, does he claim this prediction came true or essentially true? Worse does he, or his blind followers claim he predicted the Kindle?

The prediction is completely false even though it was weasel worded.

How many of them, though? Just because "some" of them were accurate doesn't mean he's any more accurate than any of us would be if we took a stab at it.

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