Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

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24 pointsjonmc1243 comments

Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(

Indeed. What did Kurzweil predict in 2000 that would happen by 2010? That our phones would be basically the same, MP3 players would achieve more market penetration, that a high end PC bought three years ago would be good enough to run any of today's high-end games or apps? (When was the last time you could say that?) That human genome research would turn out have practically no near-term usefulness? That we'd all be somewhat poorer than we were a decade ago?

For what Kurzweil actually predicted around 2000, check out his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. It's wildly wrong about some things and overly optimistic about others, but still a pretty interesting read.

2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?

Well, what's the difference between the average human lifespan in 2000 and the average human lifespan in 2010? The Internet is very different than it was (though more in form than in function), various industries have risen or fallen, and so on, and - probably what the parent post was talking about - that all fits very tidily into the normal pattern of human history. No-one can meaningfully predict what technologies will be popular in 2020, or what the geopolitical situation will be, but it seems a plausible bet that there will not be anything fundamentally different about it.

The average human lifespan in the United States has been increasing linearly by about 2 months per year since 1980. In 1990 average life expectancy was 75.5 in 2000 it was 77 and 2010 will be 78.5 http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+unite...

That's life expectancy at birth. The increase of life expectancy at birth may be due to reduced infant mortality. I'm more interested in the life expectancy of people born in the 1980s. Is that increasing?

And what's significantly different?

We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot.

The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind.

Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information.

Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information.

iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here.

And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.

Incidentally:

* Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s.

* Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.

What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.

I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s?

Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.

Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity.

There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand.

Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.

You could watch high quality streaming video from the internet in 2000, (and download and watch movies illegally), on internet connections comparable to the speed of today.

Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back.

You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices.

Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently.

Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has.

Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently.

We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly.

But people still think nothing is changing.

What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.

10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started.

10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke.

10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs.

10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space.

10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete.

10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.

For a decade of advancement, your examples are very weak. Compare 1970->1980 or 1980->1990 for the change in everyday technology!

I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available.

I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.

Tech-savy, sure. But not the rest. People didn't use all that in 2000, now they do, whether or not they are tech-savy. That counts for change.

Not decided on whether change is accelerating, but a very significant improvement in my own life is the market availability of an automatic vacuum cleaner (i.e. Roomba). Much like the automatic dishwashers and clothes washers of yore, this is a huge time-saver. God, I hate vacuuming...

Actually, I think Kurzweil is on to something. 2010 looks a lot different to me from 2000, but what's even more interesting is that I perceive the difference between 2000 and 2010 to be greater than the difference between 1990 and 2000. Same for 1980 to 1990. I really think change is accelerating, both in terms of the more quantifiable things like bandwidth and processing power, but also in more qualitative ways, like how we consume information, or how technology is integrated into our daily lives.

To an American, perhaps. Ask someone from China the same question.

I was just picking through a copy of The Singularity is Near today. Kurzweil makes several specific predictions in his "2010 scenario":

* Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth.

* We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times.

* Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas.

* Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments.

* "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance.

* We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name.

* Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist.

* Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3."

I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted.

I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE

Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies.

But I wonder what the next paradigm change will be. Some (Thomas Friedman among them) say it's going to be energy revolution: cheap, clean, available energy for everyone. I think that's a pretty good bet.

We could have had that energy revolution decades ago, but we threw it away. :) Hopefully there will be no such mistake made with solar, et al.

Are you referring to nuclear power? We didn't throw it away. Indeed, the very question of waste which can't be simply thrown away has hampered widespread nuclear plant deployment.

Nuclear is off the table until we figure out what to do with the waste.

We know what to do with the waste: burn it up in nuclear reactors. Much of what's called "waste" is really just partially-processed fuel, and the only two reasons it isn't viewed that way are, first, proliferation fear and, second, it was convenient for all the major groups involved to spread FUD about the terrible dangers of nuclear waste.

Agreed, France has an excellent nuclear power program.

Tell that to the Somalis.

The Somali pirates, who for some reason love to pillage French vessels, evolved out of fishermen, in the vacuum left by the absent government and coast guard, patrolling the shores where they fished for ships from Western (mainly European) countries dumping toxic and nuclear waste into the waters and killing the fish.

So any time I hear about how the French have their act together nuclear-wise, I have to wonder where that waste goes, and if some of it ends up off the coast of Somalia.

I'd really hate to belong to last mortal human generation.

At least your children would remember you...

Depends what happens after death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg

I dedicate to you the 4-th verse of this song.

I don't know what the world will look like in 2020, but I know what Kurzweil will be up to: still trying to turn a buck hustling bizarre 'life-extension' supplements. That is, if the 100+ pills he takes daily or the weekly transfusions don't kill him first.

To understand Kurzweil you have to understand that he is very, very, very afraid of dying. With that knowledge, everything he says and does becomes a lot more understandable.

here we go again...

Crack pot? Yes. Accurate? Probably not.

The 1990->2000 change seemed more impressive than 2000->2010 because we'd come to expect rapid change after the '90s. So nothing that has happened in the past 10 years was especially surprising in the way the Internet would be from a 1986 perspective. (When I first learned about the internet, as a 6-year-old in '89, I never thought I'd actually be able to use it until college, which seemed ridiculously far away.)

I think we're accelerating on a linear graph, but decelerating on a log graph, due to a lack of investment in science and technology compared to previous eras, and also due to the social and economic catastrophes that were seeded in the '80s and came to roost in this decade.

The 2000s was a "weak" decade, but still not a bad one, all considered. This is similar the 1930s were better than most of the 19th century, but seem awful by comparison to now (or even the '50s). Technological progress has finally reached a point where even society's "bad" decades (e.g. 2000s) are good.

2020 will have more social media experts on hacker news to down vote me.

Kurzweil is a bit optimistic on timing. His predictions will come through probably at:

2010 + (2020-2010)*PI

Not sure if I will be around :), or he for that matter!

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