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I know he's not really serious about his prediction, so he won't take you up on that, but for anyone who actually wants to make a bet like this, http://longbets.org/ was set up for exactly this kind of situation.

http://longbets.org/

I'd put money on there not being a collapse of human civilization due to climate change over the next (I'll even let you choose the amount of time). Would you?

Yeah, didn't think so.

I'm all for colonization of other worlds in order to hedge our bets for humanity's survival, but given results showing deleterious health effects when one is not subject to Earth gravity for a prolonged period, it would be silly to try to colonize Mars and its feebler-than-Earth gravity until genetic engineering can assure good health for the colonists. Good luck having this wrinkle ironed out in a century--and that's something I'd be willing to long bet on.

There is reason to be greatly pessimistic in regards to space exploration, because the general tendency has become for us to turn towards inner space, not outer--a phenomenon driven by information technology and the continued encroachment of the virtual into the daily lives of most. It's far cheaper (effort, energy, and resources--not merely finance), and the eternal human drive for short term rewards and maximal convenience at minimum cost pretty much guarantees eventually the physical world will be relegated in status to the minimum necessary to survive "for the time being", while most of a mind's time is spent in the virtual. Little attention will be paid by the vast majority to long-term continuation of humanity--far less than even today, when this concern is already so impoverished.

I'll note here that Asimov's greatest novel (albeit one not among his most famous works), The End of Eternity, has direct bearing upon this issue, and is more relevant now than it was at the time it came out back in the 1950s.

Maybe I was being too conservative in my timeframe when I posted this nine-ten years ago: http://longbets.org/16/

With visionaries like this working in Microsoft research, it is no wonder why Microsoft keeps missing the next big technology wave.

Would you like to place a bet on this?

http://www.longbets.org/

Put one up and post back here if you seriously think that will happen next year.

Now this is finally a bet worthy of http://www.longbets.org/

Put it here instead.

Anyone have a pool on when it will really stop working?

The way this things are going, that's something best handled here.

http://www.longbets.org/

The good news is that Kurzweil put cash money down to back his opinion. In this case, Mitch Kapor (of Lotus and OSAF fame) is betting against him.

27 years is a long time to project for technology.
For example, Ray Kurzweil bet $10,000 that computers will have passed the turing test by 2029.
Even if you think Kurzweil is an optimistic hack, 27 years is 18 iterations of Moore's law. If that continues, we'll have computers with 200,000 cores and 32 petabyte hard drives by 2035.
I'm not saying that will happen, my point is just that it's probably not prudent to make such long-term plans wrt defense technology, because it's quite likely that technological advancements will make most of your plans obsolete by the time you get that far out.

Register it here. The winnings go to a charity of your choice, and Long Bets is intended as a long term record of who was right, and why.

Have to agree, predictions without any significant content.
This is the kind of thing http://www.longbets.org/ was designed to counter.

I know Slashdot has been called one big online wank session. But I'd like to see some of the more thoughtful views -- like the one expressed above -- turned into testable or falsifiable predictions and tracked.

A topic like this -- which draws such divergent but more-or-less decently argued views -- would be a good subject for something like http://longbets.org/.

Wouldn't it be great if two campaigning politicians in a race against each other actually had to frame their false promises as actual testable predictions verifiable upon a certain date or within a specific timeframe and back them with some substantial sum from their campaign funds?

By the way, on the issue at hand here, I'm afraid I'd have to put my money on the parent.

Tom

Or if you're feeling philantropical, you can make the bet at http://www.longbets.org/

...will it pass the turing test? Ray Kurzweil would win his bet: http://www.longbets.org/1 early.

I think this is just a snake-oil press release.

over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be changed, it will become effectively dead

I like your comment in general, but that particular statement is short sighted. The problem is not the copyright system; it's the abuse of it. Like some businesses with a lot of money with no other business plan than bullying others for money using court scare tactics;

Please, put your money where your mouth is: http://www.longbets.org/

Get used to it: Japan and China will own the major technological innovations and discoveries 25 years from now.

At least on the basis of this, I'm not sweating it. Japan has a long history of funding big useless research in the name of industrial policy. A great example is their multi-billion-dollar push for the Fifth-Generation Computer.

Japan will be mining the moon for essential minerals before we ever get there again.

That's an intriguing prediction. You should register it with Long Bets.

There's plenty of other wagers similar to this one on longbets.org, except the loser pays money to a charity instead of to the winner.

A few examples:

* A $20,000 bet between Mitchell Kapor (founder of Lotus) and Ray Kurzweil on whether or not the Turing Test will be passed by 2029

* A $10,000 bet between Esther Dyson and Bill Campbell on whether or not Russia will be the world leader in software development by 2012

* A $2,000 bet on whether or not someone alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150

* A $2,000 bet between Craig Mundie (Microsoft CTO) and Eric Schmit (Google CEO) on whether or not commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless airplanes by 2030

There's plenty of other wagers similar to this one on longbets.org, except the loser pays money to a charity instead of to the winner.

A few examples:

* A $20,000 bet between Mitchell Kapor (founder of Lotus) and Ray Kurzweil on whether or not the Turing Test will be passed by 2029

* A $10,000 bet between Esther Dyson and Bill Campbell on whether or not Russia will be the world leader in software development by 2012

* A $2,000 bet on whether or not someone alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150

* A $2,000 bet between Craig Mundie (Microsoft CTO) and Eric Schmit (Google CEO) on whether or not commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless airplanes by 2030

I wager that long bets will only be a remnant in Google's cache before the blog bet finishes.

The bet is part of the Long Bets project, which is run by the Long Now foundation. The permanent URL for the bet is http://www.longbets.org/2.

The bet is part of the Long Bets project, which is run by the Long Now foundation. The permanent URL for the bet is http://www.longbets.org/2.

Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of NYT Digital, has bet $1000 that in 2007 the NYT webpage will still be beating blogs.

Regardless of what you think about this, go read his argument: he goes on for quite some time about "the weblog phenomonon", the NYT's 100+ year history, the First Amendment, "authoritative coverage", and so on. Not once does he mention Google! Um, that was kind of an important part of the bet, Martin.

Earlier, when they went registration-only, they lost a lot of potential readers, and maintained their Google juice only by adding a workaround with Google so registration-hidden pages could still be indexed. They've always tried to hide their stuff behind some curtain or other: now it's with subscriber-only pages. How much traffic will they lose, vs. how much in subscription money do they gain? (Maybe they think they can make more off subscriptions than ads.)

From NYT's POV, there is no "public". They're the friggin' New York Times, and people will flock to them. And if they don't ... well, they have to! We're the New York Times!

Wanna bet?

http://www.longbets.org/

I prediced when they first came up with this idea, that owners of large numbers of "free" mailboxes would promote this idea wrapping themselves in the flag of fighting spam - but later they will turn it around and use it to bill companies for access to those mailboxes.
How? you ask (or not)

1. Company BigBox declares "All mail destined for our free mail accts must use Yahoo! Domain Keys (TM, R, SM, Patent #suckitlosers)"

2. Their mail servers count the number of emails signed by company X. (incrementing a long int counter associated with cert X in postgresql or yoursql is much less expensive than the YDK verification process)

3. They send a bill for USD 0.01 per email to the (email) address associated with the signing cert for company X during a given month.

4a. Company X says fuck off and doesn't pay the bill, BigBox tags Company X's cert record in their db and which blocks all incoming emails signed by that cert at the mail server untill the bill is paid.
4b. Company X tries to say "we didn't send that many emails to your captive eyeballboxes, it was Bad People (TM) who did it with our cert" BigBox says "Then you should have revoked your keys, beeeyyyyoutch!"

Don't say I didn't warn you - I even tried to make a long bet about it because at the time we didn't know how long it would take before the major players would implement YDK - and I wanted Yahoo! to bet against me, so that they couldn't disingenuously act as if they had never heard/thought of that use for Yahoo! Demon Keys.

We are foolishly repeating history now in the Middle East, and children being born today will pay for it dearly. I guarantee it.

If you're sure, put your money where your mouth is at Long Bets. I'm sure you can find some people here to take the other side of the bet.

Reminds me of The Long Bets

Can you honestly tell me that the government is going to hire a panel of people to check in in-depth source changes on OSS projects? People who are familiar enough that they can catch an exploit that may only take 3-4 lines of code to perform?

Care to put your money where your mouth is?

Let's see if you or your minions can sneak a bug into the Linux kernel or a major component like you describe. It would have to be severe enough that it would plausibly disable or degrade a weapon under combat conditions, but not be caught by field testing of that same weapon. It must get released and be in circulation for six months without discovery.

Shall we make it a $100 bet? I'd be willing to go as high as $2500, and if you want to go higher, I'm sure I can find a consortium. If you want, we can use Long Bets to make sure the money goes to charity.

I wish Martin Rees loses this $1,000 bet:

Martin Rees predicts: "By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event."

Biotechnology is plainly advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands-even millions-of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual wierdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses. Even if all nations impose effective regulations on potentially dangerous technologies, the cyhance of an active enforcement seems to me as small as in the case of the drug laws.

By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent.

There is a web site called Long Bets where people can place long term bets that may not be settled until long after they are dead.

For example, the longest bet is Long Bet #7 - The universe will eventually stop expanding. I don't suppose any of us will be around to empirically determine the answer.

One candidate for a bet is/was Long Bet #26 - By the end of 2012, more than 50% of the root servers on the internet will be located outside the United States.

But noone accepted the bet.

There is a web site called Long Bets where people can place long term bets that may not be settled until long after they are dead.

For example, the longest bet is Long Bet #7 - The universe will eventually stop expanding. I don't suppose any of us will be around to empirically determine the answer.

One candidate for a bet is/was Long Bet #26 - By the end of 2012, more than 50% of the root servers on the internet will be located outside the United States.

But noone accepted the bet.

No. LEC. Local Exchange Carrier. It's in the FCC tariffs and all.

Sorry, the people I know talk about them collectively as LECs and separately as the ILEC (for incumbent) vs the CLECs. For an example of this usage, see this interesting prediction.

And yes, we pay $1700/month for a local DS3 on top of those fees to carry the circuits to us from the telco.

Wow. That's just robbery. $37.50 per month just to use the pair plus a slice of the DSLAM? Especially given that they also charge a monthly fee for the phone line and would have to maintain the wires anyhow? Ridiculous.

I think a Long Bet is the answer.

tried submitting this when I learned about it:

http://www.longbets.org/

It's a similar concept, and there are some very familiar names making wagers (Dave Winer, Eric Schmidt, Vint Cerf, even Ted Danson)

It looks a lot like Long Bets, which has been around for quite some time. It was launched as a spin-off of Danny Hillis's Long Now Foundation. Other interesting projects of theirs include the Rosetta Project and the 10,000 year clock.

There's a really interesting org called the Long Bets Foundation which takes bets that won't be resolved for many years. One for the first was Esther Dyson's for ten grand:

"By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect."

It will be interesting to see if the world looks back in nine years at this event and sees it as a turning point.

There's a really interesting org called the Long Bets Foundation which takes bets that won't be resolved for many years. One for the first was Esther Dyson's for ten grand:

"By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect."

It will be interesting to see if the world looks back in nine years at this event and sees it as a turning point.

Why not put your money where your mouth is?

You're on

It was not clear to me whether pets.com would succeed. Not any clearer than whether Amazon.com would succeed, although in retrospective it seems obvious.

It's clear to me that IP based stacks will be pervasive, and there aren't enough IP addresses for all possible uses of the technology. Perhaps its time for a Long bet?

Visit Long Bets if you want to read about and place money on more interesting wagers. And you don't have to worry about Big Brother looking over your shoulder!

The article is transparent. Everyone posting realizes this. On the other hand, a link was made to what I believe to be an incredible site, to which I am not familiar with, yet. It is worth a check, even if you haven't RTFA.

There is well-known "Longbet" page (Longbets.org), and bet number 2 is:
"In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site." .
It's a bet between Dave Winer (Userland.com) and Martin Nisenholtz (New York Times Digital).
So there wil be no winner in this bet? BTW - most people agrees with Dave Winer.
Read the full bet story

There is well-known "Longbet" page (Longbets.org), and bet number 2 is:
"In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site." .
It's a bet between Dave Winer (Userland.com) and Martin Nisenholtz (New York Times Digital).
So there wil be no winner in this bet? BTW - most people agrees with Dave Winer.
Read the full bet story

By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.

By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.

By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.