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A Look Back At Kurzweil's Predictions For 2009
marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergence of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.
His prediction on civil liberties might not have been so true if 9/11 never happened.
Anonymous Coward
Kurzweil has a really good handle on where hardware will be, but not software. What I believe this means is that drives the creation of software is not how quickly it can be developed, but whether there's demand for it.
Demand and innovation are a lot trickier to predict than advances in speed and minitiaturization of electronics hardware, so what we envisioned we thought our future selves might want in 2009 isn't actually quite what it turns out we actually wanted.
Kurzweil thinks speech interface is where it's at, but the world gives us Twitter and Facebook.
Kurzweil wants to use technology to make us immortal or give rise to machines that supercede humankind and take the next evolutionary step as a technological rather than biological one. Meanwhile, people want to make money, get laid, watch stupid video clips, listen to music, and act like their opinion is the best thing there's ever been.
So... Where'll we be in the future? Watch Idiocracy.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The following will happen in the next 10 years:
1. Some Terrorist group will blow something up.
2. That people will continue to argue whether Linux is superior to Windows (and vicea versa) on an ideological basis and continue to ignore individual situations/circumstances where their opposing OS would make a better choice.
3. That people will still buy (or not buy) Mac's based on a fashion over function idea (despite the fact the actual Mac offering isn't too bad functionally).
4. That people will make a bunch of random predictions, and several of these will pan out as predicted, and the people will say "Oh Wow!!!", (and then post the original predictions to Slashdot).
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
Kurzweil may not be as far off on the human-computer speech interfaces as you may first think. It's currently focused in a narrow domain right now: automated telephone systems, which are are all pretty much voice activated these days.
...the emergency of digital objects...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What? He got like 3 right out of 40.
If you throw enough crap against a wall, some of it will stick.
Kurzweil's 60. At this point, he can't seriously believe that technology is going to keep him alive forever anymore, can he?
And of course he missed the Spanish Inquisition. Possibly he didn't expect that.
Quite a bit of that was eerie, when you consider it was written ten years ago. Most decade predictions are way off, with maybe one in ten or twenty hitting near the mark.
I think he was pretty spot on regarding the visual cortex simulation:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/2014225
Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity due to the dominance of the knowledge content of products and services. The greatest gains continue to be in the value of the stock market. Price deflation concerned economists in the early '00 years, but they quickly realized it was a good thing. The high-tech community pointed out that significant deflation had existed in the computer hardware and software industries for many years earlier without detriment.
The Dow Jones is currently a bit below where it was in '99; even before the recent crash (which may turn out to be one of these "occasional corrections", who knows) it was only up about 20 percent, which is a pretty poor 10-year investment. But heck, I'll forgive the usual techie stock market triumphalism. What I want to know is, does any sane person think that overall price deflation isn't terrible for the economy? It's crushing to anyone in any significant amount of debt (i.e. anyone who holds a mortgage).
Most of his predictions that he got right were brain-dead obvious in 1999 - we already had portable computers coming into common use, and cellphones everywhere. This trend was pretty clearly going to continue. Hell, the Gameboy was proof enough that we were about to see a generation who grew up with portable computing. "Body LANs" don't exist in any meaningful form. People at best are wearing the utility belt of gadgets, some of which might talk Bluetooth to each other.
The rest? Wireless? Please. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were just coming into fruition around that time, and obviously wireless use was going to come into play. Again, cellphones paved the way for this. Beyond that though... I still see millions of wired speakers, mice, keyboards, dvd players, you name it. I still don't see wireless as being the most common form of network access, hell any network admin worth his salt will rant about the general poor performance of Wi-Fi. Wireless printers and displays never really came about (I do find it amusing that he says "occasional keyboard" - the most obvious use of a low-bandwidth wireless interface). His vision of ubiquitous wireless access never came about - the best we have is the cellphone networks, which again, we already had 10 years ago.
Digital books, movies, music? Napster was already out by then. The entertainment industry did its best to stop this from happening and it's only been in the past year or three that it's even been practical (from a legal perspective).
Eyeglass displays have existed for a long, long time and never achieved much success.
A trillion calculations per second on a home computer, eh?
Anyway, just seems a bit underwhelming. He got so much completely wrong.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
. . . the lawyers.
This is surprising since the copyright fanatics spoke much more boldly 10 years ago than they do today.
How much of the truth of his predictions is the result of his predictions?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Maybe I've heard too many "you get three wishes" jokes... but I'd rather have an unambiguous, written syntax to control my computer, thank you very much.
Except for the most trivial of tasks, I think talking to your computer is still a long way off. When you type in a command, there is at least a double fail safe in that you have to type the right command, and you have a chance to review it before hitting enter.
English, at least (maybe this is its strong point) is very ambiguous at time. The literal and actual meaning of the spoken word is very slippery. I don't trust the idiot computers we have to do what I mean, given what I say any time soon.
And, by soon, I mean...
The article seems to be being served by a win98 machine connected to the world by IP over wet string. And the site uses frames..... shudder. So here's the whole thing:
KurzweilAI.net
Chapter Nine: 2009
by Raymond Kurzweil
Ever since I could remember, I'd wished I'd been lucky enough to be alive at a great time--when something big was going on, like a crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was.
--Ben Shahn
As we say in the computer business, "shift happens."
--Tim Romero
It is said that people overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term, and underestimate the changes that will occur in the long term. With the pace of change continuing to accelerate, we can consider even the first decade in the twenty-first century to constitute a long-term view. With that in mind, let us consider the beginning of the next century.
The Computer Itself
It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thinner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book.
People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked using "body LANs" (local area networks).1 These computers provide communication facilities similar to cellular phones, pagers, and web surfers, monitor body functions, provide automated identity (to conduct financial transactions and allow entry into secure areas), provide directions for navigation, and a variety of other services.
For the most part, these truly personal computers have no moving parts. Memory is completely electronic, and most portable computers do not have keyboards.
Rotating memories (that is, computer memories that use a rotating platten, such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDs) are on their way out, although rotating magnetic memories are still used in "server" computers where large amounts of information are stored. Most users have servers in their homes and offices where they keep large stores of digital "objects," including their software, databases, documents, music, movies, and virtual-reality environments (although these are still at an early stage). There are services to keep one's digital objects in central repositories, but most people prefer to keep their private information under their own physical control.
Cables are disappearing.2 Communication between components, such as pointing devices, microphones, displays, printers, and the occasional keyboard, uses short-distance wireless technology.
Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication. Digital objects such as books, music albums, movies, and software are rapidly distributed as data files through the wireless network, and typically do not have a physical object associated with them.
The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) dictation software, but keyboards are still used. CSR is very accurate, far more so than the human transcriptionists who were used up until a few years ago.
Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces (LUIs), which combine CSR and natural language understanding. For routine matters, such as simple business transactions and information inquiries, LUIs are quite responsive and precise. They tend to be narrowly focused, however, on specific types of tasks. LUIs are frequently combined with animated personalities. Interacting with an animated personality to conduct a purchase or make a reservation is like talking to a person using videoconfer
Style improvement and automatic editing software is widely used to improve the quality of writing."
So close, and yet so, so far...
Most all the predictions I read in this article have roughly the same problem - it still assumes technology is much more ubiquitous than it is in the real world. I'd say he was probably off by a five to ten years in many of those predictions. Let's see:
Computers: Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments... The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) dictation software.
Getting there, but we're not quite at the point of wearing computers in common objects. Keyboard and mouse are still king.
Education: Students of all ages typically have a computer of their own, which is a thin tabletlike device weighing under a pound with a very high resolution display suitable for reading... Intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning.
Closer, but education still seems largely clueless about how to effectively use computers. Intelligent teaching software is making strides, but still really can't be called "intelligent" by any stretch of the imagination.
Communication: "Telephone" communication is primarily wireless, and routinely includes high-resolution moving images... Virtually all communication is digital and encrypted, with public keys available to government authorities.
Technologists always want that video phone, and the market continually says "no thanks, voice is good enough". In fact, it's gone backwards a bit, with text messaging being rather popular.
Business and Economics: Intelligent assistants which combine continuous speech recognition, natural-language understanding, problem solving, and animated personalities routinely assist with finding information, answering questions, and conducting transactions... Most purchases of books, musical "albums," videos, games, and other forms of software do not involve any physical object.
Again, the overestimation of natural interfaces. And as of right now, a large percentage of software (especially games) is still attached to a physical disk, although digital downloads are gaining Steam... (sorry)
Politics and Society: Privacy has emerged as a primary political issue. The virtually constant use of electronic communication technologies is leaving a highly detailed trail of every person's every move.... There is a growing neo-Luddite movement...
This one's pretty close regarding privacy concerns. As far as neo-Luddite, I haven't seen any such movement emerge in large numbers. There are some anti-technologists, but it's usually a secondary effect of some other philosophical argument.
The Arts: The high quality of computer screens, and the facilities of computer-assisted visual rendering software, have made the computer screen a medium of choice for visual art.
Another one technologists always get wrong is the idea that people are eager to throw away traditional art mediums. I think Star Trek was closer on this one, about how people will always enjoy timeless "classical" entertainment right alongside their "high-tech" (holodeck) entertainment. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
Etc, etc... I'd say the predictions were generally on the right track, but perhaps just a bit too optimistic in the rate of adoption. Still, overall it was fairly insightful, if somewhat conservative. I'm not sure I could have done nearly as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"BSD is Dying."
Apparently it could not predict its need for sufficient bandwidth.
-David
Excellent post. The worst thing too is that techy Internet pundits always bring up the Idiocracy reference, as if only the Internet could walk in a clean white suit above the supposed muck of the idiot masses.
But of course, they all forget their own idiocratic backyard that includes places like 4chan, /b/, and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Or even places like Boing Boing or Youtube, which is a constant barrage of bite-sized irrelevant data for the ADHD crowd. /.'ers don't need to watch Idiocracy. We are living in an Internet Idiocracy that no one cares to improve because of the lulz. Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is THE ultimate predictor of the future. We are going to giggle ourselves to death with LOLcats, and people will argue vehemently that it's morally better than any alternative. Like Postman said, we'll beg to stay entertained.
I blame RSS. I subscribe to music industry feeds in addition to /., and I thought it was plausible that Kurtzweil(the company) would predict lower sales or something like that for 2k9.
Spoken like the truly delusion zero who thinks he's a ten.
His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.
Oh I agree. His predictions may have been far more accurate had the future unfolded differently.
I was sitting next to someone with a Kindle on a plane last week, so the digital paper thing is moving fast.
Rotational storage is not going away anytime soon (who though we'd have Terabyte drives?), but you certainly my iPhone can do a heck of a lot of computing with just Flash.
...will be eating the LOL cats...
The things he was right about were fields where the path forward was pretty certain. We had a pretty good idea then how we'd make microchips smaller and faster, a clear path forward. Only now is that path getting clouded by physical limits. Where he was wrong was in predicting steady, linear progress in areas where there isn't a clear path forward. This includes AI, interface design, economics, and general welfare (I just love his dismissal of the underclass; they're a pretty big portion of humanity, you know, and I don't think the human story can be truly told without theirs as well).
Of course my mod points had to expire yesterday...
I checked out Postman on Wikipedia (hey I'm no better than the rest of society, I'm easily satisfied with digests!) after reading your post, and I have to agree 100%. Mind you, he wasn't the first to predict the "Society of the Spectacle". Guy Debord did that in the 60s, albeit in a much more cryptic way.
But it indeed seems that we have gone from an opium of the masses (TV nicely putting us in a passive coma state) to the crack-cocaine of the masses (i.e. the internet), where we need non-stop shots of our fix of LOLcat or one-liner IM from a friend during class.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
I run Downside, where, in 2000, I called the dot-com crash before it happened and named names. Check my track record. Since then, I've occasionally pointed out the obvious before it became conventional wisdom:
The next crash looks to be housing-related. Fannie Mae is in trouble. But not because of their accounting irregularities. The problem is more fundamental. They borrow short, lend long, and paper over the resulting interest rate risk with derivatives. In a credit crunch, the counterparties will be squeezed hard. The numbers are huge. And there's no public record of who those counterparties are.
Derivatives allow the creation of securities with a low probability of loss coupled with a very high but unlikely loss. When unlikely events are uncorrelated, as with domestic fire insurance, this is a viable model. When unlikely events are correlated, as with interest rate risk, everything breaks at once. Remember "portfolio insurance"? Same problem.
Mortgage financing is so tied to public policy that predictions based on fundamentals are not possible. All we can do is to point out that huge stresses are accumulating in that sector. At some point, as interest rates increase, something will break in a big way. The result may look like the 1980s S&L debacle.
The 2004 prediction describes exactly what happened in housing. No question about that.
The 2006 predictions took longer to happen than I'd expected. The Fed cut rates sharply in 2007, accelerating the economy when it should have been hitting the brakes. This deferred the collapse of the housing bubble, but not for long. When it did pop, it was worse than it had to be.
I expected one of the car manufacturers to go bust. Instead, they all almost went bust, and only a Government bailout saved them. The fundamentals indicated something had to give. The housing bubble and interest rate cuts resulted in something of a "car bubble", deferring the inevitable a few more more years.
The hurricane prediction was kind of off the wall, but Galveston was duly flattened.
It's nice to be right, but it isn't happy-making.
Kurzweil is a fucking idiot. And let this prompt any of his defenders to list his amazing achievements.
What would you do? You'd be reprogramming your younger brothers computer to use the voice of Leslie Nielsen for his Talk Sex chatware.
Quack, quack.
That was a boring read. It feels like - mind, I don't really know anything about the author - he picked a lot of different subjects, magnified them all, and happened to be right on a few things because they followed through to their natural conclusion. It was reminiscent of flipping through college textbooks from the 80s - silly predictions mixed in with ones that happened. I'm so surprised.
Gracchus: Fear and wonder, a powerful combination.
Gaius: You really think people are going to be seduced by that?
Gracchus: I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it's the sand of the coliseum. He'll bring them death - and they will love him for it.
-gladiator
The biggest problem with Kurzweil's view of the world is that it assumes that any innovation, if technologically feasible, is going to be adopted. As a simple example, the issue of voice-to-voice translation that he raises in the article. Its just more economical and practical to do business with someone who knows English (or has easy access to someone who knows English)
Similar wishful thinking by Sci Fi doyens caused visions of space colonies and interstellar travel by the first decade of the 21st century or soon afterwards (e.g. 2001:A space odyssey) back in the 60s and 70s when the edges of the universe seemed to be be just another Project Manhattan away. We all know how that has turned out.
Yes, there are lots of cool things that technology can produce. It will produce them for a population, however, that is more concerned with surviving on a decreasing resource base than the pursuit of techno-Utopia. Just because a small population of geeks in the US can afford and enjoy playing with gizmos doesn't mean the technology is pervasive in the `world'. Yes, computational power increases with time, and that can be channeled into all kinds of innovation, which is the gist of what Kurzweil is saying. That increase in computational power has limited scalability, however, unless you are assuming that all the world is concerned about is playing PC games, downloading music and watching videos online. [Note: By world, I mean the world outside /. Yes I can prove it exists!]
I think Kurzweil is going to be increasingly disappointed in the coming decades.
"There are services to keep one's digital objects in central repositories, but most people prefer to keep their private information under their own physical control." Bet google is glad that never hapened :p
www.aleo.no
I think Kurzweil is desperate for Singularity to happen sooner because frankly he just doesn't want to die.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We're nearly there. Some Netbooks already have solid-state hard drives without any rotating platters. The limitation right now seems to be writing speed and time of life. Flash memory still deteriorates with each delete+rewrite. Getting much better though.
As for exchangable media, well, the USB key seems to have become the medium for personal data - although optical media are still used for mass-produced content like movies and music. Can't see that changing ever - DVDs and BluRay disks are much cheaper to produce than rewritable flash memory.
Boing Boing? How unfair... lots of criticism can be aimed at BB, but "like Idiocracy". Nope. Same goes for 4chan, ED etc... none of them are brainless - fact, ED has some great comedy writing.
... owner of K2Vx (from the K2000 family) music synthesizer, an immensly powerful under-rated synth using V.A.S.T.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
isn't a book a form of entertainment?
The OLPC/XO utopia was more down to the earth than Kurzweil's prediction. The idea looks a lot like their predictions. A for all children computer, non-rotational storage, networking everywhere, and cheap.
But even if in my own country are widely used (in Uruguay this year should finally be in all the schools of the country, already are in most of it), the utopia painted on the launch of it wasn't reached, and the technology involved was the one available since the start.
Another miss in Kurzweil predictions could have been patents. Is hard to build the future when you have quicksand patches everywhere. They existed before, existed when he made the predictions, and they are as strong as then now (maybe even stronger, Bilsky or not).
Regarding the Singularity, there is a point I miss there. No matter if the your computer, internet, the planet or all ant colonies in the world becomes suddently sentient. Unless they becomes sentient and close to all mighty (in the "there let be light" sense) how they will manifest themselves? Your computer or any of the world will suddently not do what is programmed in a way or another to do, and "magically" do something else. Computing is too deterministic to enable something in the air to change things. I dont think will be a shortcut to the singularity.. all the road must be built step by step.
The chapter contains a bland stew of ideas that were commonplace even a decade ago (when the chapter was written). Most of the engineering goals were major targets even back then, and he didn't exactly nail the timing on most of these. Factor out general knowledge of the tech industry, and he's no more accurate than your average tea leaf reader (even worse, if you imagine that Kurzweil has some access to industry insiders who actually know what technologies they're going to push next). It's a nice chapter as a summary of some of the things to look forward to in the near future (even now, since most of the tech ones are still not here), but nothing special in terms of prognostication.
Incidentally, how hard would it have been to mention the year in which these predictions were made. I put it at 1998, based on publication dates.
Genrally its to sunbath, swim, surf, 101 other water activities or even get off with your gf. Its generally *not* to sit around playing with a mobile phone.
But hey, each to their own!
So what's the Next Big Medium that has an intellectual price of admission?
Been there. Seen it before. Amateur radio was a nerd's kingdom in the 60s. Then came CB in the 70s, Good Buddy. Once you've paved the path, the idiots will get on it.
It fascinates me - we pay attention to a persons prognostications if we have heard of them and ascribe such prescient powers to them. Kurzweil made a lot of guesses, some of which came true, some of which didn't - there is not a single other person here who could not have the same track record if they tried.
He was way off all over the place. The slashdot summary exaggerates.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Just before making the predictions, Kurzweil did preface them with a "by the way". My copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines is at home, but to paraphrase:
I'm going to make some predictions. Some will come true, and some aren't. This is how I see them, but I'm not an all seeing oracle. In all fairness, I might be off by ten or twenty years, it's very hard to predict the near future. There are too many unseen forces. And really, it's the far future ones that are much more fun.
So he does acknowledge that predictions are just that, guesses, and that he's only aiming for modicum of accuracy. If that's a disclaimer or an excuse is up to the reader.
Slightly off topic, but if you get a chance, pick up the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace. Its a concept album based on The Age Of Spiritual Machines, and is quite good. It includes Ray reading selected sections from the book, including an abridged conversation with Molly. Plus it has "In Repair" which is on my top 50.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Ironically enough, I have a 1999 Dell GX-1 running Linux acting as my storage server in my home :-D
His fundemental contention, if you either read his books or attend his lectures, is that these trends are logarithmic. He believes most people miss these trends because they extroplate based on a small data set that makes the trends look linear instead of logarithmic. As far as your contention that all high schoolers can evaluate math expressions, I suspect that may be hyperbole. My observation is that they can't make change without a cash register showing them pictures of the coins.
Don't listen to the naysayers, it's only January...
Huh? We're talking about... I dunno... Maybe 15 or 20 minutes out of 6 or 7 hours?
For example — how long do you think was required for the following sequence of events?:
Walk along beach - See pelican land on beach about 5 metres away from me - Whip out mobile phone - tap Menu - tap Kamera - aim - click Take photo - tap Mer tap Skicka - tap Till: - taptaptaptap p-q-r-S taptaptap m-n-O (first 2 letters of gf's name) - tap Anvánda - tap Fortsátt ... *SKICKAT* - Drop mobile back in shirt pocket.
Well... Y'know... I did have other things to do at the beach besides time with a stopwatch exactly how long it took me to take a photo and share it with someone who couldn't be there, but I'm pretty sure it was 1 minute or less. No need to sit down just to do that, either.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I really didn't read the whole page, but just from the first skim through, I think the real problem isn't with his predictions, he's probably correct in that we *could* and *should* have all of those things right now.
The simple fact is that that governments and those idiots in the marketing departments worldwide are the ones making the decisions as to what we should and should not use.
He can't take into account that there will be 9/11, just as he can't take into account that Stem Cell research would be restricted by Bush (thus hindering our bioengineering by 10 years or more), or that greed is driving the market, not ideas of technological utopia that most of us dream of.
Personally I think it's time we got off our asses and got ourselves to where he says we should be, if not further, and stop screwing around with trendy new cell phones and that uber-stylish newest macbook.
The runcible rhythm of ravenous raisins rolled through the rookery rambling and raving.
Two words ... "The Mule"
In case you don't get the connection, think Foundation. If you still don't get it, think trilogy. If you STILL don't get it, forget it. (and p.s. you probably shouldn't be reading /.)
His ideas on education made me laugh, honestly. In the U.S., at least, the educational system is a monolithic behemoth so entrenched in tradition and "I learned it this way, so my kids should, too" that any change happens in only the very smallest of increments. Especially when it comes to the basic school/classroom structure, which basically didn't change at all during the entire 20th century. I mean, he predicted that the job of a teacher would fundamentally change over the course of a decade - how on earth are you going to completely retrain the entire teaching force in that space of time?
Yes, computers are becoming more and more prevalent in classrooms, but they're nowhere near "ubiquitous" and without solid, long-term training for both teachers and administrators, the computers that are there get completely underutilized. It's like Kurzweil talked to some guys in 1980 who predicted that simply placing computers in a classroom would create magical, paradigm-shifting changes... and then decided that despite 20 years of being proved wrong, they must still be right.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
They're calling it the "War on Extremism" now. So, watch out, those of you who are extremely anything... the USA is coming for you!
Extremely high? (War on Drugs)
Extremely religious? (War on Terror)
Extremely [...]? (War on [...])
A South Korean company will purchase the company I founded and bears my name out of bankruptcy and continue to run it into the ground.
"The creation of music has become available to persons who are not musicians."
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
I dont know what all new gadget will be, Kurziwell has better ideas of this, but many things will appear fantastic to myself of 2009.
His perception that the brain is a computer is just wrong. It's a pattern matching engine, and it's main ability is fast memory look ups.
This 20 year number for creation of conscience machines is far off the mark. It was pushed by Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines".
That book fails to take into account the memory bottleneck.
Here is my reasoning.
Everyone knows Moore's law, doubling every 18 Months. This is 66% Per year. But did you know memory performance in increasing only 11% per year.
In addition the capacity is also increasing, causing it to take longer and longer to scan every byte stored in a computers RAM memory then before. So even if you can hold more it's not proportionally faster to search it.
Now with the Brain, It only runs at 100 Hz, and holds 10^12 Neurons allowing 10^14 logic decisions per second. CPU's are at 3 * 10^9 so in about 18 Years we will be there in logic operations.
But how about memory? We don't even know what the brain holds, but at minimum it 1 bit per neuron 10 GBytes, If it 1 bit per dendrite that's 10,000 Bits per neuron giving 100 T Bytes. I suspect the real number is far greater because data I believe is stored in the interconnect patterns. Lets assume the best case, PC's are limited to 4 gig bytes already, we will be at 10GB in no time all, 7 years. To Reach the 100 TB That's about 20 years out. With Moore laws 66% a year increase.
Now how about memory speed? The brain can access all 10GB to 100TB 100 times per second. Giving us a memory throughput from 1 TB / Sec to 10 PetaBytes per second.
We have 833 Mhz FSB. This increase only 11% this takes about 7 years to double. So to go from 8.33 x 10^8 Byte per sec to the low number of 10^10 would take 25 Years or so and the High 10^13 would take about 100 years to reach this point.
But I think our brains hold more then a 100PetaBytes, this will take over 200 years for computers to reach that point with memory performance. So at least Humans are safe for the time being.
Computers are just really fast idiots for now.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
You can't have a war against a fucking noun, you twit. Just like the others wars "on" something, the whole premise is flawed and doomed to failure. You can take effective action against criminals and devote more resources to it, sure. Calling it a "war" on something is usually cover to expand a bureacracy somewhere and suck the federal teat for funding, which you then rely on for the rest of your miserable existence.
His predictions cover a lot of different industries and technology segments. For the areas that I understand well I think his predictions were pretty good. The only problem is that every time he says "commonplace" you have to replace it with "could be commonplace" or "commonplace in certain parts of the world and/or among certain demographics". A lot of the predictions look wrong on the surface but that is only because the technology flopped in the marketplace, or the demand only materialized in niche markets.
This is a consequence of how Kurzweil does his predictions. He measures technological progress in research labs and then projects it forward using a linear or exponential curve fit. It's quite rational and a lot of his projections are right. We have the technology to do most of the stuff he describes in sufficient volume to satisfy "commonplace" worldwide demand. But we don't do it because it's not profitable or because there are more interesting projects to which we would rather allocate our limited resources.
Portable computers and wireless was already quite widely used a decade ago, so these are no-brainer predictions based squarely on what is already happening. It's not difficult to predict that things already in wide use, and increasing, will grow to become ubiquitous.
Laptop computers existed in the 1980's already. I had a 386SX laptop in 1990, 32 bit and all. It was powerful enough to run early versions of Linux.
Programmable HP calculators available in the 1970's were in fact portable computers.
There was plenty of wireless computing going on in 1999 already. Cell phones were already ubiquitous. Other wireless devices were not, but they had some presence, and it was more or less obvious they would merge with cell phones. ``Convergence'' was already a buzzword.
By 1999, PDA's like the Palm Pilot were already very popular.
You could get CDPD access with a Sierra Wireless AirCard in the PCMCIA slot of your laptop, or a small handheld computer running Windows CE.
I was working at a wireless software company on a client-server enterprise solution for mobile, secure wireless access to the intranet and internet, coporate e-mail and other applications. This was already second-generation app. When I had joined in 1997, (at around the same time I got this Slashdot account!), I did maintenance on the first generation one whose development started in around 1994.
I won't even get into what an egocentric bastard Kurzweil is, a number of people have already done that and rightly been modded up for doing so. What Kurzweil did was make a few predictions that were dead obvious to anyone without brain damage. "In 2009 people will own more portable computers!" No shit, they've been pushing them well before now and with Apple and their "everything with our logo is hip(tm)" business model, of course people were going to own more computers. Especially when they started getting smaller and cheaper (e.g. Asus EEE). A child could have predicted it if he read a relatively recent tech magazine. "Wireless will be more prevalent!" Really now, I never would have guessed when the fucking iPhone came out that wireless would be more popular Ray. Come on.
On the topics that he tends to be more wacky and amusing about, like speech interfaces to computers, he was about 50/50. Just like you and me, just like flipping a coin, just like the fortune teller and the fucking tarot cards. There's nothing special about the man, and in 50 years time people will be laughing at his nonsense the same way we're laughing at the 50's era geeks who thought we'd all be in flying cars by now. Take everything with a grain of salt.
"We are going to giggle ourselves to death with LOLcats, and people will argue vehemently that it's morally better than any alternative."
I can think of worse ways to die.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm not sure he was so far off. Sure, personal computers don't use it, but have you gone through a phone interface recently? It's not natural language but I've used some of them that are pretty free-form.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
The story fails to mention Kurzweil's newer (2005) book which refines his predictions.
Very reasoned argument. However as we approach bigger and faster AI in the nearer term we should expect those advances to assist with the design of the next generation. Does your model allow for this jump in understanding? At least we can agree that it is "man-kind's" future to move away from a biological existence. It is a tantalising prospect to imagine that we may very near (even 100 yrs) way from such a leap.
Well, the canned response part is pretty good now. As the systems add more canned responses they will become more seamless. I can imagine at some point, that to someone unfamiliar with a particular system the voice commands if sufficiently intuitive sounding might seem like natural speech interaction when they are listening to a trained operator.
My wife's car was in the shop recently, and they gave loaned us one of the new acura TL's with voice control. It works pretty well, you can control the ac units, the navigation system, radio, etc. It has a hundred or so phrases it understands, so its more like interacting with a phone system than a real human in that regard. The phrases can be things like "how long to the destination" or "Find nearest xxxx" where xxx can be "gas station", "ATM", "hospital" etc. There is a list at http://www.acuraworld.com/forums/f72/repost-voice-commands-new-owners-56829/
The moral being that some of the commands are intuitive, I figured a bunch of them out without looking at the manual and once I had memorized a number of them my wife was pretty impressed because it seemed like I was just talking to the car.
Anyway, Telling the computer to do something it hasn't been previously programmed to do will require some form of generic AI. Whether the interaction is voice, keyboard or something else is completely unrelated, that part is still a long way off.
As a side note, I got a chuckle because I tried the "fan speed" phrase, as that link hints, the voice recognition pretty much stops working as the fan speed on the ac unit increases. If you say "fan speed 7" you then have to reach over and turn the AC fan down in order to issue another command.
see:
http://oceanpark.com/webmuseum/kurzweil/critique-1.html
> Does your model allow for this jump in understanding?
My numbers to take in to account exponential growth. It's that improvement in understanding that create the Moore's law effect of explosive growth.
I don't see any reason why or how it can speed up any faster then it already is. If anything wars and social political upheaval will slow things down.
If you've noticed the development of CPU's had slowed dramatically since 2001. We hit 3.8 Ghz and just stopped cold. the 4 Ghz Pentiums never came even though overclockers reached 6 Ghz using the 3.4 Ghz CPU's almost 6 years ago!
Now they have changed direction to parallel cores, but we really haven't see the kind of Moore's law doubling we would have expected to see.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Good point. One of the reasons that legalese developed as it did is supposedly the "confusion of tongues" brought on by the Norman Conquest. The early English language had many overlapping, near-synonymous terms, so for completeness the early English legal documents contained phrases like "give, devise and bequeath." But the Romans had a well-developed legal system much earlier, and Latin is known for its excruciating precision.
As for legalese being like programming, there are standard clauses ("boilerplate") and entire form documents that even professional lawyers use. This recycling isn't just laziness on their part; it's the equivalent of using unit-tested code. If Clause X has held up in court for the last hundred years, why change it and risk breaking something, despite the fact that it looks overly complicated? In fact, if you do use nonstandard language and you're a professional lawyer, a court might well assume that you meant the wording to have a different effect than the standard version.
I've been told by a lawyer, repeatedly, in nearly these words, that "creating ambiguity is our job." That's only on the offensive side though; it's when writing a contract or something that ancient, crufty code is useful.
About natural-language programming: Some game-creation kits like the "RPG Maker" series do this graphically rather than in words, and really, high-level programming languages and even graphical OSes do this. It's just not an obvious shift. Same deal with AI: the technology is advancing, but because much of the improvement is in subtle, unobtrusive things, it's not astonishing.
Revive the Constitution.
Unless they're using the replicator to solve the problem of how to be culturally sensitive to the nutritional needs of cannibals without actually having to kill anybody.
Wow, what a can of worms that could be: would you try human flesh if it were replicated?
Odds are some people would come to prefer it as their meat of choice. Quite a societal rift in the making there.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Its only like day 8 of 2009...cant we look at the end of the year?