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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.
And as for those "image transformers," they're around too, but not so widespread, and they're at the will of the video sender, not the receiver.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/04/logitech_quickcam_orbit_mp_1.html
OMG! Wau!
People have never really wanted a speech interface, it's been around FOREVER and has not taken off even when it's quite good.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
Right. Kurzweil thinks they're awesome, in part I believe because he sees it as an incremental stepping stone to developing machines that think. In real life, users get tired after talking for a long time. Imagine how hoarse you'd be if you had to talk to a computer all day long in order to dictate a Word document, launch apps, navigate the interface, etc.
Pointers and keyboards are far more efficient for such tasks. Are there tasks for which a voice interface would be better suited? Perhaps, but I don't think we've seen the applications developed yet that work better with voice than by manual input. Maybe voice-dialing for your cell phone? Nothing else springs to mind.
Would having a conversation with a computer that was capable of understanding conversational english be awesome? I imagine it would be. But what would we talk about? What would I do with such a computer that I couldn't do with my current PC?
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. but that's nowhere near being on the horizon yet, and I don't know that we'll ever get there, because where's the demand for the intermediary steps that would lead us there, and what would those intermediary steps even be??
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I think the problem is that developers focus on creating a pure speech interface rather than a mixed one.
Also complicating things is the fact that we already use speech to interface with the world around us, other people telephones and such are often talked to while using the computer keyboard and mouse. How is the computer to know what is a command and what is being spoken to someone else?
You either have to offset spoken commands with some token that won't come up in conversation and normal background speech or you have to give the computer context recognition which is also difficult.
I'd like to bring back a revival of latin. Make all speech control software respond to latin phrases while normal speech is carried out in everyday language. Latin would be ideal because it is dead, and has a focus on commands in its grammatical makeup.
The problem is that in deflationary periods incomes drop as well as prices, either by direct cuts in salaries or layoffs followed by new jobs that don't pay as well; otherwise everyone would be rich, by magic, which never happens. Thus my family's outstanding mortgage -- currently a fairly reasonable 120 percent or so of our annual income -- would become more and more of a burden.
You are right. Just because it doesn't look like what we thought it would look like ten years ago, doesn't mean it isn't happening. To the GP, that unbreakable encryption is available if you want it. Since the government does have access without a warrant, or have you ignored the past few years discussion of warrantless wiretaps, it's been quite common. And, you might use it without knowing it, like SSL for banking?
Devices are all capable of talking to each other, via bluetooth or other means. Contactless smart cards fit as the ID protection on a chip, so do RFID passports, even if they aren't as secure as he had hoped. Memory on portable devices has moved away from the rotating platters. Kindle and other e-books are out there, and while I still prefer the contrast of paper and the lack of DRM, they are popular. Telephones do send high res pictures and video, my 'new' cellphone is capable of both. It's only new to me, the model has been out for some time. And his prediction of dating online/ virtual sex, I think it nicely sums up all the problems of Second Life. As for people preferring to interact with female AI, he's right. Wasn't there an article here about more people choosing the female workout instructor in Wii Fit?
For his predictions of art, I've seen a lot of the things he dreamed up. People are making music with Guitar Hero 'toys', and cooking up strange new instruments with accelerometers. He didn't get it all right, but he was close.
Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication.
Wrong, we don't have ever-present worldwide network. Even finding 'hot-spots' are hard.
I beg to differ. Two weeks ago today, I stood on a beach in Australia — at Hat Head, which, for the curious, is a small and fairly unremarkable seaside town in New South Wales, about 500 km from the nearest large city — where I had no trouble using my Swedish mobile phone/SIM to
Now... You were saying something about the lack of world-wide wireless connectivity...? :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.