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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think Kurzweil is desperate for Singularity to happen sooner because frankly he just doesn't want to die.
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Contrast that to today. In Western societies (at least) just about everyone from the bottom of the barrel to the top has plenty of free time -- when they're not scarfing down cheap caloric loads taht would stagger their forebearers -- to surf 4Chan and Something Awful, and play videogames. Yep, when freed from want, it turns out most people go for entertainment.
To which I can only say two things. First -- what the fuck do you expect, we're APES. It's not like there's some special nobility gene waiting to be turned on the second we have computers. And second -- who cares? People who want to do interesting things can still do interesting things (see: universities, make magazine, the people who provide content for the unwashed masses on you tube, the open source movement etc.).
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
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.
25 years ago?
It is 1985. Life is a constant struggle for survival. There is no fast food*, there are no sweets or snacks*, and there are only four television channels. Modems only work at 300 baud and home computers only have 16 colour displays, so the proles are forced to watch their porn on VHS tapes, played by machines that don't even support stereo sound. If they can't afford "a video", they'll have to buy it on the now-obsolete form of media known as "paper". Truly primitive times. It's a wonder we managed to keep our caves warm.
* except for almost all of the brands you see today
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
I don't agree with him, I reverse engineered his thought process ;-). Saying that trends are logarithmic is like saying that all distributions are Gaussian anyways. Often true, but you can't rely on that. And everyone knows that computer power expends logarithmically anyways, hence the Moore law. Or rather, not quite, in the real world shit happens, perhaps why he was arguably a bit off on that.
Oh and that's no hyperbole, I grew up and went to high school in France, not Mississippi.
You just got troll'd!
Don't listen to the naysayers, it's only January...
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 [...])
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