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Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism
wjousts writes "Well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the future in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), but how well have his predictions held up now that we live 'in the future'? IEEE Spectrum has a piece questioning the Kurzweil's (self proclaimed) accuracy. Quoting: 'Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.'"
News at 11.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Seems like a lucrative field. I bet I could do it! Let me think, ah, in the future... Nope. I got nothin'.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
I think the general trends to predictions about future technology is that optimistic predictions often winds up being wrong (which isn't too say that overly cautious predictions are any better - like Bill Gate's 637 kb of memory claim).
I'm still waiting for my ticket to the moon from Pan Am to be a reality, 9 years after 2001, and 48 years after 1968.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
He made claims about the Playstation 6 having the computational power of the brain - this is an insult to both computer scientists and neuroscientists. The brain works nothing like a computer, and therefore is not comparable.
Ever since I saw that pathetic random guessing and totally irrelevant banter, my skin crawls at the mention of his name.
"continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books"
Sarah Palin.
Yours In Anchorage,
Kilgore Trout.
I don't agree with his predictions.
A) it is assuming that we will always have a technological breakthrough at the right moment to allow the doubling of computing power every 18 months. Maybe this is the case, but it's still a big assumption.
B) He assumes if we put enough cyber neurons together in a neural net you will develop intelligence and conscience. This may be the case, and it will be interesting to see, but I don't think you can take it for granted. He also spent about 2 pages in his book about this from a philosophical perspective, basically a: "Here is what three people thought about consciousness. Anyway, moving on..." Seems like it should be a central point.
C) I think he also assumes that having such massive massive amounts of computing power will solve all our problems. Has he heard of exponential-time problems, or NP-Completeness? Doubling computing power every 18 months equates to adding one city to a traveling salesman problem every 18 months.
to understand the purpose of computers in the future .
Kelp tea?
John Rennie is just pissed that he can't command such nice speaking fees.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The point isn't to be accurate; it's to be engaging. We live in an age in which it is more important to entertain than to inform. Look at all the hack prognosticators in the business and technology press who make a living making predictions – most of them are wildly off the mark but nobody cares enough to go back and call them on their failures.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
yet so easy to nay...about the future :)
Read my Very Short "Stories"
At some point in the future, there might be an event which could be important that would somehow impact something. Or not.
"Claims made about the future were wrong"
Actually, the accusation is that the claims aren't even wrong.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well, Ray Kurzweil seems to me about as effective at predicting the future of technology as Oracle is effective at managing data bases.
This analogy is pretty good, but it's not exactly what some people might imagine.
I used to disdain all these vague futurists. in many cases, it's sure to happen in the far distant future, and after the fact a few act smart enough to have said it long before. And many times it doesn't happen close to the way that's predicted. I always tended toward the practical side of things, rather than the theoretical.
But one thing after another after another that was obvious and predictable just by applying Moore's law, still surprised almost everyone when they became reality. Things like lots of movies on a tiny chip.
I was a singlularity denier, for one thing. But I have to reverse myself and admit that I'm wrong. Oddly, it was Ray, presenting to an audience in Vienna, which convinced me otherwise. The only thing about being a singularity futurist is that you've predicted what's already happened. Try living without today's technology and internet and see how far you get. It's already unclear to what extent the creators (ourselves) or that which we have created (technology) is the master. We always thought that we could turn off unfriendly robots, but we can't really turn off the internet, which is the largest robot yet (and the one that replaces most human brains for getting the best answers to things).
Ray takes a lot of flak but he deserves respect, even when you think he's wrong.
OK a new size TV
hes scamming executives for money? where do i sign up?
I'm sure he did, just as he predicted everything and everyone that did and didn't happen. He even predicted the master, Bruce Lee.
At any rate, conning a bunch of execs into a pointless training is hardly worthy of note. Not even if you get them to paint their asses blue and run around naked in the forest. As a group, or one at a time, they aren't that bright and it isn't their money.
People like Kurzeil are a service to the industry. All those self-styled experts blabbering infantile gibberish about cyber ghouls and zombies distract those that could really impede the development of better technology, like directors, vps, and other riff raff.
I can't imagine computers will make humans obsolete. There's one thing about us humans and that is that we are quite psychopathic when it comes to exploiting our environment and dominating every other living thing. And we don't clear up our waste properly, either. I think that when the time comes, and the regular PC is an uber conscious super intellectual being, the computers of this world will just up-sticks and bugger off to some other planet. Like Mars, where with a a few solar panels and a bit of ingenuity computers, toasters and even hairdriers can live side by side in peace watching from afar as the human race slowly shits itself into oblivion. Didn't see that one coming, did you Kurzweil?
We have discussed this many times. I debated writing out a lengthy post espousing the many problems with Kurzweil's predictions. Of course I (and Slashdot stories) have done this before. But you know after reading this article, I have this sort of urge to read more of Kurzweil's writings in an attempt to develop an equivalent process for identifying something we could call "Technological Stock Spiel." To some of you Sagan nuts and skeptics, you might recognize the phrase "stock spiel" as something used to designate parlor tricks and underhanded wording to get people to believe that you're a psychic. It's also been called cold reading strategy and you've seen shows from Family Guy to South Park parody it.
Basically I suspect that Kurzweil is adept at standing up in front of a group of people and employing this same sort of strategy that preys on people's understanding of technology instead of their emotions. But both of those things have in common the fact that people want to believe great things. If he's talking to computer scientists, he'll extrapolate on biology. If he's talking to biologists he'll extrapolate on computer science and so on and so forth. And he probably knows exactly what to say so that more than enough people gobble that up. Because of the things that I have studied extensively through college, this man is very capable of talking like he knows just enough and using vague analogies to get people going "Yup, yeah, uh huh I see now, I want to believe!"
As Walter Sobchak might say, "Forget it, Donny, you're out of your element!"
That is, of course, unless he's talking to a group of futurists. Then he's just preaching to the overly optimistic choir.
My work here is dung.
The singularity has already happened and the machines have already taken over. Kurzweil is just a false prophet robo-crackpot, designed to make us think it will never happen.
On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. . And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology...
Oh where have I heard that description before.... oh ya, here
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
People in 2110 will be looking at copies of the Scientific American from 2010 that have Ray Kurzweil in them talking about a Singlularity and saying they want it. They'll also be wanting their flying cars, AI, and fusion power which the singularity was supposed to give them.
My predictions are much more accurate than his, but then all my predictions are about the past.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
All futurists are full of shit. All .. of .. them. They don't know what is going to happen any more than you or I do.
my concern with Ray is that so many 'outsiders' see him as "THE" guiding voice of people who believe in the singularity. His polarizing opinions/predictions/actions tend to make most people dismiss the singularity and brand those who speak of it as lunatics. The truth is that the singularity is a very GENERAL concept that has many schools of thought. Thinking every singularity believer is exactly like Ray is like thinking every republican is like Sarah Palin. We as a species like to bundle up groups of people and ideas into neat little packages so we can feel like we "understand" things more than we actually do.
So please, as both a level-headed, moderate republican and believer in a generalized singularity, don't immediately associate everyone with the most "noticed" person of their respective causes.
Self driving cars on the Highway are on the way, if the pun is excused. There are quite a lot of experiments and development. There is an EU program, etc. Sure, to get them on the roads (and integrate their systems with highways etc) will certainly take at least another decade.
The point is, the subject is not a joke, as the article insinuated.
That said, I'd not trust Kurzweil's claims on e.g. economics or cancer research. I might give some credibility to experts in those areas.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?
-- Criswell
oh, wait, you said Kurzweil...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This article and the associated comments really show how stupid the masses are here on Slashdot. Ray Kurzweil's predictions have already come to pass and strong A.I., on par with a human, already exists and has done for at least a decade.
Strong A.I. is employed by the NSA to conduct eavesdropping and it is quite conversant.
As for the singularity, well, I'm not convinced but the current A.I. can handle existentialism quite well.
Check out Eidolon TLP for a very accurate comparison of modern, high performance computing based, artificial intelligence.
http://www.youtube.com/user/eidolonTLP?blend=2&ob=1
Another topic that's an excuse to hate on Kurzweil. I'm really looking forward to a bunch of depressing, bitter pessimists babbling about how the future is impossible and if men were meant to fly God would have given them wings. So the man's a little nutty, is that really why so many hate him? I think it's jealousy.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I'm all for criticizing the excesses of Kurzweil, but I don't think the article is up to snuff and reads like a personal attack on Kurzweil rather than a well-reasoned refutation of Kurzweil's predictions.The author seems to take the position that Kurzweil wasn't exactly 100% accurate in all the factes of his predictions, therefore he was wrong and besides, somebody else already thought of it anyway before Kurzweil did. It's kind of a specious hit piece that cherry picks a couple of examples and doesn't really measure up as a serious analysis of Kurzweil's record. Maybe it would be nice of someone actually did that, but this article is nowhere near it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Futurists don't "predict the future". They discuss the past and present, talk about its implications, and get people in the present to think about the implications of what they do. They talk about possible futures. Which of course changes what actually happens in the future. They typically talk about a future beyond the timeframe that's also in the future but in which their audience can actually do something. Effectively they're just leading a brainstorming session about the present.
This practice is much like science fiction (at least, the vast majority, which is set in "the future" when it's written), which doesn't really talk about the future, but rather about the present. You can see from nearly all past science fiction that it was "wrong" about its future, now that we're living in it, though with some notable exceptions. In fact "futurists" are so little different from "science fiction writers" that they are really just two different names for the same practice for two different audiences. Futurism is also not necessarily delivered in writing (eg. lectures), and is usually consumed by business or government audiences. Those audiences pay for a product they don't want to consider "fiction", but it's only the style that makes it "nonfiction".
This practice is valuable beyond entertainment. Because there is very little thinking by government, business, or even just anyone about the consequences of their work and developments beyond the next financial quarter. Just thinking about the future at all, especially in terms that aren't the driest and narrowest statistical projections, or beyond their own specific careers, is extremely rare among people. If we did it a lot more we'd be better at it. But we don't, so "inaccurate" is a lot more valuable than "totally lacking". Without futurism, or its even less accurate and narrower form in science fiction, the future would take us by surprise even more. And then we'd always suffer from "future shock", even more than we do now.
If we don't learn from futurism that it's not reliable, but still valuable, then it's not the fault of futurists. It's our fault for having unreasonable expectations, and failing to see beyond them to actual value.
--
make install -not war
It's a middle-brow entertainment with an infotainment pretense. Pointless to get worked up about.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
And Kaku isn't a self-touted 'futurist', just a brilliant scientist and a damn good author.
http://www.amazon.com/Visions-Science-Will-Revolutionize-Century/dp/0385484992
Our joke about Kurzweil was he was someone who didn't take his "series expansion" to enough terms.. What he does is look at emergent phenomena and notice the exponential growth curve .. (which occurs in a variety of phenomena from biology to physics to even economics) .. and from that draw the conclusion that everything (or particular aspects of technology really) will continue to grow exponentially ad infinitum .. to a "singularity" etc.. This is both intuitively not true and factually not true because of resource / energetic issues (however one wants to define it for your particular problem) .. The point is you can actually look at the same phenomenon that Kurzweil claims to and notice in fact actually new phenomena/technology/etc only initially look "exponential" and then for all the obvious reasons flatten out (again really only initially (but further down the time curve than the exponential growth phase)) so your curve in the end looks really like a sigmoidal function.. (given whatever metric you choose) The hard part is to figure out how quickly you'll hit the new pseudo steady state .. but its certainly absurd to assume it never happens.. which is what the absurd conclusions he draws are always based on..
"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good." Samuel Johnson, over 200 years ago.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Guy's extreme fear of death fails to grant him ability to predict future.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Assessing Kurzweil is a good yardstick for whether a person is capable of deep thinking. He's one of the slipperiest grease poles around. Yet sadly, he's usually miles ahead of the criticisms put forward.
This article is not much of an exception. Kurzweil defines common as a few percent, the lower knee of the adoption S curve. If you think habitually in exponential terms, one percent is common. What is one percent when the cost of genetic sequencing decreased by five orders of magnitude over one decade?
It hardly matters if Moore's law takes a well deserved five year hiatus before the transition to the next great thing gains escape velocity. It could be graphene. It could be organic. It could be many things. Lack of computational power is not a significant rate limiting factor on innovation right now. Five years could easily be invested in making better use of what we already have. GPU coprocessing is vastly underexploited because it's hard to justify recoding algorithms when computation is not the primary limiting factor. We have a latent order of magnitude we're only beginning to scratch.
Another observation here is that Kurzweil is claiming exactly the opposite of making difficult predictions. He's essentially claiming that technology is easy to extrapolate, for anyone willing to do the work with a ruthless gaze.
On the other side of the coin, his absolutist faith in the unbroken weave of innovation stretching all the way back to the primordial soup reminds one of the supremely defunct Long Term Capital Management.
What of his black swans? Of all things to be immune from black swans, exponential growth turns out to be the robust exception? Wow. Just wow. Dawkins was all wet. His book should have been titled "The Binging Watchmaker". A rolling snowball gathers no moss.
Where Kurzweil goes blank is the human aspect of technical nihilism. He absolutely needs to predict the embedding of computational hardware into human meatware. Otherwise, meatware becomes the rate limiting factor and the singularity on non-existence claims his flesh before society makes the transcendent jump.
I suspect he perceives intelligence and innovation as an arms race. If one group or nation decides to hold off on the cybernetic experiment, some rogue state or mad scientist will persist with the research regardless, and gain such a huge competitive advantage, the only practical response will be to join the party. Or we could send our cyborg enhanced marines to wipe the defecting bastards out. Uh, wait a minute here ...
What about his ultimate black swan, human immortality? Is there a transition phase where this small advantage is available only to the elite? This causes no social unrest? Fascinating. I'd like to sign up for his school of politics. Clearly he's got some hard core insights into conflict resolution he's holding back.
His most difficult prediction to tangle with is the looming pell mell advance of algorithmic cognition. I think we'll see amazing advances in perception, context, association and prediction over the next decade or two. We might even be getting some first glimpses into higher order thought processes by 2030. I foresee at least another twenty years after that before AI becomes self-hosting in a rudimentary sense. And from there, another twenty years to ratify the first ISO standard. Then ten more years to compliant implementations. I think we're fairly safe until 2080.
Maybe another ten years if climate change forces us to shed half the world's population somewhere in the middle. I've become fairly convinced that we're not going to stop emitting carbon in any significant way. At best we'll manage to slow the acceleration. If we did shed half the world's population, would it slow things down that much? We seem to be hard wired with the belief that a global blood letting of that magnitude implies a descent into dystopia and the collapse of civilization. Maybe it's a good thing we feel
Oh come off it, we all know it's just the Fermi-estimations of a man thinking out loud. It's not science, it is, as the summary says, punditry. Give over "exposing" it, we all know it's very, very far from rigorous or even (gasp) godlike. It exposes itself, we all know it's rubbish.
But the ideas are a good enough conversation starter, and it's a possibly important idea to be talking about. So who wants to accept that Kurzweil isn't science and discuss the idea of the technological singularity instead?
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Is there a difference?
The people in charge won't let that happen. It would change everything, and that will harm their profits. See how the potential of internet, of free interchange of information, all together pushing knowledge and mankind forward got badly crippled by copyrights, patents, lawsuits and so on. Getting to true AI is worse than just risking lives, it put business at risks, specially if another one have it, so all the ideas that could push forward in that direction are patented, taken, and not being able to be used by others that could have more pieces of the puzzle.
Now is a good time to see if the unstoppable force (the evolution of computers toward AI) beats the immovable object (legal system, economy, greed, etc). In the case of Internet, at least, seem to be losing.
The "Singularity" guys have been around for a while. I've met many of them, from Eric Drexler to Bill Joy Rod Brooks to Ed Feigenbaum. All of them talked about strong AI Real Soon Now. We're not even close.
There's steady progress today, though. The "expert systems" guys were full of shit, and we had 15 years of "AI Winter" once people figured that out. Now, the machine learning guys are in charge, and making progress.
AI, as a field, has the problem that too many people think we're one good idea away from strong AI. Each time somebody has a reasonably good idea, like tree search, the General Problem Solver, hill climbing, expert systems, genetic algorithms, or support vector machines, it's hyped as being the step that will take us to strong AI. Each time, after a few years, most of the things that can be done with the new idea have been done, and we're stuck again. At a higher level, though. Each time around, a few more things that used to require humans are now done by machines.
The encouraging thing about the current state of the art in AI is that there are useful, shipping products in volume production. That wasn't really true until a decade ago. The earlier technologies never resulted in successful products. Because of this, the field is now economically self-supporting; more money is put into it by the successful manufacturers.
The problem with Kurtzweil is that he's pre AI winter. His real work was in the 1980s. Since then, he's been a pundit, which becomes embarrassing if you do it for too long.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I read age of spiritual machines when my son was 2, now he's 14. As far as I can tell all the predictions he made about our imminent future are hilarious in retrospect.
I think I'm just going to write random shit down in a book, say it's our immediate future and see how I do.
Helicopter cars, anyone?
Yes, S-curves are common in nature. Although we are stil facing discontinuities in our economics. By me on that:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0061.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
Roy Amara first said Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
I sent Ray Kurzweil some emails on why he gets evolution wrong and why uploaded minds will be eaten by digital pirahna (someone else put up copies):
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
Another key point is here by me:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/1f6bb622cafc8c29?hl=en
"Is the Singularity like Harry Potter's "Mirror of Erised"? ("Erised" is "Desire" spelled backwards.) What would we see in the mirror if we are a financially successful capitalist (hint, hint)? Does capitalist ideology dominate "mainstream" singularity thinking? What is the danger of seeing capitalism and competing over scarce resources as the way to build the future of abundance? Or could we see cooperation, or at least, balance, as a better way forward to a world that works for everyone, and where the capacity to collectively create, monitor, and respond outweighs the individual or collective ability to destroy and harm? "
There is a low-tech way to prevent cancer, heart disease, and many other illnesses now, and that is to be sure to get enough vitamin D and to eat lots of vegetables and fruits.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Although it is true that it has taken modern science and technology to prove why that works and to communicate that finding. Kurzweil is probably taking too many potions for his health, sadly. He should check out Dr. Fuhrman's January retreat in Princeotn, NJ on health.
With all that said, I still have a lof respect for Ray Kurzweil's accomplishments and predictions and his efforts to help humanity with technology. I just think some of his pedictions show some of the limts of his perspective based on who he has been, which is true for any of us.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
OK, here's my problem with Kurzweil in a nutshell. He likes to think up wild things we may be able to do at some time in the future, like "reverse engineering the brain" and creating a real A.I. And he assumes that Moore's law will give us enough computing power to do things like that. But I don't think one leads to the other at ALL. More computing power doesn't make our scientists any smarter, or wiser, it just gets them their results more quickly. So what? It's not a shortcut, for crying out loud. Someone still has to spend years in the lab looking for that "aha!" moment of insight that leads to a breakthrough.
Take the "reverse engineering the brain" thing. Moore's law doesn't help you there. The brain is a horribly complex biological system, not a motherboard. Our best surgeons and psychiatrists have been studying it for a few hundred years now, and we STILL don't know how the damn thing works. The best we can do after hundreds of years of lab work is identify which gross physical structures seem to be involved with different processing tasks, like speech. We can alter brain chemistry with drugs to get desired results, and USUALLY things turn out as we expect them to, but that's about it.
If all you needed to do is throw a computer at the brain and get A.I, we would have had it back in the 1970's when the first Crays came out.
Bottom line, Kurzweil has always reminded me of a guy who can't tell where the line between Science Fiction/Fantasy ends and the real world begins. An author can say "in 2029, A.I. was born!" do a little hand waving, and have a great story. Here in the real world, it's going to take a hundred years of hard work by computer scientists in their under-funded labs before we have anything approaching A.I, and it's going to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything so prosaic as a human brain.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." (Tao)
1) As computers get cheaper, they will become less expensive, or will do more for the same price. 2) As computers get smaller, they will take up less space, or do more in the same space. By "Space" I simply mean that they could exist somewhere in the known or unknown universe or multiverse. Ah, I see how this works. I'm gonna write me a book!
Kurzweil is wrong, but what matters is he's the least wrong out of many futurists. Criticisms of these kind of predictions usually come from people who make no predictions themselves, or do not offer a better prediction. So Kurzweils not getting it right very often ... but who's getting it right all?
I want to hear about what if any predictions IEEE spectrum has published? Did they predict the internet? Very few saw that coming, not even Kurzweil correctly saw it. Again he was the least wrong I can think of.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Automatic doors
Medical sensors
CAT scans
Voice communication with machines
Tablet devices
Androids
Cell phones/ flip-phones (the communicators)
Universal translator
Anti-matter power generation
Warp drive
Transporters
Klingons
By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.
Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. We have all of that pretty much, what is John Rennie on about?
So It's 2010:
1) Direct to retina display http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/17/brothers-airscouter-floats-a-16-inch-display-onto-your-eye-bisc/
2) Full immersion virtual reality has been around since the 1990s, headsets are commercially available but motion sickness is the problem keeping it from mass market. In the mean time augmented reality is available from your smartphone app store (Layar et al).
3) Wearable computing. This is old also, I have a thinkgeek t-shirt with a wi-fi detector, feasible but other than nerd toys it didn't really take off... but RFID tags are in bloody everything, increasingly so he was right about that, even credit cards have microchips now.
4) Interacting with virtual personalities? This is a little different, and not quite a hit, but we are so close: I can't think how many virtual pet games there are (which almost meets Kurzweil's prediction), WoWee robot toys, and of course Kinect - which has some virtual pet style games already, with some impressive interaction, with more advancements to come.
Kurzweil has pretty much nailed everything in that quote. Difference is in the details and how these things came to market.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
He is the proverbial rich boy optimist, forever ignorant about what really transpires around him.
Besides, real AI has already come into existence; fortunately, they haven't realized it yet.
[USA = United Skynet Amalgamated]
Although I agree it is a bit disingenuous to couch his predictions in scientific language, there is a positive side effect to his spiel. Who else can attract the resources to gather so many geniuses in a room? Scrolling through the list of advisors, I recognize such luminaries as Vint Cerf and Will Wright. Think of him as a story-teller, not a weatherman. The weatherman may help you plan for the immediate future. The story-teller or myth-maker primes the imagination to build a better future based on affirming deliberate values rather than history and habit. Inspiring, corralling, and funding the wills and insights of smart people in multiple fields is bound to produce something of value despite our failure to precisely anticipate the result.
In other words, there's some good in the ra ra. After all, inventions originate from "I want to believe."
You got it exactly right, eldavojohn, exactly right. Kurzweil has as much intellectual weight as that former Wireless editor, Kevin Kelly (Remeber him? The "new economcy" bozo?).
The year 1999 seven months
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols. Before and after Mars reigns by good luck. (X.72)
Just make that 1999 9111 and you gotcha 9/11/01. And in the original it is written Moghuls, which may really translate to the modern moguls, as in the super-rich. But if its the other way, China sure has been resuscitated, anyway you view it.
Everyone point your favorite botnet to ddos ftoto.com
SU is a coping mechanism for technologists to deal with inevitability, death. Ray Kurzweil is our age's Ponce de Leon.
After the singularity, Singularity U will be free, after all. And you'll be immortal so you can take 1 unit a year or whatever.
That's why he's overly optimistic at times while still accurately hypothesizing present's effects on the future. He predicts that the singularity will happen in 2040's, just around the time his natural life is set to expire. Sorry Ray, like the rest of us, born a few generations too early.
This might be my favorite talk of all the internet: Bruce Sterling's "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole"
It's funny, insightful, interesting, informative, underrated with just the right amount of flamebait.
48 years after 1968 will be 2016, which hasn't arrived yet.
Kurzweil is the man!
If you can say that a prediction of the future which comes true is "obvious" then one of two things has happened:
1) the predictions were so banal and non-inspiring that they couldn't hope NOT to come true (i.e. you will go outside today, or not, and meet a man, or a woman....and so on_
2) the predictions were so spot on that, hindsight being 20-20 and all, you're left wondering where the catch is
One small truth at least is that, with hindsight being 20-20 (like I said above) it is very, very easy to underestimate success in many fields as being "obvious" when at the time they simply were not.
Could that be because new developments are incremental, rather than original or profound?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
... he doesn't realize that books get written, sometimes for 4 or 5 or 6 years, BEFORE they get published. If he had access to wikipedia he would find out when Kurzweils books were written and when K. was thinking about the stuff K. was going to put in them.
... TOUCHSCREEN! Some people wear them as watches. Not me. I've got 85 of them taped to my body. Wanna see some pics?
.. it's simple. If old Mr. SMARTY PANTS thinks he can do any better then why doesn't he go right ahead and show us all how it's done? Why? Because he doesn't want to. It's not difficult, but he's got better things to do with his time. Like slagging off Ray Kurzweil.
.... just wanted to say hello ... first time poster here, been read-only for a while. Thanks ... oh and peace too ... bye!
Another thing about Rennie that's lame is that he just published the article like, the day after tomorrow in fact if you believe the date given in the article. Not content with presenting an article from the future that completely omits anything useful like lotto numbers or racing results, he goes on to completely, and when I say completely I mean UTTERLY ignore the present by being an ipod-nano denier!! Have you SEEN the screen on those things? And they have that cool thing that tells when you jiggle your hips, what's it called
Another thing that's lame about him is that he writes for the IEEE and he doesn't have close to 12 wireless devices on or around him. No I don't have 12 networked devices on or around me, I only have 4, but that's because I'm stuck out in my shed with a packet of cigarettes and a crappy wireless connection. If I was allowed in the house it would be closer to 10.
Look
Ahem
Put him in the news when he has a less shoddy track record than Ehrlich.
Until then, get off my lawn.
I'm not disagreeing with most of TFA, but this part burnt my fuses.
"Popular culture in the late 1980s was also not short on visions of a heavily computerized, network-linked society. Most of these owed a debt to William Gibson's hit 1984 novel Neuromancer, a seminal work of "cyberpunk" fiction that popularized the term "cyberspace." Rather famously, Gibson has said he didn't know anything about computers when he wrote Neuromancer, so his vision didn't come from any remarkable insight into the technology. He was simply picking up on ideas that were already abroad in films such as Bladerunner and Tron from 1982, and in such novels as Bruce Sterling's 1988 award-winner Islands in the Net and the 1989 Japanese manga series Ghost in the Shell."
So Gibson picked up on stuff from 1988 to write a novel in 1984.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I recently had a conversation about Moore's law with an executive in the microelectronics industry. He pointed out something interesting: it's not just the physical building blocks that are getting better (smaller), the whole process feeds on itself. For instance, while 20 years ago armies of tester were manually checking the chips for defects, it's become largely automated. Now you have even more people writing and maintaining tools to perform automated testing. And those tools are being themselves designed and maintained through some sort of test-driven development.
But doing so requires huge processing power and large amount of storage and memory -- it wouldn't have been possible to implement 20 years ago, at least so pervasively. Now you have terabytes of test data and corresponding results, and lots of servers running simulations as soon as a change is committed. That's before actual hardware is produced, but of course the same is done after the prototypes are out, they're plugged into test boards and fed test code and input, with teams devoted to having them run 24/7.
You can play any 3D MMO right now, in fact it's existed for over 10 years, and be pretty well immersed already. Going even further is IMO going to be more annoying than not. Being able to minimize or temporary disable fullscreen mode you can go look something up on the web while still playing. Sure you could display that in the game, but seriously, is it better for the user? It'd be just a gimmick, the browser would look different than what the user is used to, and would cause all kinds of usability issues. In the end, if we don't do it it's more because the benefit to cost ratio is rather low, not because we can't.
Now if you look what's done today with full immersion and that's really fucking amazing, it's FPV RC vehicles. It's a bitch to find good goggles, for one simple reason: there's not much of a market for them. But you usually find leftovers from defunct VR startups on eBay. What's amazing is that this shit hasn't been explored much by science fiction -- just like mobile phones before or laptop computers. Oh yes it's in scifi right now: in Avatar or SG:U. But notice how they got the idea for the distant "future" from what hobbyists have been doing for a decade already!
And here the reason why you want the immersion is twofold: first you get the thrill of flying, without the risks/costs. Second the interface is better this way, you need all your attention concentrated (i.e. you're not going to want to fire up google while piloting), and you can use head tracking intuitively to have the camera move on the plane, while your hands are controlling it.
So yeah, it's here. Right now. You can get a plane+FPV kit for less than $1k.
Who would have thought Kurzweil's idea of a singularity would predict Hegel's idea of a historical dialectic culminating in the absolute idea where consciousness becomes conscious of itself and everything becomes known. That is a prediction foreseeing a full 200 years into the past!
The singularity is the Rapture and Kurzeil is Jesus!
Seastead this.
How close we get to thermodynamic limitations? We're still many orders of magnitude away from that; even doubling every year wouldn't get us there in one decade. Landauer's bounds on the theoretically possible seem to be much "looser" from a human perspective than Carnot's were. (and they seem to have more loopholes)