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.'"

Comments

Oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.

Re:Any universities offering courses in Futurism?

[spun]

Holy Crap! This man is the real deal! Did you see what he did there, folks? He predicted the future!

Re:Optimistic predictions

[vistapwns]

Strange defition of success and failure that passes around these parts. Mac OS with 3.5% worldwide market share after 20 years is a 'smashing success', Linux with 1% after 15 years is likewise a smashing success. Vista with 20% market share in 3 years is a utter failure, and windows mobile with a sizeable amount of the smart phone market is likewise an utter failure. Do you guys attend some special North Korean-esque reeducation camp to learn all this stuff?