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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.'"
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
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.
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For the 50 millionth time, Bill Gates didn't make any such claim about 637K, 640K or whatever. The memory limit in MS-DOS was dictated by the CPU, the 8086 made by Intel, and chosen by IBM for the IBM PC. Sorry to be off topic but I get sick of people slandering this guy, who would never say a bad word about IBM and Intel for doing exactly what they accuse Bill Gates of, because of their support of Linux and Apple.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
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.
Intel and AMD are both doubling the width of their SIMD capabilities with AVX in the next year. This is simply a design decision, not a breakthrough. More cores is also a design decision, not a breakthrough.
When the first vector processors hit super-computing, it became plainly obvious that computational capacity could always be doubled.
Remember that capacity is not velocity, or in more geeky terms.. MIPS is not MHz.. bandwidth is not latency...
There hasnt been a breakthrough in many years now, yet computational capacity continues to grow exponentially.
"His name was James Damore."
Of course, Bob Heinlein had his characters using mobile phones in the 50's and 60's. Between Planets opened with the main character receiving a phone call while riding a horse in the back end of nowhere. Space Cadet had the main character receiving a phone call while standing in line for processing into the Patrol, while another character mentioned leaving his phone in his luggage so his mother couldn't worry at him...
Closest to the internet I can recall was Asimov's "The Last Question", which had characters connected (various input/output methods, from voice to direct neural feed) to world- (and later galaxy- and universe-) wide computer systems.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Of course, when pointing out the flaws in someone else's claims about the future, it helps to get your claims about the present correct. For example, stacked chips may not be quite as common as he suggests, but they're still fairly ubiquitous. Nearly every microSD card uses a stacked-chip design, for example, as do many full-sized SD cards. So do the CPUs used in the iPhone, the iPad, and many other phones. We're only just getting started too... there are plausible rumours AMD are considering stacked chips in the relatively near future.
Asimov... Generally he foresaw one big computer. There's even an intro he wrote for a short story compilation in which he talks about it, from the perspective of 20 years or so after writing.
He says "Basically I didn't see miniaturisation coming, so I missed out on computers becoming small or ubiquitous". So he thought of computers occupying whole cities, planets or even systems. I *think* that's the situation in the story you mention too. One huge computer.
Of course as networking and distributed computing take hold it may yet turn out that he's right, and we do end up with effectively one huge computer.