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

Any universities offering courses in Futurism?

[spun]

Seems like a lucrative field. I bet I could do it! Let me think, ah, in the future... Nope. I got nothin'.

Re:I disagree w/ his predictions

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:Optimistic predictions

[CrimsonAvenger]

Observe how the "futurists" of the 60s focused on the automobile and such, while basically didn't see the mobile phone or the equivalent of the internet.

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.