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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.'"
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.
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
"Claims made about the future were so vague that they can't be wrong."
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Seems like a lucrative field. I bet I could do it! Let me think, ah, in the future... Nope. I got nothin'.
I predict you'll be modded 'Funny', then 'Overrated' and finally 'Informative'.
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
No they're not, and there was plenty of skepticism about such claims when O'Neill in the 70s was proclaiming that we could be doing them all in a few years, because it was clearly technologically impossible with any reasonably justifiable amount of money. There's far less skepticism today because we can see that they could be viable in a few decades.
Similarly, I haven't seen too much wrong with Kurzweil's claims, other than that he expects things to happen within the next few years, rather than the next few decades (or centuries if you're pessimistic).
I believe Clarke once said something along the lines that near-term predictions were always optimistic and far-future predictions pessimistic, because humans expect linear progress when most things are exponential.
For the 50 millionth time, Bill Gates didn't make any such claim about 637K, 640K or whatever.
I'm with you. I hate when people exaggerate and mis-attribute claims. Like GWB said, "if I said it once, I said it a hundred zillion times... I hate exaggeration."
Ironically, they will probably be saying this even if they live on the Mars colony.
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.
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make install -not war
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..