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

The future? Or already the past?

[SteveWoz]

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.

But of Course

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:I disagree w/ his predictions

[lgw]

When the first vector processors hit super-computing, it became plainly obvious that computational capacity could always be doubled.

Always? We can't make much progress without a breakthrough in efficiency. My gaming PC needs a 1 kW power supply (and 11 fans). Double that and I'll trip my breaker. Double that again and it's past what's safe for home wiring. Double that again and you're past what's safe for normal commercial wiring, and you really need something special purpose (beyond 30 A @ 240V). Give it a decade without an efficiency breakthrough and we're talking "space age" SciFi computers that filled buildings (with attached atomic power station).

Any there's only so much that can be done on the efficiency front. Beyond a certain point, addional parallelism mandates additional latency, because you need physical volume for cooling and therefore separation of components, so you're really talking about adding more computers to a network, and not the power of individual computers.

We already have a network of computers that exceeds the computing power of the human brain, IMO. What makes the human brain so amazing is what it can do with ~100 W of power. That kind of efficiency gain is not a given.