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.