Kurzweil: Human-Level Machine Translation By 2029

An anonymous reader writes "In a video interview with the Huffington Post, noted futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will reach human levels of translation quality by the year 2029. However, he was quick to highlight that even major technological advances in translation do not replace the need for language learning. 'Even the best translators can't fully translate literature,' he pointed out. 'Some things just can't be expressed in another language.'"

Comments

The vodka is good...

[markian]

...but the meat is rotten.

Re:The vodka is good...

[SnarfQuest]

but does it understand the binary language of moisture vaporators?

Hello computer

[Joe_Dragon]

Hello computer

Re:Hello computer

[Flyerman]

*hands Joe a mouse*

Re:Hello computer

[CharlyFoxtrot]

How quaint !

Re:Hello computer

[Luckyo]

Not mouse, MOOSE!

Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[Sonny Yatsen]

You know, I'm a big sucker for futurism as anybody, but Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of predictions about future tech every couple of years, most of which never pan out anywhere near what he predicted. And each time Kurzweil makes a prediction, many of which are just way too optimistic or just play goofy in retrospect, the tech-minded people like slashdot lap it up.

Can't tech futurists find a better spokesman than Ray Kurzweil?

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[jdpars]

Aren't we already supposed to have a working computer model of the human brain?

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[maxwell demon]

Can't tech futurists find a better spokesman than Ray Kurzweil?

I predict that in 2029 computers will surpass Ray Kurzweil in making overly optimistic predictions. :-)

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[rolfwind]

Yeah, but for years, machine translation was stuck on alta vista's dreary babelfish... which was basically a one to one dictionary translation (often without using the right definition) for hilariously bad translations.

A couple of years ago, Google translate gave a big bump to the whole concept using UN documents (which are usually in 5+ languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but translations often went from unreadable babble babel to something that often ranged from a decent translation to something you can figure out if you put some thought into it.

I have done a lot of work with translators and even they get things wrong, so I think Kurzweil is actually off in a way. IMO, by the end of this decade, machine translation will often be good enough (really, google translate needs to start looking for more context cues and I can't think that will be 19 years away) but there will never be perfection because language itself isn't perfect. Look at humans communicating sometime, it's not a strict protocol, can misunderstandings happen all the time between people. But when a machine gets it wrong, people will point to it as bad, instead of the nature of language itself.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[RazorSharp]

That's almost exactly what I was going to post. Kurzweil will say anything to get his name in the news. While I'm sure he's a most interesting conversationalist, his predictions usually make me yawn. They're either too obvious or he anticipates they'll take place so far in the future that it amounts to nothing more than a guess. I assume he puts a lot of thought and research into his predictions, but his success rate seems to be no better than that of sci-fi authors.

Take Fahrenheit 451, replace literal book burning with figurative book burning, and what do you have? Society today.

To me, it seems like Kurzweil's always trying to motivate the scientific community to make him immortal. He was on Real Time with Bill Maher the other day and it was hilarious how excited Kurzweil was over the prospect of immortality whereas Bill found the idea humorous. It's like futurism is Kurzweil's religion: he sees it as the path to eternal life as long as he can rally the scientific community behind his ideas before he dies. So in a way, he's trying to create self-fulfilling prophecies rather than truly predict what will happen.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[PopeRatzo]

I predict that in 2029 computers will surpass Ray Kurzweil in making overly optimistic predictions. :-)

I think it's almost time to start adding Ray Kurzweil to my annual Dead Pool list.

It must be so frustrating to be so close to immortality that you can taste it but to know you'll never achieve it.

Sorry Ray, but old is old. You could have saved yourself a ton of money and effort and just spent a little time practicing Tai Chi and you'd probably have lived longer than you will.

As arrogant as Kurzweil strikes me, I've got to admit that there's something a little endearing and very sad about a little man shaking his fist at the universe saying "I'm going to beat your" yet knowing that he won't beat the system.

Personally, I decided that by retiring at 50 and practicing the aforementioned Chinese martial art although I may not live longer, I'll enjoy more of the time I have. Like the guy plummeting from the top of the proverbial skyscraper: "so far, so good". Plus, I could kick Ray Kurzweil's ass if he ever were to try to take my kidneys for transplant.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[blahplusplus]

Kurzweil is an eccentric charlatan who is making money off the gullible nerds who can't see through is bs. If anything he is a good manipulator.

People believe what they want to believe because it takes too much energy, talent and hard work to build sufficient knowledge to see through the bullshit. Most people who believe in that futurism have no background in any major scientific discipline related to his predictions what-so-ever. Big companies like Intel thought in the future we would have 10 Ghz processors unfortunately it turned out leakage and heat became a real issue and we get multi-core CPU's, more ghz may come back eventually but it will take new discoveries/processes that will likely take decades to complete. Sometimes technology gets stuck for a long time until solutions are found or something entirely different altogether emerges.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[RazorSharp]

That's a good point. The biggest problem with predicting future technologies is predicting the bumps in the road along the way. The Mesopotamians progressed technologically quite quickly, especially for their time. But Europeans during the medieval period progressed quite slow, especially for the time. Not to mention that the bumps in the road won't always be technological. Look at the political opposition that recently occurred with stem cells. Or to go with a more well known, historic example, the conflict between geocentric and heliocentric ideas. Then there's economics to worry about. Progress costs money.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[TaoPhoenix]

It depends how much time we waste with phantom terrorists.

We wasted an entire DECADE on a false crusade with a disastrously mismanaged run against Osama. "Let's go raid Afghanistan! Where has he been for four years? Pakistan!"

Notice how the media posted five stories then shut up?

X trillion dollars later we're whining about budget crises.

If we had spent that time and money on tech, we'd BE in Kurzweils's land.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[santiago]

A couple of years ago, Google translate gave a big bump to the whole concept using UN documents (which are usually in 5+ languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but translations often went from unreadable babble babel to something that often ranged from a decent translation to something you can figure out if you put some thought into it.

Agreed. For me, the turning point was about two years ago when I was reading a report of a convention in Poland. It took me about halfway down the page to realize that it was actually a link to an automatically-Google-translated version of an original in Polish, as opposed to something written in English by a non-native speaker of English who occasionally used some slightly odd phrasing. It's definitely not perfect, but it's gotten really, really good.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[geekoid]

Ironically, those wars have put a lot of money into translation applications.

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[The_Wilschon]

The technological singularity will occur in 2015, but we won't have human-level machine translation for another 14 years....

Who pays Kurzweil for these "predictions"?

[kmdrtako]

I can pull stuff out of my ass too, and I'd like to get paid for it.

Culture notes

[tepples]

Then how about this: Some things can't be expressed in another language without having culture notes as long as the original work itself.

Re:I predict...

[John Hasler]

> We'll be doing full translations a lot sooner [than 2029].

Then we'll have it by 2029, won't we? Which is what he said.

Ray Kurzweil is full of shit

[LS]

This guy has been wrong on his previous predictions as everyone already has been emphasizing, but what the fuck is the deal with such a specific year for his prediction? Why not round up to indicate it's a rough measure? 2029, really??

Re:Ray Kurzweil is full of shit

[count0]

Just like the Rapture dude, having a specific date makes it more credible. Kurzweil is nothing if not a master manipulator of credibility...

And the machine goes ...

[ackthpt]

"wtf?!? stuf! lol cul8r"

"What did my son say?"

"Sir, he inquires if things are quite as they seem. He wishes to seek tranquility, though is in good humour and will be pleased to visit again with you anon."

Here's how to translate when

[NotSoHeavyD3]

somebody says something is X years in the future. The translation of "10 years in the future" is "I don't know. If they say "20 years in the future" that means "I really don't know" and if they say "50 years in the future" that means "Go ask my dog, he's more likely to give a correct answer than me."

Re:More than machine translation...

[Abreu]

...we need reliable voice recognition and automatic transcription. Google is also working on it, but

Smartphones need a better input device than a tiny QWERTY keyboard

Showing his age

[NicknamesAreStupid]

He has predicted a lot of things but seemed far too optimistic about the time lines. This one seems more reasonable. The real prediction is whether any humans will still be reading enough to care.

I dug through all the replies

[wurp]

I dug through this thread looking for the surely inevitable reply to ask you for actual evidence to back your claim (that Kurzweil's predictions are often wrong), so I could mod it up.

I can't find one, so I sacrifice my option to mod this thread to call you out. Can you back up your claim?

I certainly don't think Kurzweil has been perfect in his prediction, but I think he does quite a good job. Here is my evidence: http://singularityhub.com/2010/01/19/kurzweil-defends-predictions-for-2009-says-he-is-102-for-108/

The predictions criticized in that article are definitely not entirely accurate, but they're also pretty damn good for having been made in 1998. We are close to where Kurzweil says we should be.

Please defend with counterexamples :-)

Re:I dug through all the replies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing other than the usual Kurzweil white-knighting. Going down the list:

1: The author defends the "computers in jewelry and clothing" prediction by pointing to smart phones, health monitors, and hearing aids. The latter two are not reasonably computers (and they existed in only marginally less advanced forms in 1998 already). Smart phones seem like a good defense here, but there is a fundamental problem. We can either say that smart phones are not clothing/jewelry (and therefore ineligible as defense of the prediction), or we can accept that they are -- but then why do the PDAs of 1998 not similarly qualify? The author is unable to produce a single example defending this that was not in some sense extant in 1998. Either the prediction has not been defended (because phones/PDAs are not clothing/jewelry), or it has been defended but is meaningless (because PDAs already existed in 1998 when the prediction was made).
2: The author doesn't even attempt to defend the actual ridiculous part of the claim -- that speech-to-text would account for the majority of text created.
3: The technology to project an image onto the eyes existed in 1998. Kurzweil once again managed the incredible feat of predicting the existence of something which already existed.
4: I don't know enough about chip fabrication to confirm or deny the author's argument. I'll accept it as probably true and say that this is one he got right.
5: Kurzweil predicted telephones capable of translation, and the author supports it by pointing to translation apps for smart phones. To anyone in 1998, the prediction meant a phone that could translate speech to another language -- that was the context in which phones were understood to function. They still do not do this (unless there are some new apps I'm unaware of). You could argue that Kurzweil is technically correct here, but I would say that (a) he is correct not through any foresight or wisdom, but because a wildly different application than what Kurzweil imagined came about and (b) that what we have is only an incremental update on the technologies of 1998 (eg electronic dictionaries) rather than the transformative capabilities Kurzweil predicted.
6: Kurzweil predicted drones would dominate combat, they don't. Author conveniently ignores this.
7: No need for me to comment, since even the author can't muster a defense for this embarrassment.

In short, what we see here is nothing different than what we normally see from Kurzweil-defenders (and Dead Sea Scrolls-defenders, and Psychic Hotline-defenders, &c). Six of the seven predictions are only accurate if you reinterpret the predictions to match reality (or worse, reinterpret reality to match the predictions), which frequently involves either neutering the interesting aspect of the prediction or making the prediction so vague as to be meaningless.

Kurzweil's ridiculous futurism is nothing but a religion for people who not uncommonly pat themselves on the back for being "too rational for religion."

Re:I dug through all the replies

[snowgirl]

1) iPod shuffles, health monitors, hearing aidsthese are all computers that can be worn on the body and fit the prediction.

This reads like a post-hoc rationalization... if someone were given the prediction they would not describe the given items. Predictions aren't validated because you can force things to fit them after the fact, they're valid because they predict and accurately describe what will be in the future before it is actually available.

2) Speech to text is gaining ground. It’s available in hand held devices, and as (semi) popular Apps on smartphones.

The prediction was that a majority of text is done by Speech-to-Text. "Gaining ground" doesn't give you credit.

5) Like speech to text, this technology is gaining ground and has related Apps for smartphones.

Like Speech-to-Text, "it's available" is not the necessary condition. The prediction was "commonly used".

6) Drones are a major part of the war in Afghanistan. Some of their explosive ordinance is the size of birds and contain their own navigating intelligence.

Post-hoc rationalization, and the condition was not "are used" or "major part", it was "dominated".

Seriously, this post is a horrible example of post-hoc rationalization from people who want to believe... like Nostradamus apologists. I mean, Ray Kurzweil believes in "alkalinized water" and dismisses just adding sodium bicarbonate, because the HNO3- molecule won't work as well as the HO- molecule... which entirely disregards that HNO3- interacts with H2O to make H2NO3 and HO-. http://glowing-health.com/alkaline-water/ray-kurzweil-alkaine-water.html

Your post translated and back again on Google

[syousef]

Yeah Google translate isn't THAT good at this stage. Here's what it did to your post. My favourite mistranslation: was in Russian. "I did a lot of work with translators and even they get it wrong, so I think Kurzweil is actually a way" can be taken to mean the opposite of "so I think Kurzweil is actually off in a way." which is very misleading. I'd use it cautiously for casual conversation even now, knowing there will be misunderstanding. But I wouldn't dare dream of reliability for anything critical in a decade. It would only need to tranlsate "Well we don't want war" to "We want war" once to kill millions.

Here is your post, translated English -> French -> English

Yeah, but for years, machine translation was blocked on Alta Vista babelfish gloomy ... which was essentially a one to one translation of the dictionary (often without the help of the definition of right) to hilariously bad translations.

A couple of years, Google translate gave a big bump in the whole concept of using United Nations documents (which are usually 5 + languagels) as a faithful translation. It has many failures, but translations of Babel Babble past often unreadable for something that often range from decent translation of something that you can see if you put some thought into it.

I did a lot of work with translators and even they make mistakes, so I think Kurzweil is really a way out. IMO, by the end of this decade, machine translation will often be good enough (really, Google Translate should start looking for context clues and I do not think it will be 19 years away) but n 'there will ever be perfect because the language is not perfect. Watch humans communicate sometimes, it's not a strict protocol, misunderstandings can occur any time between people. But when a machine is wrong, people will point to it as evil, instead of the very nature of language.

Here is your post, translated English -> Chinese -> English

Yes, but over the years, machine translation is boring to stay in Alta Vista's Babelfish platform ... which is basically a one to one translation dictionary (usually not the right to use the definition of) the cheerful bad translation.

A couple years ago, Google translation of a big jolt to the whole concept of using United Nations documents (which is usually 5 + languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but the translation is often unreadable babble from Babel things, often translated from a decent range of things you can calculate, if you want to go some.

I've done a lot of work, even their translation wrong, so I think Kuziweier actually way off. Haishizuzhi, by the end of this decade, machine translation is often not good enough (really, Google translator need to start looking for more context clues, I can not believe it will be 19 years later), but there will never be perfect because language itself is not perfect. A look at human communication, it is not a strict protocol, can be misunderstanding between the people what happened. However, when a machine to get it wrong, people will point to it's bad, rather than the nature of language itself.

Here is your post, translated English -> Russian -> English

Yes, but for many years, machine translation is stuck in a dreary Babelfish Alta Vista in ... which was basically the dictionary translation 12:59 (often without proper identification) to have fun bad translations.

A couple of years ago, Google translate gave a big blow to the whole concept of United Nations documents (which are usually 5 + languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but the translations often traveled from unreadable babble babel to what is often varied from decent translation of the fact that you can find out if you put some thought into it.

I did a lot of work with translators and even they get it wrong, so I think Kurzweil is actually a way. IMO, by the end of this decade, machine translation will often be

They'll improve but not that much...

[Jeeeb]

I can see machine translations improving significantly but until we develop proper machine AI I don't think they're going to be near perfect.

I've done translations from Japanese -> English occasionally for work and I can tell you that sentences often encode different things. As an example I once did a translation of a letter regarding animal imports. Japanese has no distinction between singular and plural and gender isn't encoded at a grammatical level to the degree it is in English. This created problems because nowhere in the original letter was the gender or number of animals involved mentioned. In order to translate the letter into correct, natural English I ended up having to ring around to find the number and gender of the animals involved. As another example, I have a friend who did a translation for a court where the original Japanese had been scattered with borrowed English terms written in Roman characters. It created real problems for her because they definitely didn't fit into the English sentences at all but they were still there and needed to be translated accurately. These were after all documents that had the potential to decide a court-case!

Language is hard and translations definitely have a degree of creativity and artistic skill involved, even technical translations, as in significantly different languages you often find yourself having to rewrite sentences structures that simply don't exist in the target language for the translation. The summary highlights it to a degree but it's not just literature where you come across things that can7t be directly translated.

Prediction: By 2029 Kurtzweil will be wrong

[tyrione]

and most likely deceased. Not to be mean, but the guy keeps adjusting his time frames sooner rather than later. Unless there is some massive push for I-Robot the idea we all used robots for our physical chores can never happen when people need to earn a living, and no we aren't all going to be dealing with Future Crime either.

So what is his success rate?

[Namarrgon]

He claims 86%.

Got any alternate figures, or some sci-fi authors we can compare to?