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Most books will be read on screens rather than paper.
Most text will be created using speech recognition technology.
Intelligent roads and driverless cars will be in use, mostly on highways.
People use personal computers the size of rings, pins, credit cards and books.
Personal worn computers provide monitoring of body functions, automated identity and directions for navigation.
Cables are disappearing. Computer peripheries use wireless communication.
People can talk to their computer to give commands.
Computer displays built into eyeglasses for augmented reality are used.
Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video.
Three-dimensional chips are commonly used.
Sound producing speakers are being replaced with very small chip-based devices that can place high resolution sound anywhere in three-dimensional space.
A $1,000 computer can perform a trillion calculations per second.
There is increasing interest in massively parallel neural nets, genetic algorithms and other forms of "chaotic" or complexity theory computing.
Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain through both destructive and non-invasive scans.
Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.
The facts are substantially different.
Certainly book readers are popular but printed books are still in very high demand. Many people bought Kindles and really did not like them.
Almost all text is created through keyboarding with very little voice recognition being used.
Driverless cars are just being tested. It remains to be seen what will happen in the long term. Certainly our use of trucks for transportation is wasteful and silly but that does not mean we will improve this with driverless trucks.
Moore's Law means computers will continue to get smaller but these predictions were excessive.
I have no health monitoring devices no devices to establish my identity, but my cellphone will help with navigation...at least sometimes.
Yes, lots of cableless devices.
I can talk to some devices but find that is rare and not helpful. My current desktop does not even have a microphone.
Sorry, no computer displays in my eyeglasses.
3D chips? Who knows or cares?
I cannot see or hear a revolution in speaker technology.
I have no idea how many calculations can be performed on the $1K computer.
I have no interest or knowledge of massively parallel neural nets or genetic algorithms or other chaotic computing. Sounds like gibberish.
Brain scans are common but have nothing to do with reverse engineering of brain function. Nor is it likely that this will ever happen. Computers will not be designed to mimic brain processes.
"Autonomous nonengineered machines" sounds like more gibberish instead of a prediction.
Look at what this guy predicted 15 years ago. A lot of his predictions were based on technology that was evolving at the time and he still managed to miss the mark with almost every prediction.
Look at what this guy predicted 15 years ago. A lot of his predictions were based on technology that was evolving at the time and he still managed to miss the mark with almost every prediction.
I don't know where you got these, but they aren't quite the list I've seen. You also appeal to ignorance quite often as proof that something doesn't exist!
He made 147 predictions in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (published in 1999) for the year 2009. He published an extensive essay in 2010 that goes over each prediction and discusses the current technology. By his estimation he has been correct on nearly all of them, but you can take a look yourself: http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions/download.php
Once the computers became available and inexpensive there were huge advances in the robotic systems.
The one point I think you are missing. We currently aren't capable of making robots anywhere near as smart as a dumb human (we are at mouse level). But we are on track to do this in a couple decades. You admit that huge advances in robotic tech follow computer advances. So extrapolate. Use your imagination. What fundamental factors will limit their capability?
Computer capability doesn't need to be at human level before a large percentage are technologically unemployed. Since their invention, computers have had superiority in special functions. Computers have been tools that humans use to increase their productivity. Nothing new there. The superiority has slowly become more universal, and as we approach human level computing capability, the specialness of humans becomes exponentially less relevant.
I do agree computers and automation can do a spectacular job in performing some specialized tasks. I do not see that they will start to reach human capability anytime within the foreseeable future. This is the Buck Rogers stuff of science fiction not reality.
When it comes to predicting the future none of us will likely be discussing this years or decades from now. The best way of reviewing someone's predictive capability is to look at past predictions. I am aware that Kurzweil claims a high level of success with his past predictions. I guess that is not surprising since he does well at self promotion and keeping his own score. The list above is a direct quote from Wikipedia of his 1999 predictions. When I keep score he did very poorly and was close to being consistently wrong. Not only that, but many of his 1999 predictions were none too insightful. Back then many of us saw that computers were doing well at voice recognition and I for one thought there would be a lot of applications and use. We also saw computers getting much faster and smaller. We got the smart phone and tablets but nothing matching the size of rings, pins, and credit cards.
Lets compare today with 60 years ago, when we had gotten over WWII and the Korean War. Then 30% of all working people, were working in agriculture growing the food we needed. Today due to machines replacing men in the farming world, it only takes 1 1/2% of working people to do the same. Those people replaced by machines found new and mostly better paying jobs.
60 years ago, people lived a different life style, and the man working and woman stayed home to raise a family was the norm. They were satisfied with a small 1,000 sq. ft home. Today they want one twice as big, with so many more features than were available back then. 50 years ago it was one car per family. Today it is multiple cars. All of those things cost money, so the wives went to work. Huge numbers of new jobs had t o be created to fill the need for employment caused by farm jobs disappearing, and wives moving into the work force combined with the increase in population.
Sixty years ago, home economics was a real thing. Food consumed 30% of the family budget, and clothing was unaffordable for many people, so women grew a garden, kept chickens, milked a cow and made the family clothes. Women were not unemployed, they just worked at home, and generally contributed about 50% of the family's livelihood from there.
Wives went to work because the price of food and clothing became negligible. I remember when my family quit keeping chickens because it was cheaper just to buy prepared chickens and eggs at the supermarket. Automatic washers, dryers and dishwashers eliminated many time consuming household chores. Rather than sitting around doing nothing most of the time, women went out and got jobs. The expansion in the job force added immeasurably to the wealth of the nation. Trust me, nobody wants to go back to a '50s lifestyle.
This is a huge, huge jump from where we are today. Most industrial robots do very simple, repetitive tasks. We have a computer program that can play chess. Big deal. That is a long, long way from human intelligence, even the level we see on this forum.
Have you talked to a directory assistance operator lately? AT&T replaced all of them with voice recognition computers even before the breakup. Have you ever run a computer diagnostic? There are many reasonably high level human tasks that have been taken over by a machine, more every day.
I don't know where you got these, but they aren't quite the list I've seen. You also appeal to ignorance quite often as proof that something doesn't exist!
That list is from the book you mentioned, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
That essay you have where he says he got them all right often looks like a bunch of spinning to twist questionable predictions into being correct. For example:
Quote:
An example of a prediction that was cited as “false” when it is, in fact, true is, “Personal
computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly
embedded in clothing and jewelry.”
When I wrote this prediction in the 1990s, portable
computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm.
Today, they are indeed embedded in shirt pockets, jacket pockets, and hung from belt
loops. Colorful iPod nano models are worn on blouses as jewelry pins or on a sleeve
while running, health monitors are woven into undergarments, computers are built into
hearing aids, and there are many other examples.
So a computing device being stored in a shirt pocket is now considered "embedded" in the clothing, and an iPod since colorful was considered jewelry? Come on, what a bunch of bull****.
Computers are in hearing aids but that is neither jewelry or clothing, so using that to point and claim he got a prediction about computers being commonly embedded in clothes or jewelry makes little sense unless you're trying your best to make a false prediction look like a true one.
Another example:
Quote:
Another prediction that has been cited as wrong is “Warfare is dominated by unmanned
intelligent airborne devices.” This prediction is certainly true in Afghanistan and recently
in America’s undeclared war in Pakistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air
war… has escalated under McChrystal’s watch.” UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were
also commonly used in the second Iraq war, and countries like Israel are using them
regularly for their own military operations, among many other nations.
The existence and use of drones is hardly the same as warfare being dominated by them.
They are used for recon, they occasionally take out some terrorists, and someday in the future they will likely take on a bigger role, but bottom line the overwhelming majority of warfighting actions are undertaken by things other than drones, be it a US Marine, an Apache Helicopter, or an F-18 that flew from a carrier.
Again he is spinning the truth to make his prediction true when it isn't, unmanned vehicles don't dominate modern warfare and they aren't even intelligent, a Predator is flown by a human pilot with a joystick and it's sensors are operated by a human looking at cameras, IR, and radar data.
Once you see someone trying to bull**** like this to try to convince others (or himself?) he was right you question every other claim of how right he was, especially when the judgement of right is coming from him.
That essay you have where he says he got them all right often looks like a bunch of spinning to twist questionable predictions into being correct.
Granted, some of them are questionable as of 2010 or even now, but that only means he was a bit early. As a whole he did quite well. It isn't surprising either that many of these things were in the early stages when he published the books. It gives you a good handle on what is likely to appear in the future. Predicting how long it will take to develop and market a product still is a bit of a crap shot.
As for intelligent military unmanned airborne vehicles, he never said they were completely autonomous. They are most definitely intelligent however, and the military even makes autonomous ones that require little human input.
The important aspect here isn't the exact timeline, but what the future is likely to bring. Can you think of any scientific reason why computing power will *not* cause tech unemployment for a large % of the population?
I do not see that they will start to reach human capability anytime within the foreseeable future. This is the Buck Rogers stuff of science fiction not reality.
Meanwhile computers keep getting faster and more sophisticated at the same rate as always. This isn't sci-fi, it's happening right in front of you. And companies are spending billions of $$$ to develop it.
A few other funny ones from his "I was right" manifesto:
Quote:
PREDICTION: Most users have servers where they keep digital “objects” such
as virtual reality environments (although these are still at an early
stage).
ACCURACY: Correct
He then goes on to say he's right because of the way the controls work on the Nintendo Wii, so the video game tennis or whatever is a virtual reality environment.
That is bull**** because by the mid 90s (before he wrote the book) there were already first person shooter PC video games that could be declared virtual reality since they immersed you with sound and sight. Wii adding hand motion suddenly crosses the line to virtual reality in his book? What about smell and taste? Just an artificial criteria created by him to prop up his predictions.
Quote:
PREDICTION: The majority of text is created using continuous speech
recognition (CSR) dictation software, but keyboards are still used.
CSR is very accurate, far more so than the human
transcriptionists who were used up until a few years ago.
ACCURACY: Partially correct
Partially correct? Are you kidding me? This is either correct or incorrect... is the majority of text created today by dication software? Not even close, this isn't "partial" anything it is downright wrong.
Quote:
PREDICTION: Students interact with their computers primarily by voice and by
pointing with a device that looks like a pencil.
ACCURACY: Partially correct
Nope. Partial nothing, students do not interact with their computers primarily by voice or a pencil like pointing device, they use their fingers, a keyboard, or a mouse. Voice and whatever pencil things he predicted aren't in the top three, there is no partially correct this would be flat our wrong.
Quote:
PREDICTION: Deaf persons — or anyone with a hearing impairment —
commonly use portable speech-to-text listening machines, which
display a real-time transcription of what people are saying. The
deaf user has the choice of either reading the transcribed speech
as displayed text, or watching an animated person gesturing in
sign language. These have eliminated the primary communication
handicap associated with deafness.
ACCURACY: Partially correct
Nope, deaf people do not commonly use anything like this. The existence of such a product does not validate the word "commonly" so his prediction isn't partially correct, it is wrong.
etc.
Anyone can be right a lot of the time when something clearly wrong is easily spun as "partially correct"
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