User:TheBilly/drafts/Kurzweil

Working on a cleaned up version of the "accuracy of predictions" section in the Raymond Kurzweil article

Predictions

Kurzweil has published 3 major books focusing on his predictions of the future, outlining how he believes technology will shape the future of the human race.

The Age of Intelligent Machines

Written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990, it correctly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union (1991) as new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines critically disempowered authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information.

• Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to correctly predict that computers would beat the best human players by 1998, and most likely in that year.
• In fact, the event occurred in May of 1997 when chess World Champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament.

• Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet usage that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world , and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content, making Kurzweil's realization of its future potential especially prescient given the technology's limitations at that time.

• He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services" (such as Wikipedia). Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

• Kurzweil also accurately predicted that many documents would exist solely on computers and on the Internet by the end of the 1990s, and that they would commonly be embedded with animations, sounds and videos that would prohibit their transference to paper format. Moreover, he foresaw that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future.

Kurzweil's views regarding the future of military technology were likewise supported by the course of real-world events following the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines.

• His pronouncement that the world's foremost militaries would continually rely on more intelligent, computerized weapons was illustrated spectacularly just a year later during the Gulf War, which served as a showcase for new weapons technologies. The trend towards greater computerization of weapons systems is further demonstrated by the increased use of precision munitions since the publication of Kurzweil's book. For example, 10% of all U.S. Naval ordinance expended during the Gulf War (1991) were guided weapons. During the Kosovo campaign (1999), that quantity climbed to 70%, and it reached 90% during the 2001-2002 Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

• As he also predicted, remotely controlled military aircraft were developed, beginning with the Predator reconnaissance plane in the mid-90's, and an armed version of the aircraft was first used in combat in November of 2002.

• Kurzweil also described the future of computer-controlled, driverless cars, claiming that the technology to build them would become available during the first decade of the 21st century, yet that due to political opposition and the general public's mistrust of the technology, the computerized cars would not become widely used until several decades hence

• In fact, considerable progress has been made with the technology since 1990, and General Motors is scheduled to unveil a new electronic car system called "Traffic Assist" in its 2008 Opel Vectra model.

• "Traffic Assist" uses video cameras, lasers and a central computer to gather and process information from the road and to make course and speed changes as needed, and is supposedly capable of driving itself without any input from the user in speeds below 60 mph, making it a true driverless car

• "Traffic Assist" will not be exclusive to the 2008 Opel Vectra for long as GM has announced plans to offer the system for several other types of cars before the end of the decade. Due to stricter U.S. product liability laws, the system will not be available in America for the foreseeable future and will only be offered in Europe.

• Kurzweil predicted that pocket-sized machines capable of scanning text from almost any source (a piece of paper, a road sign, a computer screen) and then reading the text out loud in a computerized voice would be available "In the early twenty-first century" and would be used to assist blind people. In June of 2005, Ray Kurzweil himself unveiled the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader), which is a reading machine possessing the aforementioned attributes.

• However, he also claimed back in 1990 that the readers would be able to recognize and describe symbols, pictures and graphics in addition to words, read multiple languages, possess wireless Internet access, and be in use with "most" blind and dyslexic people, and perhaps among some normal people as well.

• While the K-NFB Reader does not have these final attributes, it is entirely possible that the device may be upgraded to the necessary level before the nebulously defined "early twenty-first century" expires.

• Kurzweil stated during a speech to the 2006 Singularity Summit that his company's current efforts are focused on increasing the pattern recognition abilities of the K-NFB Reader so that the device could identify animals, objects and people, also utilizing facial recognition programs for the final task. Presumably, a machine complex enough to handle such tasks would also be able to read much simpler written symbols and traffic signs.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil believes the world will experience over the next century. Titled "To Face the Future," the section is divided into four chapters respectively named "2009", "2019", "2029", and "2099". For every chapter, Kurzweil issues predictions about what life and technology will be like in that year.

While the veracity of Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 and beyond cannot yet be determined, 2009 is near enough to the present to allow many of the ideas of the "2009" chapter to be scrutinized. To begin, Kurzweil's claims that 2009 would be a year of continued transition as purely electronic computer memories continued to replace older rotating memories seems to be vindicated by the current growth in the popularity and cost-performance of Flash memory. He also correctly foresaw the growing ubiquity of wireless Internet access and cordless computer peripherals. Perhaps of even greater importance, Kurzweil presaged the explosive growth in peer-to-peer filesharing and the emergence of the Internet as a major medium for commerce and for accessing media such as movies, television programs, newspaper and magazine text, and music. He also claimed that three-dimensional computer chips would be in common use by 2009 (though older, "2-D" chips would still predominate), and this appears likely as IBM has recently developed the necessary chip-stacking technology and announced plans to begin using three-dimensional chips in its supercomputers and for wireless communication applications.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil also spent time discussing future increases in computing use in education. He predicted that interactive software and electronic learning materials would be used by 2009. Indeed, smartboards, interactive whiteboards with a connection to the Internet and learning software and activities are commonly used in schools in developed nations.

The XO Laptop in ebook-mode. Also known as the "$100 laptop".

Kurzweil went further to say that students would commonly have portable learning computers in the form of a "thin tablet-like device weighing under a pound." While students increasingly use portable laptops in schools, they tend to be of traditional configuration and of greater weight. But supporting Kurzweil's prediction is the emergence of the One Laptop Per Child Project, which aims to provide low-cost laptop computers (often called the "$100 Laptop") to students in developing nations across the world. The computer can be quickly reconfigured from traditional laptop layout to a tablet-like "e-book reading" layout. However, the $100 Laptop also weighs over three pounds. The first batch of 5 million laptops is expected to ship sometime in 2007. The government of Uruguay was the first to make a major order, buying 100,000 of the laptops in October, 2007 and announcing plans for the possible purchase of 300,000 more units by 2009. By the end of 2009, there could be millions more in use across the world, vindicating Kurzweil's belief that portable computers will be playing a central role in education.

While text-to-speech converters, which Kurzweil imagined in widespread use by 2009, remain uncommon as of early January 2008, such technologies are rapidly becoming more and more widely used; for example, the strategy game EndWar, scheduled for release in 2008, features an extremely robust voice command interface. Computerized distance learning, also, is already fairly common at sites such as open.yale.edu, youtube.com/ucberkeley, and Second Life.

Kurzweil also restates his earlier prediction from The Age of Intelligent Machines regarding the advent of pocket-sized, text-to-speech converters for the blind. As mentioned, this can be regarded as correct given the 2005 introduction of the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader), though a significant reduction in price would be required by 2009 to reasonably classify the device as "cheap"--one quality Kurzweil claimed they would possess.

Kurzweil's pronouncements regarding the state of Warfare in 2009 seem likely to meet mixed success. While the United States remains the world's dominant military power and will almost certainly remain so until 2009, Kurzweil's "prediction" of this reality is not so awe-inspiring given the massive military preponderance the U.S. has historically enjoyed coupled with the extreme unlikelihood of a sudden diminishment of American strength between 1999 and 2009 considering the U.S.'s past emphasis on military readiness. Kurzweil instead predicted that most opposing countries in 2009 would focus on challenging the United States' economic as opposed to military strength, and this is already the case today. Kurzweil's claim that warfare in 2009 would be dominated by unmanned combat planes seems unlikely to pan out, though it should be noted that unmanned aircraft have nevertheless advanced considerably since 1999 and are more widely used than ever. A squadron of Reaper pilotless bombers was announced for Iraq in August 2007 where there are already numerous smaller Predator unmanned planes there that can fire missiles. Also unlikely is his more general assessment that humans would be largely absent from the battlefield thanks to fighting machines. One needs to look no farther than Iraq or Afghanistan, where the world's most advanced military is forced to fight infantry-based wars in which even soldiers in "safe" rear-echelon areas are subject to regular attack, to realize that combat remains--at its core--a human endeavor. On that note, Kurzweil's prediction that wars between nations would remain rare in 2009 is so far vindicated by the occurrence of only two such wars since 1999--one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. While numerous conflicts rage elsewhere, Kurzweil was right to foresee that they would primarily pit regular forces against terrorists.

Kurzweil successfully predicted privacy emerging as a political issue (see CCTV: Privacy).

Kurzweil was also correct to predict that unused processing power from idle computers would be harvested via the Internet, pooling the computational resources of many ordinary PC's to create "virtual parallel supercomputers." When Kurzweil wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1998, distributed computing was unknown to the general public, and the two biggest projects--the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search and Distributed.net--had about 8,000 and 100,000 computers contributing idle-time processing power, respectively. The popularity of distributed computing exploded in May of 1999 with the release of the SETI@home program, which attracted 200,000 users within a week of initial Internet release, and by July of 2002, 3.83 million people had downloaded and run the client. Today, the vast majority of distributed computing projects fall under the auspices of either United Devices or BOINC. As of November 2007, BOINC has more than 1.1 million active users and almost 2.4 million hosts. Sony also offers users of the Internet-capable PS3 game console the option to donate their machines' idle processing power to Folding@home--an online distributed computing project that seeks to understand the process of protein folding. More than 600,000 PS3 users have agreed to lend their game consoles to the task, resulting in a record-breaking petaflop (10¹⁵calculations per second) of processing power in November of 2007. This makes the Folding@home project only slightly less powerful (in terms of raw calculating power) than the human brain, which Kurzweil estimates to be capable of 20 x 10¹⁵ calculations per second. With continual, order-of-magnitude improvements to PC's and continued growth in distributed computing networks, it seems almost certain that some of these networks will have more raw power than a human brain by 2009, which is another prediction Kurzweil puts forth in the "2009" chapter of his book.

Moreover, Kurzweil's prediction that portable computers will shrink in size and take on nontraditional physical forms (i.e. - very different in design from a laptop or desktop computer) by 2009 is supported by the emergence of devices such as the portable media players and advanced cell phones, as well as by newer PDA's. All meet Kurzweil's aforementioned criteria, being small to the point of wearability, possessing the power and range of function of older computers, and featuring designs that radically depart from normal computers. Kurzweil's forecast that these devices would lack rotating memories was also right.

However, his claim that such portable computers will be commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry by 2009 seems unlikely to pass, as does his prediction that people will typically be wearing "at least a dozen" such computers in the same year. Most "portable computers" as they are defined here also have built-in keyboards or accessible keyboard functions (such as a digital keyboard that can be manipulated through a touchscreen), putting reality again at odds with Kurzweil's belief that most computers would lack this feature by 2009, with users instead relying on continuous speech recognition (CSR) to communicate with their PC's.

Similarly, Kurzweil's claim that, by 2009, "the majority of text" will be created through continuous speech recognition (CSR) programs instead of through keyboards and manual typing seems highly unlikely. On that vein, he also implied in The Age of Spiritual Machines that CSR software should in fact have already replaced human transcriptionists years before 2009 (i.e. - 2007 or earlier) due in part to its projected superiority in understanding speech compared to human listeners. CSR is not yet this advanced, and the total replacement of human transcriptionists did not happen, nor is it on the verge of happening.

Not only that, he also optimistically stated that houses would have around one hundred computers within, yet houses are not yet "Intelligent". However, this linked into his prediction of domestic robots being around but not mainstream (see Domestic robots).

Since the publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil has even tacitly admitted that some of his 2009 predictions will not happen on schedule. For instance, in the book he forecast that specialized eyeglasses that beamed computer-generated images onto the retinas of their users to produce an HUD-effect would be in wide use by 2009. However, the computerized voice translating services, allowing people speaking different languages to understand one another through a phone, he predicted are available.

The Age of Spiritual Machines also features a "Timeline" section at the end, which summarizes both the history of technological advancement and Kurzweil's predictions for the future.

The Singularity is Near

While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines did, Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity is Near, though longer-term visions are present in abundance.

Kurzweil predicts that, in 2005, supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. However, he does not say that an adequate scientific understanding of the forces behind protein folding will come into being in the same year, meaning that the supercomputers might lack the software to accurately mimic the biochemical process. In fact, protein folding is still (as of 2008) a poorly understood phenomenon, and even supercomputer simulations remain inaccurate outside of simulating the folding of anything larger than a basic protein.

Other Sources

In an October 2002 article published on his website, Kurzweil stated that "Deep Fritz-like chess programs running on ordinary personal computers will routinely defeat all humans later in this decade."

Deep Fritz is a computer chess program--generally considered superior to the older Deep Blue--that has defeated or tied a number of human chess masters and opposing chess programs. Due to advances in personal computer performance, the Deep Fritz program can now run on ordinary personal computers, and different versions of it are available for purchase. While this makes the first part of Kurzweil's prediction true, it is unknown whether the Deep Fritz programs are currently defeating all humans in all games played, though considering the impressive professional record of Deep Fritz, it would be reasonable to assume that only the very best human players can beat the program with consistency.