5 ms·

It would be a lot more impressive if he made those predictions before PDAs were already commonplace, and WiFi was well established. So basically his prediction

by axiom 17y ago

It would be a lot more impressive if he made those predictions before PDAs were already commonplace, and WiFi was well established. So basically his prediction was "there's gonna be the same stuff we have now, but it's gonna be all over the place!"

ugh 17y ago
WLAN well established? Really? Sure, some bigger institutions used it. But today you can be dropped pretty much anywhere in any city and have ten or more WLAN access points show up on your iPod touch. That you just pulled out of your pocket. Everything seems obvious in hindsights.
toby 17y ago
To be fair, he says he made these predictions in 1996. The PalmPilot personal, which I would say was the first widely-used PDA didn't come out until 1997. From what I remember, there weren't really any commercially available 802.11 devices until 1999. So while these things were on the horizon, I wouldn't say they were commonplace just yet.
- varjag 17y ago
  There was already Apple Newton though, so the idea was clearly in the air.
jerf 17y ago
Many of his predictions boil down to "You know that weird fringe technology that's too expensive, bulky, and power consuming? In ten years, it'll be common place and cheap." After the fact they look like nothing. But... despite over fifty years of this progression occurring in the electronics arena, the idea that what we have now is all we will ever have remains pervasive. Very few people have internalized the concept. And so he makes predictions, and they are not met with widespread apathy and people claiming they are trivial and obvious, they are met with disbelief and mockery from many people. So you can't say they are vacuously true from the vantage point of 2009. You need to have said it in 1998 when it was published, whereupon I assure you, you too would have been met with mockery and derision. One example of where people are not thinking this way is in our discussions about the environment. The closest thing to innovation any mainstream debate discusses has to do with taking technologies that mostly work now but don't scale, and making them fail to scale marginally less, while assuming the same baseload of resource consumption will be in place. Yet technology marches ever onward, and one way it manifests is increased efficiency. A command of nanotechnology, even if it never quite reaches the dizzying heights described in the farthest-out singulatarian literature, will still have massive consequences for the efficiency of manufacturing, manufacturing of food resources, and numerous other issues as well. I find the idea of the Kyoto protocols utterly laughable, because built into the very concept is the idea that we can have meaningful discussions of what our resource consumption will look like in 50 years, an idea so absurd that it is remarkable that it passes without comment. What's the point of negotiating a binding treaty on a world that may literally be growing houses, just to take one incredibly small example?
- axiom 17y ago
  Except that the predictions that actually came true are the obvious ones (e.g. smaller faster computers everywhere predicted in 1999) while the ones that didn't come true (e.g. "Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages" ) were the ones that were derided - rightly so.
  - jerf 17y ago
    I accept Kurzweil's defense. He's off by two years, tops, for common use, and in terms of simple existence, he's not wrong at all. The software already exists: http://www.jibbigo.com/website/index.php http://www.jibbigo.com/website/index.php . That's real. You can buy it. The only thing stopping me from linking straight into the app store is the app store won't let me. Even if you want to get anal about the year (which is not really appropriate), that was out in 2009. And I'm pretty sure that's not the only one, either. Compared to the general rate of prediction failure he is in a league of his own. And again, you just claimed his predictions were trivial as if I didn't mention that issue at all. I feel you may not have read my message, as you don't seem to have actually reacted to it. It's not about the triviality apparent in 2009. It's about whether the general public he was speaking to would have considered it a trivial prediction in 1998-ish. That's easy: No. I remember that time. Many technologically-aware people like me wouldn't have blinked at most of the predictions but they were not in the public's mind.

by axiom 17y ago

ugh 17y ago

WLAN well established? Really? Sure, some bigger institutions used it. But today you can be dropped pretty much anywhere in any city and have ten or more WLAN access points show up on your iPod touch. That you just pulled out of your pocket. Everything seems obvious in hindsights.

toby 17y ago

To be fair, he says he made these predictions in 1996. The PalmPilot personal, which I would say was the first widely-used PDA didn't come out until 1997. From what I remember, there weren't really any commercially available 802.11 devices until 1999. So while these things were on the horizon, I wouldn't say they were commonplace just yet.

varjag 17y ago
There was already Apple Newton though, so the idea was clearly in the air.

jerf 17y ago

Many of his predictions boil down to "You know that weird fringe technology that's too expensive, bulky, and power consuming? In ten years, it'll be common place and cheap." After the fact they look like nothing. But... despite over fifty years of this progression occurring in the electronics arena, the idea that what we have now is all we will ever have remains pervasive. Very few people have internalized the concept. And so he makes predictions, and they are not met with widespread apathy and people claiming they are trivial and obvious, they are met with disbelief and mockery from many people. So you can't say they are vacuously true from the vantage point of 2009. You need to have said it in 1998 when it was published, whereupon I assure you, you too would have been met with mockery and derision. One example of where people are not thinking this way is in our discussions about the environment. The closest thing to innovation any mainstream debate discusses has to do with taking technologies that mostly work now but don't scale, and making them fail to scale marginally less, while assuming the same baseload of resource consumption will be in place. Yet technology marches ever onward, and one way it manifests is increased efficiency. A command of nanotechnology, even if it never quite reaches the dizzying heights described in the farthest-out singulatarian literature, will still have massive consequences for the efficiency of manufacturing, manufacturing of food resources, and numerous other issues as well. I find the idea of the Kyoto protocols utterly laughable, because built into the very concept is the idea that we can have meaningful discussions of what our resource consumption will look like in 50 years, an idea so absurd that it is remarkable that it passes without comment. What's the point of negotiating a binding treaty on a world that may literally be growing houses, just to take one incredibly small example?

axiom 17y ago
Except that the predictions that actually came true are the obvious ones (e.g. smaller faster computers everywhere predicted in 1999) while the ones that didn't come true (e.g. "Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages" ) were the ones that were derided - rightly so.
- jerf 17y ago
  I accept Kurzweil's defense. He's off by two years, tops, for common use, and in terms of simple existence, he's not wrong at all. The software already exists: http://www.jibbigo.com/website/index.php http://www.jibbigo.com/website/index.php . That's real. You can buy it. The only thing stopping me from linking straight into the app store is the app store won't let me. Even if you want to get anal about the year (which is not really appropriate), that was out in 2009. And I'm pretty sure that's not the only one, either. Compared to the general rate of prediction failure he is in a league of his own. And again, you just claimed his predictions were trivial as if I didn't mention that issue at all. I feel you may not have read my message, as you don't seem to have actually reacted to it. It's not about the triviality apparent in 2009. It's about whether the general public he was speaking to would have considered it a trivial prediction in 1998-ish. That's easy: No. I remember that time. Many technologically-aware people like me wouldn't have blinked at most of the predictions but they were not in the public's mind.