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I understand your point, but it does happen. For example, commercially available LED lighting that is more efficient than compact fluorescent. The blue LED wa

I understand your point, but it does happen. For example, commercially available LED lighting that is more efficient than compact fluorescent. The blue LED was invented in the early nineties and you just knew it was a matter of time before we would get efficient white-light light. The problem is that for every person who says, "This is 20 years away", there are unrealistic people who are saying, "This is 5 years away". And there are pessimistic people who are saying, "Oh, this is just going to go on for ever. They don't really know how long it's going to take". Will you ever be able to read popular news articles and reasonably expect the predictions to be accurate? I doubt it. Are there people in the world who have a pretty good idea how long it will actually take? For a great many things, yes.

whitegrape 11y ago
Kind of off topic, but wow LEDs have gotten a lot cheaper very quickly. I recently moved and replacing all the incandescent bulbs and a few halogens lights with white-light LEDs was a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be, judging by my memory of some LEDs I bought during the last move a few years ago... and they're at least as or even more energy efficient for the same lumens. I'm usually part of the crowd that thinks Kurzweil hypes his curves too much and additionally is "curve deterministic" instead of pointing in the right research directions to make things happen sooner/better, but there really are a lot of exponentials (and slightly less impressively power laws) out there if you look for them, and they can shake up expectations quite a bit when you're predicting linearly all the time... The genome project usually comes to mind since Kurzweil mentions a lot that by the halfway point they were only 1% "done", so getting the other 99% in the next 7 years seemed pretty ridiculous if you were a layman extrapolating linearly and didn't read that they actually planned for an order of magnitude decrease in cost (https://books.google.com/books?id=rtq1bS7g-OEC&lpg=PA529&ots=uGygaGQiPe&pg=PA530#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=rtq1bS7g-OEC&lpg=PA529&ots...).
- tallanvor 11y ago
  Completely off topic, but I replaced almost all of my traditional lights with led lights (except for some oddly shaped ones) two years ago. It wasn't that cheap, but I haven't had to replace a single of them yet. I figure if they last 5 years, they'll have paid for themselves between the costs of replacement bulbs (some of my fixtures ate normal lights every few months), the cost of electricity, and the pain of having to drag out the ladder every time I needed to replace one.
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    Ha ha... Super off topic, but last year we moved back to Japan and I had to buy all new light fixtures. I decided to go with these new LED panels. I'm trying to remember the details, but I bought 3 panels each 5,600 lumens for about $100 US each. Even now I have a hard time believing that, so I just did a quick price check online and they are still about the same price. Not only that, but IIRC they get over 120 lumens per watt, are colour adjustable, and have a remote control. It just seems too good to be true. I've only ever seen these lights in Japan, which is really a shame because they are amazing. (of course they are about a meter in diameter which wouldn't suit most western homes...) Slightly more on topic, it's the thing in my home that most makes me feel like I'm living in the future :-)
klagermkii 11y ago
I'm ok with 20 year predictions when it comes to converting an existing invention into its commercially available mass produced form (like white LED lighting). Or the growth of the 1995 Internet into its now ubiquitous level. I'm very skeptical when people do 20 year predictions from the current state of the art into something which is impossible to do today for any amount of money, such as this quantum computing based RSA breaker.

whitegrape 11y ago

Kind of off topic, but wow LEDs have gotten a lot cheaper very quickly. I recently moved and replacing all the incandescent bulbs and a few halogens lights with white-light LEDs was a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be, judging by my memory of some LEDs I bought during the last move a few years ago... and they're at least as or even more energy efficient for the same lumens. I'm usually part of the crowd that thinks Kurzweil hypes his curves too much and additionally is "curve deterministic" instead of pointing in the right research directions to make things happen sooner/better, but there really are a lot of exponentials (and slightly less impressively power laws) out there if you look for them, and they can shake up expectations quite a bit when you're predicting linearly all the time... The genome project usually comes to mind since Kurzweil mentions a lot that by the halfway point they were only 1% "done", so getting the other 99% in the next 7 years seemed pretty ridiculous if you were a layman extrapolating linearly and didn't read that they actually planned for an order of magnitude decrease in cost (https://books.google.com/books?id=rtq1bS7g-OEC&lpg=PA529&ots=uGygaGQiPe&pg=PA530#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=rtq1bS7g-OEC&lpg=PA529&ots...).

tallanvor 11y ago
Completely off topic, but I replaced almost all of my traditional lights with led lights (except for some oddly shaped ones) two years ago. It wasn't that cheap, but I haven't had to replace a single of them yet. I figure if they last 5 years, they'll have paid for themselves between the costs of replacement bulbs (some of my fixtures ate normal lights every few months), the cost of electricity, and the pain of having to drag out the ladder every time I needed to replace one.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Ha ha... Super off topic, but last year we moved back to Japan and I had to buy all new light fixtures. I decided to go with these new LED panels. I'm trying to remember the details, but I bought 3 panels each 5,600 lumens for about $100 US each. Even now I have a hard time believing that, so I just did a quick price check online and they are still about the same price. Not only that, but IIRC they get over 120 lumens per watt, are colour adjustable, and have a remote control. It just seems too good to be true. I've only ever seen these lights in Japan, which is really a shame because they are amazing. (of course they are about a meter in diameter which wouldn't suit most western homes...) Slightly more on topic, it's the thing in my home that most makes me feel like I'm living in the future :-)

klagermkii 11y ago

I'm ok with 20 year predictions when it comes to converting an existing invention into its commercially available mass produced form (like white LED lighting). Or the growth of the 1995 Internet into its now ubiquitous level. I'm very skeptical when people do 20 year predictions from the current state of the art into something which is impossible to do today for any amount of money, such as this quantum computing based RSA breaker.