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I don't buy that Kurzweil prediction accuracy stuff. There's just so much wiggle room when you start allowing categorisations like 'mostly correct', and the so

by feral 16y ago

I don't buy that Kurzweil prediction accuracy stuff. There's just so much wiggle room when you start allowing categorisations like 'mostly correct', and the sort of equivocation that seems to be going on. I thought his recent evaluation of predictions was weak. First off, this particular technology could probably have been built, very badly, in the early 90s. It would have had accuracy too low to make it useful. Its cool that google are doing this now, certainly, but the questions on accuracy and speed need to be answered. I'm sure they'll do a good job, but my point is that there is a big difference than when the technology is first prototyped in a lab, in some form, and when its mature enough for wide spread consumption. The predictions really need to say which they are referring to to be meaningful - a big problem with the recent evaluation. Further, if your thesis is that technological capacity grows exponentially, like moores law, then 8/10 years wrong is pretty wrong. Finally, I'll just say, that the charts of progress and development in the book 'The Singlularity Is Near' are hard to take seriously. Subjective technological milestones are arbitrarily chosen, sometimes over millennial timespans. These are plotted log-log, lines are fitted and inferences drawn that make predictions on for the next 30 years. What's the margin of error to a methodology like that? I'm not disagreeing with any particular thesis; his writing certain stirs healthy debate on important ideas, and its certainly worth pointing out to a whole lot of people that technological growth is non-linear. But beyond that, I'm not paying too much attention to the future predictions.

ghshephard 16y ago
I'm a huge kurzweil critic as well, and, in fact, believe he is overly generous sometimes in his "Mostly Correct" versus "Correct" category. But, seriously - you've got to give the guy credit for his "* Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages." That's a pretty far-out prediction for when he made it, and, the new Droid Apps are doing precisely that. The voice recognition stuff that Dragon does freaks me out so much that I actually don't use them - It weirds me out to see 5-10 minutes of me talking coming out with only one or two typos. It's an uncanny valley experience. I can only imagine what it's going to be like when _translation_ experiences the same increase in performance and accuracy. BTW - the entire point of Kurzweil's writing, and "singularity" thesis is precisely that the last 500+ years of technological growth are all building on each other, and a 20% growth next year is incomparable to what 20% growth was 100 years ago, presuming we had year over year growth of 20% in terms of our information processing capability. We can argue if it's 30%/year, 20% year, or 10% year - but the reality is that as long as it's 10% plus (which I think every resident of HN would agree is a conservative predictor for future technological growth for the next 20 years), the curve gets freaky very soon. Kurzweil isn't interesting in terms of the precision and absolute accuracy of his predictions - which I'll agree with you, he is overly generous - but in terms of the "class" of advances he is predicting. Basically, anything that can be translated (pardon the pun. :-) into a "Information Processing Domain" - is going to be radically transformed in terms of performance, personalization, and miniaturization. He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now. So, I find his prediction about things like "nanotechnological blood and organ analysis in 20 years" to be pretty darn interesting.
- feral 16y ago
  "you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..." Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation? First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert. http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html "I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor." Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy? What was hard to estimate was when it would happen. "He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now." But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve. However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant * that the technology could be implemented, or * had been implemented in a lab, or * was commonly available. Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met. This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions. It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact. However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was. As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy. I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one. I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.
  - ghshephard 16y ago

by feral 16y ago

ghshephard 16y ago

I'm a huge kurzweil critic as well, and, in fact, believe he is overly generous sometimes in his "Mostly Correct" versus "Correct" category. But, seriously - you've got to give the guy credit for his "* Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages." That's a pretty far-out prediction for when he made it, and, the new Droid Apps are doing precisely that. The voice recognition stuff that Dragon does freaks me out so much that I actually don't use them - It weirds me out to see 5-10 minutes of me talking coming out with only one or two typos. It's an uncanny valley experience. I can only imagine what it's going to be like when _translation_ experiences the same increase in performance and accuracy. BTW - the entire point of Kurzweil's writing, and "singularity" thesis is precisely that the last 500+ years of technological growth are all building on each other, and a 20% growth next year is incomparable to what 20% growth was 100 years ago, presuming we had year over year growth of 20% in terms of our information processing capability. We can argue if it's 30%/year, 20% year, or 10% year - but the reality is that as long as it's 10% plus (which I think every resident of HN would agree is a conservative predictor for future technological growth for the next 20 years), the curve gets freaky very soon. Kurzweil isn't interesting in terms of the precision and absolute accuracy of his predictions - which I'll agree with you, he is overly generous - but in terms of the "class" of advances he is predicting. Basically, anything that can be translated (pardon the pun. :-) into a "Information Processing Domain" - is going to be radically transformed in terms of performance, personalization, and miniaturization. He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now. So, I find his prediction about things like "nanotechnological blood and organ analysis in 20 years" to be pretty darn interesting.

feral 16y ago
"you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..." Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation? First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert. http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html "I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor." Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy? What was hard to estimate was when it would happen. "He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now." But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve. However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant * that the technology could be implemented, or * had been implemented in a lab, or * was commonly available. Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met. This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions. It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact. However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was. As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy. I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one. I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.
- ghshephard 16y ago