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The Singularity is Near: How Kurzweil's Predictions Are Faring (2017)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hyper_reality 6y agoSummary of the article is in this paragraph: > This is actually quite impressive! Although 9 out of 25 is only a 36% accuracy rate, I still remember when reading The Singularity is Near for the first time that almost all of the predictions seemed wildly optimistic and sort of crazy. It seemed a bit unlikely that it would be possible to have a high speed internet connection from a touchscreen super-computer everyone has in their pocket that can also act as a personal assistant that you can speak to in natural language and it will usually understand and respond appropriately, albeit unable to have a full conversation at this point. So his best record is in making predictions about the internet and ubiquity of portable computers (smartphones), but he's been less successful in his optimistic predictions for full-immersion virtual reality, and the jury is still out on the singularity.
- ghransa 6y agoWhat he seems to get wrong are the adoption, the tech is there in niches and works reasonably well, but it's just not wide spread, people just don't see the value in using say VR or Google glass.
- dTal 6y agoI think that even this article is overly generous, marking predictions as "true" that were equally true when they were made as they are today. For example, "Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually" is marked as "true", which reads to me as particularly laughable in light of the enormous disruption to universities that COVID-19 has caused. Yeah, distance learning is a thing; it was a thing in the 70s too.
- hyper_reality 6y agoYes, to take predictions seriously, we should ask the visionary for a rough timescale. And we should also ask not just them but their peers on how likely they think the prediction is to come true. It's not impressive to identify an existing trend and say that it will continue; all of Kurzweil's peers would have been able to see that. Similarly, it's not impressive to keep kicking the can down the road as a prediction eventually becomes truer, but only 50-100 years behind the timeline the visionary implied. Ultimately if the prediction doesn't follow fairly rigorous criteria, it's neither falsifiable nor impressive.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoIMO Kruzweil doesn't make predictions, he makes wish lists. It's useful to consider obvious misses - for example, he failed to predict fake news or the dystopian surveillance and behavioural influencing culture being created by ad tech. This has obvious implications for practical AI. If the black-hat possibilities aren't considered and mitigated, experience to date suggests they'll dominate.
- dTal 6y agoRemind me why anyone listens to Kurzweil? Anyone can read a bunch of sci-fi and make wild, scattershot extrapolations into the future, and do as well or better than he does.
- newyankee 6y agoNot true, although he seems like he is doing crazy speculations, there is a method to his madness. It is driven by all the exponential growth laws which he documented and extrapolated very well.
- nradov 6y agoExponential growth is not a law, nor is extrapolation a valid scientific technique.
- dalbasal 6y ago"Not a valid scientific technique" is not a valid objection to a nonscientific process.
- fnord123 6y agoKurzwel is making predictions. Extrapolation is like the only method of making predictions.
- ben_w 6y agoThey can be, when used appropriately. To give a particular example, the exponential growth of computing power has been a close-enough match to exponential since Kurzweil became famous: It was about 20 years ago that Apple was boasting that their latest PowerMac was banned from export to Cuba because a 1 gigaflops computer counted as a weapon, now they boast their phones do 11 teraflops — compatible with 1.5 year doubling time. (That said: while I have met someone who expected the exponential to continue past single atom transistors, I do expect it to stop soon-ish; superconducting/3D/quantum computing may replace classical transistors, but I never expect to see multiple transistors on a single atom).
- HONEST_ANNIE 6y agoEvery Kurzweil's prediction that came true is riding on the advances with semiconductors and networking. Even many of the true predictions are 'on the way' in the sense that they exist but the impact for the society is not there. Only 2 of them rely on advances in machine learning (real-time translation of foreign languages, personal assistant). Most of these are consumer tech or interaction with computer advances. Two predictions about education are nice. All predictions about advances in biotech, medicine, nanotech, etc. have failed.
- xiphias2 6y agoThe problem with medical predictions is that everybody wants to live forever, so of course he tried to rush it a little bit compared to what's realistic, so that rejuvenation can happen before he dies. At the same time we have a small experiment that successfully made 9 people younger using growth hormone therapy, so we know that there are targets that work in human, we just need to decrease the side effects significantly (which can sadly take 20 years realistically, as experiments are extremely slow and expensive compared to running an A/B test on a web site).
- im3w1l 6y agoSeems to be the primary reason we age is dna damage. The first order effect is cancer, and the second order effect is that the body engages various cancer prevention strategies like senescence. There are some other ways in which we accumulate damage, such as scar tissue, and increasing amounts of embedded foreign bodies. But not nearly as important as dna damage. For this reason, I see crispr as the only path that could lead to immortality, and frozen stem cells as the most likely way to stall until that happens.
- xiphias2 6y agoAccording to the Hallmarks of Aging paper DNA inside the nucleus is relatively stable, and the epigenetic material (i.e. DNA methylation) is a much better predictor of aging, as the proteins can't be transcribed if the DNA is methylated at those parts. That's why is such a big thing that reversing methylation already happened in humans, as it means that the human body already knows how to regenerate itself (just like other animals), we just don't yet know how to turn on the regeneration pathways safely.
- marktangotango 6y agoVinge presents some interesting ways to measure progress toward the singularity in this talk I found very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhhBkmVQs&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhhBkmVQs&feature=emb_logo
- greyswan 6y agoThe most interesting thing about looking back at Kurzweil's writing is the tech optimism we were all smoking back then.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoGwern has some interesting personal reflection [0] on tech optimism vs. tech pessimism. [0] https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#near-singularity https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#near-singularity
- dalbasal 6y agoI agree. It is fascinating though, to see what predictions still seem as likely (though less optimistic) when we go from a "don't be evil" perspective to the 2020 one.
- dalbasal 6y agoTangentially, I think "what didn't happen" in the last decades is an interesting question. Most of Kurzweil's predictions have two parts, implied or explicit. One is the technology itself. The second is how that technology affects the world. Between the two (1.5) is a lot of ambiguity, whenever anyone tries to "score" Ray. EG Displays will be built into our eyeglasses. Tech that essentially exists but hasn't yet become widespread or impactful yet. Sometimes tech does become widespread & impactful, but we still predict impacts wrong. PCs have been on every desk for 25 years. But, administration (to the extent that measurement is possible) seems to have gotten less efficient. HR departments, schools, etc need more administrators today than before PCs. Weird considering PCs are paperwork efficiency machines. Meanwhile, dating and social life have been radically transformed by personal computing. A lecture hall, library and university are notably inferior (eg you can pause the lecture) when digitised, yet Harvard is still Harvard. Even a local college is still the local college. Universities are persistent despite their most legible reasons raison d'etres becoming nonessentials. When I was in college, "Keynes' 15 hr workweek prediction for the 80s" really fascinated me. He was right, on paper, in his efficiency/growth assumptions. I felt that the professor's explanation for why the prediction failed (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin) totally unsatisfactory. "Why history didn't work out this way" seemed a much better basis for understanding the past than post fact theorizing of traditional economics. Lets take theory and its predictions and see why it failed. Often, I think the projected premises turn out correct, but their impacts do not. Demonstrates what we do and don't have a grasp on.
- ced 6y agowhy the prediction failed (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin) totally unsatisfactory. Why not?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dalbasal 6y agoWhy unsatisfactory? Essentially because I think Keynes (and most economists of his era) were right in their basic assumptions. If you made the average person in the 1920 10X richer, they'd have behaved much like the "leisure class" of the time. If you ask the average person "why don't you work 65% less and chill?" most people would look at you funny. It's not a choice. I have rent, etc. A solution that relies exclusively on choice fails the smell test. I have my own ideas about the solution, but that's besides the point. My point was that Keynes, not knowing the future, gave a more intellectually honest projection of what the theories predict than any post facto economist would have. note: no reason to downvote a respectful, on topic comment. Asking "why not" is the whole point of discussions.
- gwbas1c 6y agoLooks like the page got a hug of death. Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201016100027/https://www.antropy.co.uk/blog/the-singularity-is-near-how-kurzweils-predictions-are-faring/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201016100027/https://www.antro...
- TRC_0FF 6y agoKurzweil gets criticized for his incorrect predictions, but it is hard to predict the future. If you take a look at HN users predictions from 10 years ago[0] and evaluate them strictly, then Kurzweils' predictions in comparison don't look that bad after all. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681
- neaden 6y agoMy criticism of Kurzweil isn't that he gets his predictions wrong, it's that he acts like an authority with his predictions and confidence that is totally unearned. If he was just throwing out some guesses and saying "I'm probably wrong" no one would really care one way or the other.
- thomasjoulin 6y agoWas there an HN thread for 2030 predictions?
- TRC_0FF 6y agoThere was[0]! In contrast to 2010, 2020 thread seems much more pessimistic. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
- Nbox9 6y agoThe value of reading The Singularity is Near in 2005 (I read it in 2009, a little late to the game) wasn’t the predictions themselves. The way he thought about the development of technology was fundamentally different, and by reading his explanations for his prediction other people were learning how to think about the future as well. 2000 started with clunky desktops and dial up. 2009 ended with 3G iPhones. I can forgive him for being overly optimistic about future progress given the time.
- Rochus 6y agoI preferred his digital piano. That was real and had a good sound quality (for its time).
- adverbly 6y agoI'm not sure that the author's assessment that "36% accuracy rate" ... "there is no reason to doubt his date of 2029" follows. I'm no statistician, but my intuition tells me that if you drop 1/3 accuracy every 10 years, you're shooting well under 10% by 2029, so it seems crazy to say that we're "on track" for that date. This reminds me of the insanity that some project managers use to estimate their completion dates. They say something will take 1 year. Then after 2 months they have done 1 month of work and then update their total estimate to be 13 months instead of 24. And I'd argue that its even worse for Kurzweil's prediction because in that case its an exponential growth factor thats off - not a constant factor. Want a prediction to sell a book? Singularity by 2029. Want the truth? The singularity won't happen by 2029. Note: I'm using 10 years here because the predictions from 2020 were not graded, and the last timeframe for graded predictions was ~2015
- tim333 6y agoKurzweil never said singularity by 2029. He said 2045. 2029 is the date he predicted for the Turing test which is a different thing and may be kind of possible judging by GPT-3.
- p1esk 6y ago“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” Kurzweil said in an interview at SXSW 2017. That’s quite a bit more than TT.
- throwanem 6y ago> Wikipedia (whose reputation in academia for being inaccurate I don't accept as fair or accurate) Neither did I, until I started studying aculeates in detail. Only a few polistid species are even described in Wikipedia, and for the most part their pages share identical content that appears to have been copy-pasted and which, while a reasonable general description of polistid social behavior and colony cycle overall, totally fails to describe heterospecific variations which can be fairly easily found in papers which treat individual species in detail. For a general lay overview such as an encyclopedia is meant to provide, sure, it's accurate enough. But - given that even an interested amateur like me can not only soon exhaust Wikipedia's treatment of the subject, but almost as quickly also become aware of that treatment's shortcomings - I no longer have any difficulty understanding why it's so negatively regarded as an academic reference. On reflection, I don't understand why this should be controversial. When is any encyclopedia expected to be able to serve in this role? The genre is, as I mentioned, intended to provide a lay overview of many subjects; its treatments are thus broad and shallow by deliberate design.
- Fannon 6y agoA quote from the QualityLand 2.0 audiobook by Marc-Uwe Kling: > The Singularity is always one Kurzweil in the future. (That is a pun on Kurzweil's name. It consists of two german words that can be roughly translated to "a short amount of time"). Another quote that this may be based on: "The semantic web is the future of the web, and always will be." (Peter Norvig) Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510953
- mensetmanusman 6y agoFuture generations will remember Covid for having paused the Singularity indefinitely.
- gwern 6y agoQuite the opposite. They'll look back at the turbocharging of remote work, the skyrocketing big tech stocks, the embrace of mobile-everything, and so on, as accelerating the progress. You certainly see no slowdown in the onslaught of DL papers at the online conferences this year.
- postalrat 6y agoI don't see those things part of a progression closer to the singularity.
- gwern 6y agoThey are. They all contribute to available capital, data, legibility of employment arrangements (when you go fully remote, you've made considerable progress towards enabling automation of job roles by intermediating it, and it forces rearrangement of organizations to be digital-first), the value of AI, and so on. A world in which everyone works via a computer, and AI-heavy big tech organizations are the top predator is not a world which has delayed a Singularity!
- tim333 6y agoAlternate hypothesis. I think if you look back in a decade on a graph of say compute operations per second per dollar you won't see any visible effect from covid.
- gwern 6y agoThis has been done more systematically. For example, for 2009: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbA6T3xpxtko36GgP/assessing-kurzweil-the-results https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbA6T3xpxtko36GgP/assessing-... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kK5rabDsKWMkup7gw/kurzweil-s-predictions-good-accuracy-poor-self-calibration https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kK5rabDsKWMkup7gw/kurzweil-s... For 2019: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-kurzweil-predictions-about-2019-the-results https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-... My own takeaway: Kurzweil's self-assessments are misleading and borderline dishonest; Kurzweil is overoptimistic in general, and you could improve by adjusting by about a decade; there seems to be a split in accuracy to my eyes about hardware vs software - when Kurzweil talks about software such as natural language translation, he is often right or delayed by a relatively short time, but when he talks about hardware (and biology especially) he is strikingly wrong and often the prediction looks like it will never come to pass; and a lot of the software wins were driven by the deep learning revolution: even in 2015, you would have reasonably dismissed some of the 2019 predictions working out, but by the end of 2019...
- solidasparagus 6y agoI've always felt that Kurzweil doesn't properly appreciate the limits of his expertise.