13 ms·

How Ray Kurzweil’s 1998 predictions about 2019 are faring

123 points by apsec112 6y ago

ggm 6y ago
The ones he was mostly right or right about were the less speculative and more generally predictable ones. Cast any of them in the negative, and ask yourself if the proposition felt more or less true. The ones he was mostly wrong on, are the highly speculative ai boosterism which is why Kurzweil is laughed at by many people. I've felt grumpy about Kurzweil since 1982 or so. He made some really good innovative stuff happen in computing for blind people and then dived into fame and attention seeking lunacy. He's unquestionably smart, far smarter than me. He appears to have set himself time wasting goals. I totally fail to see what value he brings google compared to eg Vint Cerf or Rob Pike or Ken Thompson.
- danaliv 6y ago
  I read The Age of Spiritual Machines in ‘98 with high hopes but quickly found Kurzweil difficult to take seriously. The singularity fandom has always baffled me.
  - J5892 6y ago
    It's a religion based on the idea that technology will advance fast enough to make its followers immortal before they die.
    - mads_ravn 6y ago
      I remember reading “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and the “events vs time” plot (criticized below) https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ was the calling bullshit moment for me [1]. It is a nice thought though - if we just wait then technology solves all of our problems. [1] https://www.callingbullshit.org/ https://www.callingbullshit.org/
    - will_pseudonym 6y ago
      or fear of Roko's Basilisk [0] [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >The singularity fandom has always baffled me. It basically comes in two flavours. The "it's dangerous" crowd is as Ted Chiang put it imagining the singularity as no-holds-barred capitalism, because when they imagine superintelligence the only thing they can come up with is the companies they work for.The paperclip AI is just a VC funded startup, the only difference is it's even better at disruption than their employers. The Kurzweil one is basically just recycled Christian eschatology, where the final judgement comes around, we'll resurrect the dead, defeat death and so on. So it's basically two American timeless cultural classics, the funny part is that people in that crowd don't seem to notice it
  - lz400 6y ago
    > The singularity fandom has always baffled me. I like it. Try to take as hard sci-fi. It's plausible enough to let your imagination run with it. Don't take it seriously enough to turn it into a religion and it's all good fun escapism. I've accepted that we all need a way to think away the fear of dying. I like this one.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Kurzweil since 1982 is easy to understand. His predictions are part of his personal eschatology. He is man in religious quest for personal salvation. All his past predictions and timeframes are conveniently set so that there is change for him to live forever. He is nutrition and immortality nut (Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever). He is now 72 years old. If he lives to old age with all his life extension pills and rapture of the nerds happens in 25 years he could just make it.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Looking at how quickly our knowledge of intracellular processes is growing, I fully expect us to invent biological immortality. In eight hundred years or so.
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      Well they should hurry up then!
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      The whole boomer thinks technology will allow him to live forever is something that was really common when I was growing up. I long decided animals are not at all evolved to last.
      - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
        We are indeed evolved to die. Our bodies actively kill us, they don't just "degrade" (do you degrade between 10 and 18?). Quite logical also, when you think of it.
    - xvilka 6y ago
      It will happen far sooner than you expect. In five hundred years.
    - beambot 6y ago
      If we can improve lifespan by more than 1 yr/yr, then you may already be immortal...
- cbozeman 6y ago
  You have to understand a person's motivations to understand that person. Kurzweil doesn't want to die. He wants to live forever, in some form. Once you understand that, you'll understand why he's so bullish on AI, gene therapy, lifespan extension, etc.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    No rational person should want to die unless their life is full of suffering and they have no hope of recovery. People who truly understand technology can be very optimistic about it's potential.
    - enw 6y ago
      No rational person should want to live forever knowing the progressive deterioration of biological bodies.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        I hope you’re aware that progressive deterioration is the first thing that the people working on this want to solve.
        m4rtink 6y ago
        Exactly - if someone says immortal they usually mean "forever young" or equivalent. Deterioration is not really compatible with forever anyway.
      - ilaksh 6y ago
        Really that's the fundamental misunderstanding here. The idea is to prevent or recover from age-related disease and degredation. Certainly most everyone likes the idea of staying healthier as they age. This is just progressing that idea with speculation about potential technologies.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > No rational person should want to die unless their life is full of suffering and they have no hope of recovery. Or, no rational person should want to live, because life is mostly drudgery and inconvenience and it also includes a fair amount of pain and anxiety. If you're a materialist, death would free you from that and any regrets about missing out on any positives or guilt about unfulfilled obligations.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Would be funny if Google brought on Robert Zubrin of Mars Society fame, or even funnier if they brought on David Brin of The Transparent Society.
- Havoc 6y ago
  >and more generally predictable ones Can you really say that without the benefit of hindsight colouring that assessment?
  - ggm 6y ago
    A fair point, but I think when you compare Ray's predictions to Robert Heinlein (for example) you'd be more impressed with Robert's teleoperation [1] and mobile phones [2], predicted in the 1940s, than Rays singularity and his "AI will be mostly human led decision making" [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadet
ashtonkem 6y ago
ShotSpotter is really not a great example of AI monitoring for interpersonal violence, if only because detecting gunshots is not that hard. For those who have never been around guns, guns are very loud. Loud enough to damage your hearing instantly. Detecting gunshots is a pretty low hanging fruit in this area, and far less impressive than detecting the chainsaws of illegal loggers in the Amazon, for example. The point about facial recognition cameras is fair though.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  ShotSpotters are good at picking up airplane crashes too. Some accidents have been located in the Bay Area that way, which is helpful considering that Palo Alto and Redwood City airports have marshy areas.
  - vosper 6y ago
    I vouched for this comment, because a quick Google suggests it’s happened once, at least: “ShotSpotter system records tragic plane crash” https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2010/02/19/shotspotter-system-records-tragic-plane-crash https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2010/02/19/shotspotter-s...
tazedsoul 6y ago
“In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing.“ This is not exactly true. Welfare in some parts of the US may be minimal; for example, food stamps may be available but not enough to feed yourself every meal. Further, housing assistance may be non-existent or virtually so in the sense that many are homeless while waiting extended periods of time before they can utilize it, don’t qualify because their income is too low (it’s true, but how does that make sense?), or such housing is temporary. Also, some of the “right” interpretations are rather optimistic or generous in their assessment. But fun read.
- geodel 6y ago
  > This is not exactly true... Unless absolutely best is provided. This will always remain the case. One has to compare 3rd world countries to see how generous US system is even in its current
avalys 6y ago
> "Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions." > MOSTLY RIGHT I'll quibble with this one and call it mostly wrong. Yes, a very narrow and specific set of possible cardiac abnormalities can be detected (with significant error rates) by the Apple Watch's optical (PPG) and electric (ECG) heart rate sensors. Other vendors have functionally equivalent capabilities. But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything, let along recommending an intervention (i.e. a drug or surgery). Kurzweil's terms have specific meanings in medicine and current technology is nowhere close to that. What exists today (or, in 2019) is a very narrow use case and far from the broad and general scenario Kurzweil envisioned. And there is no realistic roadmap to achieve any more than incremental development in this area - PPG and ECG were "low-hanging fruit" in some sense, and medically actionable wearable sensors for pretty much any other medical signal present orders of magnitude larger engineering challenges that few people are even seriously working on. Hence, "mostly wrong."
- aaron695 6y ago
  It's definitely wrong. > But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything But it's because we won't do it. There's nothing technical or hard to make this right. I don't believe it's hard to pick up a heart attack using a wearable. But I don't think many heart attacks are picked up with wearables. Record everything, if something is different see a doctor should both meet this requirement and be highly beneficial. A smartwatch will just communicate. That could be to an online database or a person. If the intent is around privacy and no doctor or external thing is ever consulted and not recommended to be consulted. Then, yes it's decades away.
  - Dig1t 6y ago
    Totally agree, the limitations here aren’t technical, they are regulatory. The barrier to entry for medical devices (FDA approval) is so incredibly high it greatly slows down development on health related devices. Apple has an entire team dedicated to regulatory stuff for the one tiny health feature they offer on the Apple Watch.
jcranmer 6y ago
When the topic of Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 came up 2 years ago (!), I gave him a ~20% hit rate [1]. However, at the time, I didn't realize that he was writing a sequence of 10-year predictions, so I didn't look at the corresponding predictions for 2009 or 2029. When you instead grade his foresight on the basis of how he predicts the development of technology over time, it's clear that a lot of what would seem to be partial hits if assessed alone should actually be graded as hard fails. Discussion about the ubiquity of computers and their use in non-traditional roles for computers is a firm example here. > “Many of the life processes encoded in the human genome, which was deciphered more than ten years earlier, are now largely understood, along with the information-processing mechanisms underlying aging and degenerative conditions such as cancer and heart disease.” This is an example of where the author is going way too easy on Ray (he called it "partly right"). One of the biggest futurist misses of the 21st century is the role of genomics. While genomic sequencing has become incredibly routine, that hasn't actually resulted in the revolution in medicine that it was thought to have by, well, everybody. A key case in point is COVID-19 and some of the mutations: we understand very well details about some of its evolution, and we can pinpoint those mutations to individual genetic letters, but we still struggle to actually develop any predictive effects on its behavior (e.g., is this new strain more infective? more deadly? more resistant against vaccines?--we can't answer those questions without seeing what happens in real infections). Contrast with organic chemistry. Decades ago, figuring out how to synthesize something ugly like vitamin B12 was insanely difficult, even Nobel Prize-worthy. But nowadays, it's the sort of task you might give to a junior chemical engineer in the first week to onboard them (although maybe not for something as difficult as vitamin B12). The thought was that genomics would lead biology to a similar sort of plane of existence--that we could treat genes as a ready menu for achieving various biological goals, and treating disease (at least those with genetic components) would be handled with a similarly combination of picking and choosing from this well-understood menu. That's what Ray was predicting here (more specifically, that the genetic influence on aging, cancer, and heart disease has succumbed to this process), and we really haven't made any progress on that front.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  I agree with this. I don’t think the promise of genomics is even possible because genes (unless it is something simple like a loss of function mutation) don’t work like we think they do on phenotypic expression. Every gene seems to be involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigenic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigenic_model And that doesn’t even begin to touch on epigenetic modifications.
ilaksh 6y ago
At the root of this I think there is a strong difference in worldview between people who are let's say very optimistic about the potential of technology, and those who are less optimistic. People get into these discussions of specific predictions with their worldviews motivating the evaluation of the predictions. That's why you have strong disagreements about what ostensibly would be a fairly objective measures. Because people see the world in radically different ways. There are different variations of views towards technology but at the extremes you have "true believers" and what I would call "haters".
dwaltrip 6y ago
> “An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. [...] On the other hand, few decisions are made without significant involvement and consultation with machine-based intelligence.” > MOSTLY RIGHT This first one should be “mostly wrong”. The vast majority of decisions are made without any involvement or consultation with machine-based intelligence.
- apsec112 6y ago
  How often do people make non-trivial decisions without ever using Google?
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    That's like calling books intelligent. At some point information is gathered. Making a decision is what counts, not being an encyclopedia.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - xondono 6y ago
    The way most people and HN audience make decisions is definitely not the same
  - sammax 6y ago
    I would take "significant involvement and consultation" to mean a lot more than "I googled for an article about it and followed its advice" or similar things.
hyko 6y ago
When making predictions you’re either RIGHT or WRONG in my opinion. If your prediction cannot be clearly assessed then it is WRONG. Otherwise, you’re in the realms of prophecy or horoscopes where most of the heavy lifting is done by the reader after the fact. Edited to add my own surprising-but-useless prediction: “Computers as we know them today will be largely abandoned by the year 2050”.
hyko 6y ago
comparable gains in bioengineered antiviral treatments If I was a pedant, I’d point out that the mRNA vaccines are not antiviral treatments, and this prediction was WRONG; the balance of power clearly lies with potential attackers right now. I am a pedant.
giantDinosaur 6y ago
"Automated license plate reader cameras, which are commonly mounted next to roads or on police cars, also use machine intelligence and are widespread. The technology has definitely reduced violent crime, as it has allowed police to track down stolen vehicles and cars belonging to violent criminals faster than would have otherwise been possible." What? How does this follow?
printercable 6y ago
The retrospective pattern of futurists' predictions is pretty clear: almost all optimistic predictions about medicine end up being mostly or entirely incorrect. The narrative of near-future (10-20 years) medical breakthroughs is continually reiterated by the media, only with the horizon pushed further and further forward, with the effect of distorting the public's perception of the actual pace of medical innovation. I wonder what kind of changes (regulatory or other) you would see if the general public came to accept that radical progress in medicine - absent radical change - wasn't going to happen in their lifetimes, and that medicine twenty years from now would be little different and only marginally more effective than it is today.
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
"MOSTLY RIGHT" seems to mean "a pilot project around silicon valley (or in a big Chinese city) exists". I've visited a dozen countries and I've never encountered an AI system to prevent interpersonal violence. AI gunfire detection system seem to exist solely in a certain country with a tendency to tack startup solutions onto deep-rooted societal issues. This is a recurring theme throughout the article. The average hospital runs on Windows XP, not a sci-fi network of smart-watches. Virtual artists are somewhat respected for sure, but AI-generated art is a niche for nerds. I say "art" you think Picasso, not Google Labs. No, no one passed the actual Turing test yet. The public discussion was doomed from the start, since Turing himself published several variants. This led to an explosion of (mostly dumb IMO) variations that are much easier to solve - which are getting solved. Honestly, the original predictions are written badly. They are full of bullshit words (many, some, there is) making them not really quantifiable. Also, they contain an implied focus on US tech centers, which allows the existence of a single PR-stunt pilot project as a reason to answer "Totally Right" to anything proposed. Maybe I just don't the point, but this smells like pseudo-intellectual reasoning for "amortality will definitely be achieved before I die, see?"...
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Also "I've tortured the meaning of this to make Ray look like less of an idiot." I'm pretty sure gunshot detectors, which arguably date from WW-1, don't qualify as "Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
  - blackbrokkoli 6y ago
    This made me laugh, thank you. Do you have source on the WW-1 detectors? Sounds intriguing!
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      They're referring to artillery sound ranging. (Using sound to triangulate the position of enemy artillery batteries.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging#World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging#World_...
himinlomax 6y ago
> “Most flying weapons are tiny–some as small as insects–with microscopic flying weapons being researched.” In air combat, whether A2A or air to ground, smart missiles are the primary weapon with planes acting as the launch platform. Guns are there as a backup, to fire warning shots, or to save on the expense of the missile. To wit, according to a former fighter pilot streaming air combat sims, he didn't train much on guns even though it's commonly used in the game for the sportmanship aspect.
himinlomax 6y ago
> although the rights of machine intelligence have not yet entered mainstream debate Thankfully, because the idea that machine intelligence should have rights is based on a fundamental and obvious mistake: first they're not alive, second they've not evolved to feel pain or any other drive related to being alive. You can't literally kill an artificial intelligence. What if you tried? Joke's on you, I have a snapshot from 10s ago. What if I destroy that snapshot? Joke's still on you, I have a full backup from last night. What if I destroy that backup too? Dude, I got an offlined tape in the vault. And anyway it was distributed to begin with.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  You make a lot of assumptions, e.g. that the AI is, in practice, being thoroughly backed up, and that it's even feasible to back it up online given its size and update bandwidth. More abstractly, deleting a day of memories is still pretty close to a form of death. You better believe I'd feel weird if you restored me from a day-old backup. There is a version of me that died, and I never get to remember that day of experiences. Your dismissal of the possibility of killing an AI only applies in a small slice of possible scenarios. Your first argument is a lot stronger.
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    > More abstractly, deleting a day of memories is still pretty close to a form of death Not only is it not for a living being, but it's definitely not for a non-living device.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Replace AI in your example with the consciousness of a living person you copied (perhaps destructively) into a computer simulation. Do your conclusions still stand ? And an actual AI migh be as complex and sensitive as such a copy of a live person or possibly even more. (edit: fixed typos :P)
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    > Do ypu conclusions still stand ? Indeed they do, but the situation is different enough in other ways to have other implications. Addendum: the fact that a transferred consciousness could inherit evolved traits such as pain (psychological if not physical), fear of death and so on would change the analysis as well. Those have no reason to exist in a constructed consciousness / GPAI.
user-the-name 6y ago
This article is incredibly generous in its assessments. It is giving "partly right" and "mostly right" to things that are wildly off base. Kurzweil fandom bullshit, all of it.
knuxus 6y ago
> “Visual, musical, and literary art created by human artists typically involve a collaboration between human and machine intelligence.” What about the cases of virtual divas, such as the OG from Vocaloid, Miku Hatsune, and now the whole section of vtubers, such as Hololive? Seems like it hits that spot, although still a tiny niche.
- Arcorann 6y ago
  Not really. Vocaloids are driven by human-written notes; one could argue that converting the notes into singing may involve "machine intelligence" (depending on how much processing is applied to the voice sample bank), but ultimately the software is essentially being used as an instrument. Similarly a Virtual YouTuber is just an animated model driven by motion-capture software, with the motions and voice provided by a human. I doubt this is what Kurzweil had in mind.
xondono 6y ago
It’s always kind of weird to see other people make a mistake I did for years, like charting the trend in life expectancy increases and project it to the future. Life expectancy increases are mostly a statistical fluke of reducing child mortality. Once you factor that out, our upwards trend is way less impressive.
aeturnum 6y ago
It really feels like this is the key fragment for the entire article: > If “algorithms” is another name for “computer intelligence” in the prediction’s text, then yes... If that fragment is to be taken seriously, then much of what Kurzweil predicted for 2019 was also true in 1998. Algorithms carried out by computer have been used to administer and surveil since before the 90s. Personally, my understanding of Kurzweil is that "computer intelligence" is something greater than just an algorithm that is carried out by a machine, but could be done by a human. It would mean something more malleable and conscious than that. Based on that standard I'd say he's wrong about nearly everything (save the privacy one - but again - that was true in 1998 with weaker encryption).
jackcosgrove 6y ago
> Computer scientists at Google have built a neural network called “JukeBox” that is even more advanced than EMMY, and which can produce songs that are complete with simulated human lyrics. While the words don’t always make sense and there’s much room for improvement Sounds like a lot of song lyrics I've heard.
joejerryronnie 6y ago
As wrong as the original spirit and intent of these predictions are for 2019/2020, I’ll bet many will be common place by 2030 and most by 2040.

123 points by apsec112 6y ago

ggm 6y ago

The ones he was mostly right or right about were the less speculative and more generally predictable ones. Cast any of them in the negative, and ask yourself if the proposition felt more or less true. The ones he was mostly wrong on, are the highly speculative ai boosterism which is why Kurzweil is laughed at by many people. I've felt grumpy about Kurzweil since 1982 or so. He made some really good innovative stuff happen in computing for blind people and then dived into fame and attention seeking lunacy. He's unquestionably smart, far smarter than me. He appears to have set himself time wasting goals. I totally fail to see what value he brings google compared to eg Vint Cerf or Rob Pike or Ken Thompson.

danaliv 6y ago
I read The Age of Spiritual Machines in ‘98 with high hopes but quickly found Kurzweil difficult to take seriously. The singularity fandom has always baffled me.
- J5892 6y ago
  It's a religion based on the idea that technology will advance fast enough to make its followers immortal before they die.
  - mads_ravn 6y ago
    I remember reading “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and the “events vs time” plot (criticized below) https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/ was the calling bullshit moment for me [1]. It is a nice thought though - if we just wait then technology solves all of our problems. [1] https://www.callingbullshit.org/ https://www.callingbullshit.org/
  - will_pseudonym 6y ago
    or fear of Roko's Basilisk [0] [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >The singularity fandom has always baffled me. It basically comes in two flavours. The "it's dangerous" crowd is as Ted Chiang put it imagining the singularity as no-holds-barred capitalism, because when they imagine superintelligence the only thing they can come up with is the companies they work for.The paperclip AI is just a VC funded startup, the only difference is it's even better at disruption than their employers. The Kurzweil one is basically just recycled Christian eschatology, where the final judgement comes around, we'll resurrect the dead, defeat death and so on. So it's basically two American timeless cultural classics, the funny part is that people in that crowd don't seem to notice it
- lz400 6y ago
  > The singularity fandom has always baffled me. I like it. Try to take as hard sci-fi. It's plausible enough to let your imagination run with it. Don't take it seriously enough to turn it into a religion and it's all good fun escapism. I've accepted that we all need a way to think away the fear of dying. I like this one.
nabla9 6y ago
Kurzweil since 1982 is easy to understand. His predictions are part of his personal eschatology. He is man in religious quest for personal salvation. All his past predictions and timeframes are conveniently set so that there is change for him to live forever. He is nutrition and immortality nut (Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever). He is now 72 years old. If he lives to old age with all his life extension pills and rapture of the nerds happens in 25 years he could just make it.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Looking at how quickly our knowledge of intracellular processes is growing, I fully expect us to invent biological immortality. In eight hundred years or so.
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    Well they should hurry up then!
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    The whole boomer thinks technology will allow him to live forever is something that was really common when I was growing up. I long decided animals are not at all evolved to last.
    - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
      We are indeed evolved to die. Our bodies actively kill us, they don't just "degrade" (do you degrade between 10 and 18?). Quite logical also, when you think of it.
  - xvilka 6y ago
    It will happen far sooner than you expect. In five hundred years.
  - beambot 6y ago
    If we can improve lifespan by more than 1 yr/yr, then you may already be immortal...
cbozeman 6y ago
You have to understand a person's motivations to understand that person. Kurzweil doesn't want to die. He wants to live forever, in some form. Once you understand that, you'll understand why he's so bullish on AI, gene therapy, lifespan extension, etc.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  No rational person should want to die unless their life is full of suffering and they have no hope of recovery. People who truly understand technology can be very optimistic about it's potential.
  - enw 6y ago
    No rational person should want to live forever knowing the progressive deterioration of biological bodies.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      I hope you’re aware that progressive deterioration is the first thing that the people working on this want to solve.
      - m4rtink 6y ago
        Exactly - if someone says immortal they usually mean "forever young" or equivalent. Deterioration is not really compatible with forever anyway.
    - ilaksh 6y ago
      Really that's the fundamental misunderstanding here. The idea is to prevent or recover from age-related disease and degredation. Certainly most everyone likes the idea of staying healthier as they age. This is just progressing that idea with speculation about potential technologies.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > No rational person should want to die unless their life is full of suffering and they have no hope of recovery. Or, no rational person should want to live, because life is mostly drudgery and inconvenience and it also includes a fair amount of pain and anxiety. If you're a materialist, death would free you from that and any regrets about missing out on any positives or guilt about unfulfilled obligations.
Apocryphon 6y ago
Would be funny if Google brought on Robert Zubrin of Mars Society fame, or even funnier if they brought on David Brin of The Transparent Society.
Havoc 6y ago
>and more generally predictable ones Can you really say that without the benefit of hindsight colouring that assessment?
- ggm 6y ago
  A fair point, but I think when you compare Ray's predictions to Robert Heinlein (for example) you'd be more impressed with Robert's teleoperation [1] and mobile phones [2], predicted in the 1940s, than Rays singularity and his "AI will be mostly human led decision making" [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadet

ashtonkem 6y ago

ShotSpotter is really not a great example of AI monitoring for interpersonal violence, if only because detecting gunshots is not that hard. For those who have never been around guns, guns are very loud. Loud enough to damage your hearing instantly. Detecting gunshots is a pretty low hanging fruit in this area, and far less impressive than detecting the chainsaws of illegal loggers in the Amazon, for example. The point about facial recognition cameras is fair though.

redis_mlc 6y ago
ShotSpotters are good at picking up airplane crashes too. Some accidents have been located in the Bay Area that way, which is helpful considering that Palo Alto and Redwood City airports have marshy areas.
- vosper 6y ago
  I vouched for this comment, because a quick Google suggests it’s happened once, at least: “ShotSpotter system records tragic plane crash” https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2010/02/19/shotspotter-system-records-tragic-plane-crash https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2010/02/19/shotspotter-s...

tazedsoul 6y ago

“In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing.“ This is not exactly true. Welfare in some parts of the US may be minimal; for example, food stamps may be available but not enough to feed yourself every meal. Further, housing assistance may be non-existent or virtually so in the sense that many are homeless while waiting extended periods of time before they can utilize it, don’t qualify because their income is too low (it’s true, but how does that make sense?), or such housing is temporary. Also, some of the “right” interpretations are rather optimistic or generous in their assessment. But fun read.

geodel 6y ago
> This is not exactly true... Unless absolutely best is provided. This will always remain the case. One has to compare 3rd world countries to see how generous US system is even in its current

avalys 6y ago

> "Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions." > MOSTLY RIGHT I'll quibble with this one and call it mostly wrong. Yes, a very narrow and specific set of possible cardiac abnormalities can be detected (with significant error rates) by the Apple Watch's optical (PPG) and electric (ECG) heart rate sensors. Other vendors have functionally equivalent capabilities. But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything, let along recommending an intervention (i.e. a drug or surgery). Kurzweil's terms have specific meanings in medicine and current technology is nowhere close to that. What exists today (or, in 2019) is a very narrow use case and far from the broad and general scenario Kurzweil envisioned. And there is no realistic roadmap to achieve any more than incremental development in this area - PPG and ECG were "low-hanging fruit" in some sense, and medically actionable wearable sensors for pretty much any other medical signal present orders of magnitude larger engineering challenges that few people are even seriously working on. Hence, "mostly wrong."

aaron695 6y ago
It's definitely wrong. > But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything But it's because we won't do it. There's nothing technical or hard to make this right. I don't believe it's hard to pick up a heart attack using a wearable. But I don't think many heart attacks are picked up with wearables. Record everything, if something is different see a doctor should both meet this requirement and be highly beneficial. A smartwatch will just communicate. That could be to an online database or a person. If the intent is around privacy and no doctor or external thing is ever consulted and not recommended to be consulted. Then, yes it's decades away.
- Dig1t 6y ago
  Totally agree, the limitations here aren’t technical, they are regulatory. The barrier to entry for medical devices (FDA approval) is so incredibly high it greatly slows down development on health related devices. Apple has an entire team dedicated to regulatory stuff for the one tiny health feature they offer on the Apple Watch.

jcranmer 6y ago

When the topic of Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 came up 2 years ago (!), I gave him a ~20% hit rate [1]. However, at the time, I didn't realize that he was writing a sequence of 10-year predictions, so I didn't look at the corresponding predictions for 2009 or 2029. When you instead grade his foresight on the basis of how he predicts the development of technology over time, it's clear that a lot of what would seem to be partial hits if assessed alone should actually be graded as hard fails. Discussion about the ubiquity of computers and their use in non-traditional roles for computers is a firm example here. > “Many of the life processes encoded in the human genome, which was deciphered more than ten years earlier, are now largely understood, along with the information-processing mechanisms underlying aging and degenerative conditions such as cancer and heart disease.” This is an example of where the author is going way too easy on Ray (he called it "partly right"). One of the biggest futurist misses of the 21st century is the role of genomics. While genomic sequencing has become incredibly routine, that hasn't actually resulted in the revolution in medicine that it was thought to have by, well, everybody. A key case in point is COVID-19 and some of the mutations: we understand very well details about some of its evolution, and we can pinpoint those mutations to individual genetic letters, but we still struggle to actually develop any predictive effects on its behavior (e.g., is this new strain more infective? more deadly? more resistant against vaccines?--we can't answer those questions without seeing what happens in real infections). Contrast with organic chemistry. Decades ago, figuring out how to synthesize something ugly like vitamin B12 was insanely difficult, even Nobel Prize-worthy. But nowadays, it's the sort of task you might give to a junior chemical engineer in the first week to onboard them (although maybe not for something as difficult as vitamin B12). The thought was that genomics would lead biology to a similar sort of plane of existence--that we could treat genes as a ready menu for achieving various biological goals, and treating disease (at least those with genetic components) would be handled with a similarly combination of picking and choosing from this well-understood menu. That's what Ray was predicting here (more specifically, that the genetic influence on aging, cancer, and heart disease has succumbed to this process), and we really haven't made any progress on that front.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
I agree with this. I don’t think the promise of genomics is even possible because genes (unless it is something simple like a loss of function mutation) don’t work like we think they do on phenotypic expression. Every gene seems to be involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigenic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigenic_model And that doesn’t even begin to touch on epigenetic modifications.

ilaksh 6y ago

At the root of this I think there is a strong difference in worldview between people who are let's say very optimistic about the potential of technology, and those who are less optimistic. People get into these discussions of specific predictions with their worldviews motivating the evaluation of the predictions. That's why you have strong disagreements about what ostensibly would be a fairly objective measures. Because people see the world in radically different ways. There are different variations of views towards technology but at the extremes you have "true believers" and what I would call "haters".

dwaltrip 6y ago

> “An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. [...] On the other hand, few decisions are made without significant involvement and consultation with machine-based intelligence.” > MOSTLY RIGHT This first one should be “mostly wrong”. The vast majority of decisions are made without any involvement or consultation with machine-based intelligence.

apsec112 6y ago
How often do people make non-trivial decisions without ever using Google?
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  That's like calling books intelligent. At some point information is gathered. Making a decision is what counts, not being an encyclopedia.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xondono 6y ago
  The way most people and HN audience make decisions is definitely not the same
- sammax 6y ago
  I would take "significant involvement and consultation" to mean a lot more than "I googled for an article about it and followed its advice" or similar things.

hyko 6y ago

When making predictions you’re either RIGHT or WRONG in my opinion. If your prediction cannot be clearly assessed then it is WRONG. Otherwise, you’re in the realms of prophecy or horoscopes where most of the heavy lifting is done by the reader after the fact. Edited to add my own surprising-but-useless prediction: “Computers as we know them today will be largely abandoned by the year 2050”.

hyko 6y ago

comparable gains in bioengineered antiviral treatments If I was a pedant, I’d point out that the mRNA vaccines are not antiviral treatments, and this prediction was WRONG; the balance of power clearly lies with potential attackers right now. I am a pedant.

giantDinosaur 6y ago

"Automated license plate reader cameras, which are commonly mounted next to roads or on police cars, also use machine intelligence and are widespread. The technology has definitely reduced violent crime, as it has allowed police to track down stolen vehicles and cars belonging to violent criminals faster than would have otherwise been possible." What? How does this follow?

printercable 6y ago

The retrospective pattern of futurists' predictions is pretty clear: almost all optimistic predictions about medicine end up being mostly or entirely incorrect. The narrative of near-future (10-20 years) medical breakthroughs is continually reiterated by the media, only with the horizon pushed further and further forward, with the effect of distorting the public's perception of the actual pace of medical innovation. I wonder what kind of changes (regulatory or other) you would see if the general public came to accept that radical progress in medicine - absent radical change - wasn't going to happen in their lifetimes, and that medicine twenty years from now would be little different and only marginally more effective than it is today.

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

"MOSTLY RIGHT" seems to mean "a pilot project around silicon valley (or in a big Chinese city) exists". I've visited a dozen countries and I've never encountered an AI system to prevent interpersonal violence. AI gunfire detection system seem to exist solely in a certain country with a tendency to tack startup solutions onto deep-rooted societal issues. This is a recurring theme throughout the article. The average hospital runs on Windows XP, not a sci-fi network of smart-watches. Virtual artists are somewhat respected for sure, but AI-generated art is a niche for nerds. I say "art" you think Picasso, not Google Labs. No, no one passed the actual Turing test yet. The public discussion was doomed from the start, since Turing himself published several variants. This led to an explosion of (mostly dumb IMO) variations that are much easier to solve - which are getting solved. Honestly, the original predictions are written badly. They are full of bullshit words (many, some, there is) making them not really quantifiable. Also, they contain an implied focus on US tech centers, which allows the existence of a single PR-stunt pilot project as a reason to answer "Totally Right" to anything proposed. Maybe I just don't the point, but this smells like pseudo-intellectual reasoning for "amortality will definitely be achieved before I die, see?"...

scottlocklin 6y ago
Also "I've tortured the meaning of this to make Ray look like less of an idiot." I'm pretty sure gunshot detectors, which arguably date from WW-1, don't qualify as "Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
- blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  This made me laugh, thank you. Do you have source on the WW-1 detectors? Sounds intriguing!
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    They're referring to artillery sound ranging. (Using sound to triangulate the position of enemy artillery batteries.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging#World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging#World_...

himinlomax 6y ago

> “Most flying weapons are tiny–some as small as insects–with microscopic flying weapons being researched.” In air combat, whether A2A or air to ground, smart missiles are the primary weapon with planes acting as the launch platform. Guns are there as a backup, to fire warning shots, or to save on the expense of the missile. To wit, according to a former fighter pilot streaming air combat sims, he didn't train much on guns even though it's commonly used in the game for the sportmanship aspect.

himinlomax 6y ago

> although the rights of machine intelligence have not yet entered mainstream debate Thankfully, because the idea that machine intelligence should have rights is based on a fundamental and obvious mistake: first they're not alive, second they've not evolved to feel pain or any other drive related to being alive. You can't literally kill an artificial intelligence. What if you tried? Joke's on you, I have a snapshot from 10s ago. What if I destroy that snapshot? Joke's still on you, I have a full backup from last night. What if I destroy that backup too? Dude, I got an offlined tape in the vault. And anyway it was distributed to begin with.

andrewflnr 6y ago
You make a lot of assumptions, e.g. that the AI is, in practice, being thoroughly backed up, and that it's even feasible to back it up online given its size and update bandwidth. More abstractly, deleting a day of memories is still pretty close to a form of death. You better believe I'd feel weird if you restored me from a day-old backup. There is a version of me that died, and I never get to remember that day of experiences. Your dismissal of the possibility of killing an AI only applies in a small slice of possible scenarios. Your first argument is a lot stronger.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  > More abstractly, deleting a day of memories is still pretty close to a form of death Not only is it not for a living being, but it's definitely not for a non-living device.
m4rtink 6y ago
Replace AI in your example with the consciousness of a living person you copied (perhaps destructively) into a computer simulation. Do your conclusions still stand ? And an actual AI migh be as complex and sensitive as such a copy of a live person or possibly even more. (edit: fixed typos :P)
- himinlomax 6y ago
  > Do ypu conclusions still stand ? Indeed they do, but the situation is different enough in other ways to have other implications. Addendum: the fact that a transferred consciousness could inherit evolved traits such as pain (psychological if not physical), fear of death and so on would change the analysis as well. Those have no reason to exist in a constructed consciousness / GPAI.

user-the-name 6y ago

This article is incredibly generous in its assessments. It is giving "partly right" and "mostly right" to things that are wildly off base. Kurzweil fandom bullshit, all of it.

knuxus 6y ago

> “Visual, musical, and literary art created by human artists typically involve a collaboration between human and machine intelligence.” What about the cases of virtual divas, such as the OG from Vocaloid, Miku Hatsune, and now the whole section of vtubers, such as Hololive? Seems like it hits that spot, although still a tiny niche.

Arcorann 6y ago
Not really. Vocaloids are driven by human-written notes; one could argue that converting the notes into singing may involve "machine intelligence" (depending on how much processing is applied to the voice sample bank), but ultimately the software is essentially being used as an instrument. Similarly a Virtual YouTuber is just an animated model driven by motion-capture software, with the motions and voice provided by a human. I doubt this is what Kurzweil had in mind.

xondono 6y ago

It’s always kind of weird to see other people make a mistake I did for years, like charting the trend in life expectancy increases and project it to the future. Life expectancy increases are mostly a statistical fluke of reducing child mortality. Once you factor that out, our upwards trend is way less impressive.

aeturnum 6y ago

It really feels like this is the key fragment for the entire article: > If “algorithms” is another name for “computer intelligence” in the prediction’s text, then yes... If that fragment is to be taken seriously, then much of what Kurzweil predicted for 2019 was also true in 1998. Algorithms carried out by computer have been used to administer and surveil since before the 90s. Personally, my understanding of Kurzweil is that "computer intelligence" is something greater than just an algorithm that is carried out by a machine, but could be done by a human. It would mean something more malleable and conscious than that. Based on that standard I'd say he's wrong about nearly everything (save the privacy one - but again - that was true in 1998 with weaker encryption).

jackcosgrove 6y ago

> Computer scientists at Google have built a neural network called “JukeBox” that is even more advanced than EMMY, and which can produce songs that are complete with simulated human lyrics. While the words don’t always make sense and there’s much room for improvement Sounds like a lot of song lyrics I've heard.

joejerryronnie 6y ago

As wrong as the original spirit and intent of these predictions are for 2019/2020, I’ll bet many will be common place by 2030 and most by 2040.