8 ms·

Futurist prediction methods and accuracy

151 points by telotortium 4y ago

abeppu 4y ago
I think an important assumption underlying this is that the goal of the predictor is to be as accurate as possible. In a number of cases that's probably not true. Other goals for making (public) predictions: - influencing investor or consumer confidence. Even if you don't have high confidence in what you're saying in the long term, it may be necessary in the near term to make statements that project confidence - building a brand as a thought-leader, futurist, whatever. In part this depends on saying something interesting that people will want to read or hear about. People can enjoy this kind of prediction without believing it. A book review for Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near said "exhilarating speculation is great fun to read, but needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt." Buckminster Fuller was wrong about many things but people still enjoy his work because it's interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Reviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Review... - influencing policy in your preferred direction. No one can predict the number of severe zoonotic diseases that will have epidemics in the next 30 years, but some experts think they'll happen more frequently as the climate crisis progresses. We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers.
- xapata 4y ago
  > We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers. Frustrating, but true. I was recently asked at work to stop adding statements on certainty, to be more concise. I suppose they were in essence delegating the decision of whether something matters to me. That's in some ways a reasonable request, because if I make a nuanced presentation, the audience doesn't have the education/knowledge to evaluate the nuances.
- hyperpape 4y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say Dan knows people bullshit, but it would be very weird to say "well, I guess I can't criticize the bullshit" just because someone else doesn't care about the truth. To your point about people enjoying the work, they're still allowed to. Anyone can read what Dan wrote, and say "I enjoy this work despite the fact that (almost) none of it is true." I do this with Marvel movies, for instance. I do suspect that many readers did not realize how phenomenally bad Kurzweil's projections are, and would be disappointed by realizing that they are.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. Nobody needs to be reminded that people who make public predictions might want to deceive investors or customers, to be famous and make money, or to deceive voters or legislators into pursuing their favored policies. People need to be reminded that their current psychics (and pundits for that matter) have a long history of only getting the things right that everybody got right, and even getting a few of those wrong for a bit of contrarian attention.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    > I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. No, my assumption is that the author is interested in understanding what contributes to good vs bad predictions, and how credible long range predictions are. The author points out factors such as whether the predictor appears to learn from past prediction errors, whether they have a deep expertise in the area they're making a prediction about, whether they depend on extrapolating exponential trends etc. I am guessing that "Do they sell a lot of popular press books?" and "Do they receive performance based compensation from an organization invested in the domain under discussion?" are at least as important explanatory factors as the ones the author explicitly discusses.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  So it's a grift at worst, and Kardashians-tier mindless entertainment at best?
- bigmealbigmeal 4y ago
  I also think there's a key point being missed. That is: being a futurist with high accuracy is useless if your predictions were already obvious. I can score a 100% accuracy rate by predicting things that everyone knows are going to happen (humans will still exist in 2025, the sun will rise in 2050, etc.). A futurist is not useful when they are merely accurate, but when they are accurate about events that no one else expected. It is inappropriate to compare someone like Kurzweil to Caplan. Caplan is just trying to be correct. Kurzweil is trying to make predictions about black-swan events -- the things people don't see coming. These are different ballgames, and the ballgame of predicting unexpected events is inherently more difficult.
laserlight 4y ago
Finally, someone is calling BS on Kurzweil. Praising him, which is the sole source of his “credibility”, has been an in-group signaling in some circles.
- avg_dev 4y ago
  I read The Age of Spiritual Machines quite a while back and it was obvious at the time that Kurzweil’s predictions were pretty far fetched, but they were also very far reaching, thought provoking, and sparked much internal (and external) debate within me. I am not someone who takes much part in tech communities outside of this one so I don’t know what circles you are referring to. But yeah: Kurzweil makes some predictions that don’t come true. It’s been a long time, and it is quite possible that I’m misremembering, or viewing through rose tinted glasses, so please take my follow up question at face value: So what? What’s the harm? If one thing stuck with me from that book, it is that deep gut-level social understanding of the tech we create lags far behind the creation of the tech itself. In a world of personalization algorithms and addiction under the guise of engagement, isn’t that lesson more relevant than ever? Edit: I’m reading some of the criticisms of Kurzweil’s claims in the article. It is clear that he was wrong about growth rates in many areas and about life expectancy growing unbounded. Perhaps my skepticism kept me from taking these claims at face value at any point. Perhaps it is dangerous for someone to be making these claims to the public. I am not sure.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    If you built your life so that your happiness rests on immortality via the Singularity, I think Kurzweil's predictions have done a fair amount of harm. You built your life on an illusion, and will figure out before the end that the promise isn't going to come true. That's tough to swallow. Worse, it distracts you from things that matter even though you die in the end.
    - avg_dev 4y ago
      I believe your point is valid.
- 4y ago
bo1024 4y ago
(1) People don't genuinely want to be evaluated on their predictions. If they did, they would (a) make probabilistic predictions and (b) make well-defined predictions. Example "with 80% probability, there will be more than one million Americans over 100 years old in 2040." (2) Prediction on long timelines is too hard. It's more useful to generate ideas about possibilities. With the small samples here, people are almost just as likely to be lucky as right. We saw a microcosm of this early in the pandemic, where some groups got really excited about forecasting the number of cases. (1) I didn't see anybody quantitatively evaluate their own predictions and own up to how good or bad they were. (2) Everyone pretty quickly gave up even trying to make predictions over a month away. It was too hard. So it devolved into fitting short-term curves and then I think mostly they gave up forecasting altogether.
- seizethecheese 4y ago
  True for most people. The exception to this rule is Bryan Caplan who is covered in this article.
- bombcar 4y ago
  And if you make a well-defined prediction, you should be able to work backwards from it to smaller predictions over intervening years. If, say, I were to predict that 40% of intercity travel would be via high speed rail in 2100 in California, I should be able to either argue why high speed rail would spring out of nowhere in 2099 or have a plausible story as to how it might grow.
- goatlover 4y ago
  At least Vernor Vinge gave a date range for the singularity. Initially, he said he would be surprised if it happened before 2000 and after 2020. I think he's moved that goalpost forward a decade or two since. Kurzweil just says 2045, because that's where his chart or accelerating returns tells him it will happen.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It is always wise to make your date after your estimated death but before your customers.
blastro 4y ago
Years ago, when I lived in SF, a friend of mine invited me out after work on a Friday evening. Exhausted from the week prior, I declined. "Oh but it's a party at The Singularity House, in the south bay" my friend replied. "The Singularity" was something that smart people had mentioned to me during my time in SF, but I never understood what they were talking about. For whatever reason, that was enough of a novelty for me to change my mind and head to the party, to see if I could figure out what The Singularity was. I met my friend at the SF Caltrain station and we headed towards the "singularity house" in Atherton. It was the strangest party I've ever been to. It seemed like small groups of people who didn't know each other had gathered there, in all sorts of strange outfits and the lack of coherence was quite something. I remember someone dressed up as a victorian queen. Despite the massive mansion, the party was pretty lame. I made a few laps before deciding it wasn't for me and headed back to the city. Whenever someone mentions the singularity, this is what I imagine.
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  Was there something special about the house itself? Was it owned by someone special? Did your friend say why it was called that?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Maybe it was a party that nobody could leave once they'd gotten fully into the party. Our intrepid reporter is just lucky that they didn't pass the event horizon of and getting into a conversation with a futurist.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Was this related to Singularity University? I think there's a similar house in Woodside these days.
jcranmer 4y ago
> It's simply not the case that most bugs or even, as a fraction of bugs, almost any bugs are due to programmers rewriting existing code to run on new CPUs. If you really squint, you can see things like Android devices having lots of security bugs due to the difficulty of updating Android and backporting changes to older hardware, but those kinds of bugs are both a small fraction of all bugs and not really what Dixon was talking about. It's worth noting that Dixon's prediction was at the very tail end of the time when CPU portable was a major goal. In the late 90s, anyone compiling for Unixes might reasonably have to support a half-dozen major architectures. Nowadays, even including 32- and 64-bit as separate architectures, there's basically 4 architectures that matter (i386, x86-64, arm, aarch64) for most software. And since 1998, RISC-V and Itanium would have been the only notable new architectures. This doesn't contradict what Dan says about Dixon being wrong, though.
- wmf 4y ago
  I still wouldn't characterize writing portable code as constantly rewriting code for new CPUs, at least if you're doing it right. (There's a whole historical discussion to be had about how hard it was to write portable software back in the day and the causes of that.)
ACV001 4y ago
Just looking at Kurzweil's predictions for 2020's, they are all off: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#2020s https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipe... Interestingly enough, in the latest version of this wikipedia page, all these "predictions" are removed.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >By the later part of this decade, virtual reality will be so high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real reality. LOL, Zuck's metaverse would like a word...
  - hnuser123456 4y ago
    It's not indistinguishable, but VRchat has a pretty massive daily playerbase (20k on this weekday per steam), including some people that make a living making 3D art content (environments, character models), and to the dedicated, that is their reality. To be indistinguishable, though, not quite there yet. Then again, the valve index is still visually nearly, if not the, top of the line, and 3 years old, and it sounds like valve, meta, apple, and some more smaller players are still working on a true next gen, where "gen" is something that feels wholly, indisputably superior to previous offerings. Vive is also still trying but also not doing anything revolutionary. We are however simultaneously on the brink of consumer-level extremely high fidelity, high speed, cable-matching wireless video, and being able to strap sufficient computer power into the headset itself, and no-extra-equipment, compromise-free tracking. VR is absolutely a guaranteed long term growth market
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      20k is massive for a restaurant, but not the internet.
      - spartanatreyu 4y ago
        20k is massive for sustained players of an indie online-only game released around 6 years ago. At the time of writing (the quietest period in the week for online gaming worldwide), it is currently 54th place in terms of people playing on steam right now. None of the 53 games above it require/recommend a dedicated peripheral to play. VR won't hit 1 million simultaneous users in anything until VR displays can render high quality text on a quad (think a screen or piece of paper) and/or provide haptic feedback. VR is still held back by today's technology for the most interesting uses, but is still acceptable enough for a social space to thrive.
MintDice 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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yuan43 4y ago
According to the article, Bryan Caplan has the best record of 100%. But I was surprised to find that the article did not say much about the bets themselves, nor analyze in any great detail what exactly Caplan is doing. Indeed, it's not even possible based on the article AFAICT to check the 100% figure (23/23) independently. Hopping through some links, I found this list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARAiurX-WK6ChrMgQRQz-0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARA... What's interesting is how many of Caplan's bets favor a continuation of the status quo against an opponent believing in a more extreme outcome. The open bets are also interesting. Consider this one: > You pay me $x today. If any European country that was not Communist in 1988 has a civil war leading to 10,000 or more fatalities between today and December 31, 2045, I will immediately pay you $11x.” (initial terms, final terms here) 09/24/2015. Status: open. That said, the language prevents me from figuring out which side Caplan bet on. This is a problem with many of the terms, but fortunately the winner is given as Caplan. Not so in this case. Given Caplan's apparently conservative bent, I suspect he's "me".
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Note that Caplan does have a handful of losing bets for which the deadline simply hasn't arrived yet. For example, he made an anti-global-warming bet that average temperatures wouldn't rise faster in the 2015-2030 span than they did over 2000-2015, which he has all but lost unless we plunge into an ice age tomorrow; it's just that the end of the bet isn't for another seven years.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Caplan can still get a push on that bet if NOAA stops publishing the data before the end of 2029. Two presidential elections to go.
    - yuan43 4y ago
      I would not rule that out, and maybe that was part of his thinking.
m0llusk 4y ago
Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner's work on forecasting yields interesting perspectives on predictions like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting%3A_The_Art_and_Science_of_Prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting%3A_The_Art_an...
- bo1024 4y ago
  As discussed in the article.
pessimizer 4y ago
Kurzweil: "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. With the revolutions in genomics, proteomics, rational drug design, therapeutic cloning of our own organs and tissues, and related developments in bio-information sciences, we will be adding more than a year every year within ten years." Dan Luu: "Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by more than one year per year (the last citation I saw on this was a 2016 prediction that we would have unbounded life expectancy by 2029), which is characteristic of many of Kurzweil's predictions."
- zanecodes 4y ago
  As I've heard it said: sigmoid functions look a lot like exponential functions, right up until they don't...
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Of course, the relevant thing to know is always if that one important point comes after or before the curve's first inflection.
Animats 4y ago
Futurist predictions for this century are really bad. Which is a problem. We don't know where we're trying to go, and thus can't get there. The best futurism was probably at the 1939 World's Fair.[1] The General Motors vision for 1960 came to pass. Wide freeways! Endless suburbia! Big airports! Mission accomplished. By the 1964 World's Fair, futurism was kind of stuck. The GM exhibit had moon bases and undersea cities. Nope. The 1964 World's Fair mostly ended the era of futuristic world's fairs, although there were a few later attempts. Usually involving monorails. The huge misses of futurism: * Robots. Manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks. * Atomic power. Works, but every two decades or so you lose a city-size area. Costs too much. * Space. Costs too much to get there, not that useful to be there. * Immortality. Not even close. What we have now is dystopian futurism, about which too much has been said already. [1] https://vimeo.com/329901114 https://vimeo.com/329901114
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > What we have now is dystopian futurism Unless you live in that large part of the world where living standards having been rising quickly.
  - rednerrus 4y ago
    So everywhere in the world?
    - postsantum 4y ago
      You can use life expectancy as a proxy for the level of living standards. Spoiler: not everywhere
      - rednerrus 4y ago
        The things killing people in the developed world are diseases of excess. People literally have too much stuff.
        4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
You could make a lot of money by taking "Rapture" literature and replacing a few words and publishing it as Singularity literature. And I suspect it fills a similar need/niche. So much of it is "local exponential increase will continue forever" despite all the laws of nature screaming it won't.
- notahacker 4y ago
  The "local exponential increase will continue forever" is the normal bad forecasting bit. It's everything else about the Singularity belief system that looks like religious millennialism and fits the same niche: projections based on the appeal of culturally significant stories rather than actual developments, the certainty the dramatic change will happen in the near future to people like them as a result of powerful forces called by people like them, the near future technology being sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, the insistence this is a path to immortality or terrible destruction but nothing more modest, even sometimes the insistence there's something profoundly immoral about not believing in it.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > taking "Rapture" literature and replacing a few words and publishing it as Singularity literature What if I told you that's not a coincidence? https://www.christianevidence.net/2019/01/gods-7000-year-plan.html https://www.christianevidence.net/2019/01/gods-7000-year-pla...
bee_rider 4y ago
Always have to appreciate Dan's trick of literally just measuring anything about a topic to cut through some of the bullshit surrounding it. Certainly this isn't a perfect measurement but it is at least something.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by more than one year per year Ouch!
O__________O 4y ago
Found the most useful question to ask people about the future is not what will change, but the things they don’t believe will change that currently impact the most people both today and in the future. For example: all people will eventually die, both today and 50 years from; Earth’s climate will increasingly get warmer; etc. By collecting enough of these types of predictions, future becomes much more clear than attempting to predict what will change.
- adamisom 4y ago
  >all people will eventually die, both today and 50 years from I wouldn't be so sure--would you also be confident about 100 years from now? 500?
  - O__________O 4y ago
    In my opinion, with rare exceptions, trying to predict what will or will not change more 50 years out likely is a waste of time. For example, say you wanted to backup data for 1000 years, then it makes sense to think through the logistics. Climate change is also another good example. To me though, wondering if “cars” will still be around feels like a waste of time. As for not dying, not aware of any meaningful progress that would be of note; feel free to give a more detailed reasoning for why the future of death is increasingly uncertain.
doener 4y ago
This is a great article. I have been annoyed for some time that no one points out Kurzweil's overoptimistic and almost never true predictions. My guess is that Kurzweil is simply predicting a singularity out of fear of death.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
I wish you could force two submissions to ride side by side. If I could do that I would pair this article with the one "death by hockey sticks"[1]. Great fun to read them back to back. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832177
neo_spike 4y ago
Thank you for posting this, I remember it on my notifications yesterday over on twitter but forgot opening it . Also any recommendations for material to read about future trends in technology outside of people mentioned in the article?
jl6 4y ago
Kurzweil famously took/takes large numbers of vitamins / supplements / pills each day, in order to extend his life and health. I’d love to read a followup on that. Did it work? Were there any side-effects? How is he measuring whether it is working?
betwixthewires 4y ago
I thoroughly enjoy getting into conversations where someone says something along the lines of "science communicators are important." I enjoy it because of how laughably ridiculous it is, I like amusement and entertainment just like everyone else. The only things these "science communicators" have done is parade their buffoonery around and turn science into a daytime TV marathon. They've created a generation or two of people who think they're informed because they passively watch TV shows with pretty renders in them, "nerds" who don't design or build anything, and an idea that you can be right all the time if you venerate the right people. They're grifters, they're novelty guests at parties, they don't actually understand anything or teach anyone anything. Actual smart people who know what they're talking about don't take these people seriously. The day I listen to these guys is the day Neil DeGrasse Tyson draws me a picture depicting exactly how you write bug free code.
msh 4y ago
Charlie Stross (scifi author and hn user @cstross) have made some good speeches about predicting the future and what errors futurist typically make. One of them is available in text form here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-...
Traster 4y ago
This is... dense. And I think in some ways it's just giving credence to things we should just discard. For example, >In 2001, he uses this method to plot a graph and then predicts unbounded life expectancy by 2011 and then Dan cites this sentence: > In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. Like, let's lay aside the predictions. Between 1980 and 2000 US life expectancy increased by 3 years. So let's just shelve the question of the predictions, this person is clearly making shit up. Whoever is making this prediction is simply not getting even the most basic facts correct. In some ways I think the approach of this article is backwards. You don't apply retrospective rigor to old predictions, you define a rigorous process for future predictions, because there's no way someone is going to luck into being rigorous, and I think most of the futurists are even aiming to be rigorous. A lot of futurists are essentially sci-fi writers. What they're doing is fundamentally entertainment rather than rigorous scientific method. So I don't see why you would set out to judge them by a rigorous scientific method. In some ways I see a parallel between this and effective alturism - EAs often think other forms of charity are misguided, but there's no point judging non-EA giving by EA standards because people just fundamentally don't agree with the core ideas of EA.
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  But the "rigorous scientific process" for the regular science does contain the step of getting creative with the hypothesis space (sometimes quite wildly creative, think Einstein) and you are deemed either a crackpot or a genius depending on your communication skills and social status first (sci-fi writer allusion). The experimental results start to arrive often years after.

151 points by telotortium 4y ago

I think an important assumption underlying this is that the goal of the predictor is to be as accurate as possible. In a number of cases that's probably not true. Other goals for making (public) predictions: - influencing investor or consumer confidence. Even if you don't have high confidence in what you're saying in the long term, it may be necessary in the near term to make statements that project confidence - building a brand as a thought-leader, futurist, whatever. In part this depends on saying something interesting that people will want to read or hear about. People can enjoy this kind of prediction without believing it. A book review for Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near said "exhilarating speculation is great fun to read, but needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt." Buckminster Fuller was wrong about many things but people still enjoy his work because it's interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Reviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Review... - influencing policy in your preferred direction. No one can predict the number of severe zoonotic diseases that will have epidemics in the next 30 years, but some experts think they'll happen more frequently as the climate crisis progresses. We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers.

xapata 4y ago
> We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers. Frustrating, but true. I was recently asked at work to stop adding statements on certainty, to be more concise. I suppose they were in essence delegating the decision of whether something matters to me. That's in some ways a reasonable request, because if I make a nuanced presentation, the audience doesn't have the education/knowledge to evaluate the nuances.
hyperpape 4y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Dan knows people bullshit, but it would be very weird to say "well, I guess I can't criticize the bullshit" just because someone else doesn't care about the truth. To your point about people enjoying the work, they're still allowed to. Anyone can read what Dan wrote, and say "I enjoy this work despite the fact that (almost) none of it is true." I do this with Marvel movies, for instance. I do suspect that many readers did not realize how phenomenally bad Kurzweil's projections are, and would be disappointed by realizing that they are.
pessimizer 4y ago
I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. Nobody needs to be reminded that people who make public predictions might want to deceive investors or customers, to be famous and make money, or to deceive voters or legislators into pursuing their favored policies. People need to be reminded that their current psychics (and pundits for that matter) have a long history of only getting the things right that everybody got right, and even getting a few of those wrong for a bit of contrarian attention.
- abeppu 4y ago
  > I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. No, my assumption is that the author is interested in understanding what contributes to good vs bad predictions, and how credible long range predictions are. The author points out factors such as whether the predictor appears to learn from past prediction errors, whether they have a deep expertise in the area they're making a prediction about, whether they depend on extrapolating exponential trends etc. I am guessing that "Do they sell a lot of popular press books?" and "Do they receive performance based compensation from an organization invested in the domain under discussion?" are at least as important explanatory factors as the ones the author explicitly discusses.
betwixthewires 4y ago
So it's a grift at worst, and Kardashians-tier mindless entertainment at best?
bigmealbigmeal 4y ago
I also think there's a key point being missed. That is: being a futurist with high accuracy is useless if your predictions were already obvious. I can score a 100% accuracy rate by predicting things that everyone knows are going to happen (humans will still exist in 2025, the sun will rise in 2050, etc.). A futurist is not useful when they are merely accurate, but when they are accurate about events that no one else expected. It is inappropriate to compare someone like Kurzweil to Caplan. Caplan is just trying to be correct. Kurzweil is trying to make predictions about black-swan events -- the things people don't see coming. These are different ballgames, and the ballgame of predicting unexpected events is inherently more difficult.

laserlight 4y ago

Finally, someone is calling BS on Kurzweil. Praising him, which is the sole source of his “credibility”, has been an in-group signaling in some circles.

avg_dev 4y ago
I read The Age of Spiritual Machines quite a while back and it was obvious at the time that Kurzweil’s predictions were pretty far fetched, but they were also very far reaching, thought provoking, and sparked much internal (and external) debate within me. I am not someone who takes much part in tech communities outside of this one so I don’t know what circles you are referring to. But yeah: Kurzweil makes some predictions that don’t come true. It’s been a long time, and it is quite possible that I’m misremembering, or viewing through rose tinted glasses, so please take my follow up question at face value: So what? What’s the harm? If one thing stuck with me from that book, it is that deep gut-level social understanding of the tech we create lags far behind the creation of the tech itself. In a world of personalization algorithms and addiction under the guise of engagement, isn’t that lesson more relevant than ever? Edit: I’m reading some of the criticisms of Kurzweil’s claims in the article. It is clear that he was wrong about growth rates in many areas and about life expectancy growing unbounded. Perhaps my skepticism kept me from taking these claims at face value at any point. Perhaps it is dangerous for someone to be making these claims to the public. I am not sure.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  If you built your life so that your happiness rests on immortality via the Singularity, I think Kurzweil's predictions have done a fair amount of harm. You built your life on an illusion, and will figure out before the end that the promise isn't going to come true. That's tough to swallow. Worse, it distracts you from things that matter even though you die in the end.
  - avg_dev 4y ago
    I believe your point is valid.
4y ago

bo1024 4y ago

(1) People don't genuinely want to be evaluated on their predictions. If they did, they would (a) make probabilistic predictions and (b) make well-defined predictions. Example "with 80% probability, there will be more than one million Americans over 100 years old in 2040." (2) Prediction on long timelines is too hard. It's more useful to generate ideas about possibilities. With the small samples here, people are almost just as likely to be lucky as right. We saw a microcosm of this early in the pandemic, where some groups got really excited about forecasting the number of cases. (1) I didn't see anybody quantitatively evaluate their own predictions and own up to how good or bad they were. (2) Everyone pretty quickly gave up even trying to make predictions over a month away. It was too hard. So it devolved into fitting short-term curves and then I think mostly they gave up forecasting altogether.

seizethecheese 4y ago
True for most people. The exception to this rule is Bryan Caplan who is covered in this article.
bombcar 4y ago
And if you make a well-defined prediction, you should be able to work backwards from it to smaller predictions over intervening years. If, say, I were to predict that 40% of intercity travel would be via high speed rail in 2100 in California, I should be able to either argue why high speed rail would spring out of nowhere in 2099 or have a plausible story as to how it might grow.
goatlover 4y ago
At least Vernor Vinge gave a date range for the singularity. Initially, he said he would be surprised if it happened before 2000 and after 2020. I think he's moved that goalpost forward a decade or two since. Kurzweil just says 2045, because that's where his chart or accelerating returns tells him it will happen.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It is always wise to make your date after your estimated death but before your customers.

blastro 4y ago

Years ago, when I lived in SF, a friend of mine invited me out after work on a Friday evening. Exhausted from the week prior, I declined. "Oh but it's a party at The Singularity House, in the south bay" my friend replied. "The Singularity" was something that smart people had mentioned to me during my time in SF, but I never understood what they were talking about. For whatever reason, that was enough of a novelty for me to change my mind and head to the party, to see if I could figure out what The Singularity was. I met my friend at the SF Caltrain station and we headed towards the "singularity house" in Atherton. It was the strangest party I've ever been to. It seemed like small groups of people who didn't know each other had gathered there, in all sorts of strange outfits and the lack of coherence was quite something. I remember someone dressed up as a victorian queen. Despite the massive mansion, the party was pretty lame. I made a few laps before deciding it wasn't for me and headed back to the city. Whenever someone mentions the singularity, this is what I imagine.

thedorkknight 4y ago
Was there something special about the house itself? Was it owned by someone special? Did your friend say why it was called that?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Maybe it was a party that nobody could leave once they'd gotten fully into the party. Our intrepid reporter is just lucky that they didn't pass the event horizon of and getting into a conversation with a futurist.
gnicholas 4y ago
Was this related to Singularity University? I think there's a similar house in Woodside these days.

jcranmer 4y ago

> It's simply not the case that most bugs or even, as a fraction of bugs, almost any bugs are due to programmers rewriting existing code to run on new CPUs. If you really squint, you can see things like Android devices having lots of security bugs due to the difficulty of updating Android and backporting changes to older hardware, but those kinds of bugs are both a small fraction of all bugs and not really what Dixon was talking about. It's worth noting that Dixon's prediction was at the very tail end of the time when CPU portable was a major goal. In the late 90s, anyone compiling for Unixes might reasonably have to support a half-dozen major architectures. Nowadays, even including 32- and 64-bit as separate architectures, there's basically 4 architectures that matter (i386, x86-64, arm, aarch64) for most software. And since 1998, RISC-V and Itanium would have been the only notable new architectures. This doesn't contradict what Dan says about Dixon being wrong, though.

wmf 4y ago
I still wouldn't characterize writing portable code as constantly rewriting code for new CPUs, at least if you're doing it right. (There's a whole historical discussion to be had about how hard it was to write portable software back in the day and the causes of that.)

ACV001 4y ago

Just looking at Kurzweil's predictions for 2020's, they are all off: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#2020s https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipe... Interestingly enough, in the latest version of this wikipedia page, all these "predictions" are removed.

jjulius 4y ago
>By the later part of this decade, virtual reality will be so high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real reality. LOL, Zuck's metaverse would like a word...
- hnuser123456 4y ago
  It's not indistinguishable, but VRchat has a pretty massive daily playerbase (20k on this weekday per steam), including some people that make a living making 3D art content (environments, character models), and to the dedicated, that is their reality. To be indistinguishable, though, not quite there yet. Then again, the valve index is still visually nearly, if not the, top of the line, and 3 years old, and it sounds like valve, meta, apple, and some more smaller players are still working on a true next gen, where "gen" is something that feels wholly, indisputably superior to previous offerings. Vive is also still trying but also not doing anything revolutionary. We are however simultaneously on the brink of consumer-level extremely high fidelity, high speed, cable-matching wireless video, and being able to strap sufficient computer power into the headset itself, and no-extra-equipment, compromise-free tracking. VR is absolutely a guaranteed long term growth market
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    20k is massive for a restaurant, but not the internet.
    - spartanatreyu 4y ago
      20k is massive for sustained players of an indie online-only game released around 6 years ago. At the time of writing (the quietest period in the week for online gaming worldwide), it is currently 54th place in terms of people playing on steam right now. None of the 53 games above it require/recommend a dedicated peripheral to play. VR won't hit 1 million simultaneous users in anything until VR displays can render high quality text on a quad (think a screen or piece of paper) and/or provide haptic feedback. VR is still held back by today's technology for the most interesting uses, but is still acceptable enough for a social space to thrive.

MintDice 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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yuan43 4y ago

According to the article, Bryan Caplan has the best record of 100%. But I was surprised to find that the article did not say much about the bets themselves, nor analyze in any great detail what exactly Caplan is doing. Indeed, it's not even possible based on the article AFAICT to check the 100% figure (23/23) independently. Hopping through some links, I found this list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARAiurX-WK6ChrMgQRQz-0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARA... What's interesting is how many of Caplan's bets favor a continuation of the status quo against an opponent believing in a more extreme outcome. The open bets are also interesting. Consider this one: > You pay me $x today. If any European country that was not Communist in 1988 has a civil war leading to 10,000 or more fatalities between today and December 31, 2045, I will immediately pay you $11x.” (initial terms, final terms here) 09/24/2015. Status: open. That said, the language prevents me from figuring out which side Caplan bet on. This is a problem with many of the terms, but fortunately the winner is given as Caplan. Not so in this case. Given Caplan's apparently conservative bent, I suspect he's "me".

Analemma_ 4y ago
Note that Caplan does have a handful of losing bets for which the deadline simply hasn't arrived yet. For example, he made an anti-global-warming bet that average temperatures wouldn't rise faster in the 2015-2030 span than they did over 2000-2015, which he has all but lost unless we plunge into an ice age tomorrow; it's just that the end of the bet isn't for another seven years.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  Caplan can still get a push on that bet if NOAA stops publishing the data before the end of 2029. Two presidential elections to go.
  - yuan43 4y ago
    I would not rule that out, and maybe that was part of his thinking.

m0llusk 4y ago

Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner's work on forecasting yields interesting perspectives on predictions like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting%3A_The_Art_and_Science_of_Prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting%3A_The_Art_an...

bo1024 4y ago
As discussed in the article.

pessimizer 4y ago

Kurzweil: "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. With the revolutions in genomics, proteomics, rational drug design, therapeutic cloning of our own organs and tissues, and related developments in bio-information sciences, we will be adding more than a year every year within ten years." Dan Luu: "Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by more than one year per year (the last citation I saw on this was a 2016 prediction that we would have unbounded life expectancy by 2029), which is characteristic of many of Kurzweil's predictions."

zanecodes 4y ago
As I've heard it said: sigmoid functions look a lot like exponential functions, right up until they don't...
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Of course, the relevant thing to know is always if that one important point comes after or before the curve's first inflection.

Animats 4y ago

Futurist predictions for this century are really bad. Which is a problem. We don't know where we're trying to go, and thus can't get there. The best futurism was probably at the 1939 World's Fair.[1] The General Motors vision for 1960 came to pass. Wide freeways! Endless suburbia! Big airports! Mission accomplished. By the 1964 World's Fair, futurism was kind of stuck. The GM exhibit had moon bases and undersea cities. Nope. The 1964 World's Fair mostly ended the era of futuristic world's fairs, although there were a few later attempts. Usually involving monorails. The huge misses of futurism: * Robots. Manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks. * Atomic power. Works, but every two decades or so you lose a city-size area. Costs too much. * Space. Costs too much to get there, not that useful to be there. * Immortality. Not even close. What we have now is dystopian futurism, about which too much has been said already. [1] https://vimeo.com/329901114 https://vimeo.com/329901114

pfdietz 4y ago
> What we have now is dystopian futurism Unless you live in that large part of the world where living standards having been rising quickly.
- rednerrus 4y ago
  So everywhere in the world?
  - postsantum 4y ago
    You can use life expectancy as a proxy for the level of living standards. Spoiler: not everywhere
    - rednerrus 4y ago
      The things killing people in the developed world are diseases of excess. People literally have too much stuff.
      - 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

You could make a lot of money by taking "Rapture" literature and replacing a few words and publishing it as Singularity literature. And I suspect it fills a similar need/niche. So much of it is "local exponential increase will continue forever" despite all the laws of nature screaming it won't.

notahacker 4y ago
The "local exponential increase will continue forever" is the normal bad forecasting bit. It's everything else about the Singularity belief system that looks like religious millennialism and fits the same niche: projections based on the appeal of culturally significant stories rather than actual developments, the certainty the dramatic change will happen in the near future to people like them as a result of powerful forces called by people like them, the near future technology being sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, the insistence this is a path to immortality or terrible destruction but nothing more modest, even sometimes the insistence there's something profoundly immoral about not believing in it.
dane-pgp 4y ago
> taking "Rapture" literature and replacing a few words and publishing it as Singularity literature What if I told you that's not a coincidence? https://www.christianevidence.net/2019/01/gods-7000-year-plan.html https://www.christianevidence.net/2019/01/gods-7000-year-pla...

bee_rider 4y ago

Always have to appreciate Dan's trick of literally just measuring anything about a topic to cut through some of the bullshit surrounding it. Certainly this isn't a perfect measurement but it is at least something.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by more than one year per year Ouch!

O__________O 4y ago

Found the most useful question to ask people about the future is not what will change, but the things they don’t believe will change that currently impact the most people both today and in the future. For example: all people will eventually die, both today and 50 years from; Earth’s climate will increasingly get warmer; etc. By collecting enough of these types of predictions, future becomes much more clear than attempting to predict what will change.

adamisom 4y ago
>all people will eventually die, both today and 50 years from I wouldn't be so sure--would you also be confident about 100 years from now? 500?
- O__________O 4y ago
  In my opinion, with rare exceptions, trying to predict what will or will not change more 50 years out likely is a waste of time. For example, say you wanted to backup data for 1000 years, then it makes sense to think through the logistics. Climate change is also another good example. To me though, wondering if “cars” will still be around feels like a waste of time. As for not dying, not aware of any meaningful progress that would be of note; feel free to give a more detailed reasoning for why the future of death is increasingly uncertain.

doener 4y ago

This is a great article. I have been annoyed for some time that no one points out Kurzweil's overoptimistic and almost never true predictions. My guess is that Kurzweil is simply predicting a singularity out of fear of death.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

I wish you could force two submissions to ride side by side. If I could do that I would pair this article with the one "death by hockey sticks"[1]. Great fun to read them back to back. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832177

neo_spike 4y ago

Thank you for posting this, I remember it on my notifications yesterday over on twitter but forgot opening it . Also any recommendations for material to read about future trends in technology outside of people mentioned in the article?

jl6 4y ago

Kurzweil famously took/takes large numbers of vitamins / supplements / pills each day, in order to extend his life and health. I’d love to read a followup on that. Did it work? Were there any side-effects? How is he measuring whether it is working?

betwixthewires 4y ago

I thoroughly enjoy getting into conversations where someone says something along the lines of "science communicators are important." I enjoy it because of how laughably ridiculous it is, I like amusement and entertainment just like everyone else. The only things these "science communicators" have done is parade their buffoonery around and turn science into a daytime TV marathon. They've created a generation or two of people who think they're informed because they passively watch TV shows with pretty renders in them, "nerds" who don't design or build anything, and an idea that you can be right all the time if you venerate the right people. They're grifters, they're novelty guests at parties, they don't actually understand anything or teach anyone anything. Actual smart people who know what they're talking about don't take these people seriously. The day I listen to these guys is the day Neil DeGrasse Tyson draws me a picture depicting exactly how you write bug free code.

msh 4y ago

Charlie Stross (scifi author and hn user @cstross) have made some good speeches about predicting the future and what errors futurist typically make. One of them is available in text form here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-...

Traster 4y ago

This is... dense. And I think in some ways it's just giving credence to things we should just discard. For example, >In 2001, he uses this method to plot a graph and then predicts unbounded life expectancy by 2011 and then Dan cites this sentence: > In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. Like, let's lay aside the predictions. Between 1980 and 2000 US life expectancy increased by 3 years. So let's just shelve the question of the predictions, this person is clearly making shit up. Whoever is making this prediction is simply not getting even the most basic facts correct. In some ways I think the approach of this article is backwards. You don't apply retrospective rigor to old predictions, you define a rigorous process for future predictions, because there's no way someone is going to luck into being rigorous, and I think most of the futurists are even aiming to be rigorous. A lot of futurists are essentially sci-fi writers. What they're doing is fundamentally entertainment rather than rigorous scientific method. So I don't see why you would set out to judge them by a rigorous scientific method. In some ways I see a parallel between this and effective alturism - EAs often think other forms of charity are misguided, but there's no point judging non-EA giving by EA standards because people just fundamentally don't agree with the core ideas of EA.

kubanczyk 4y ago
But the "rigorous scientific process" for the regular science does contain the step of getting creative with the hypothesis space (sometimes quite wildly creative, think Einstein) and you are deemed either a crackpot or a genius depending on your communication skills and social status first (sci-fi writer allusion). The experimental results start to arrive often years after.