If we believe in some geographical correlation (due to exposure to new ideas, sharing interests, or anything else that's not genetic + a minimal threshold popul

If we believe in some geographical correlation (due to exposure to new ideas, sharing interests, or anything else that's not genetic + a minimal threshold population being necessary), a prediction would be that online communities should facilitate the emergence of a "long lasting remarkable excess of creative accomplishment" by removing the geographical constraints. Given what I see all around me (HN, reddit etc) I'd tend to believe that: free software has changed the world. Wikipedia offers free knowledge to anyone who wants it. Libgen offers all the scientific knowledge and book. Reddit and the likes offer to the fat-tail places to congregate and exchange ideas. I'm curious what we'll create in the next 25 years! It may not have been possible to make that prediction in 1997: I don't think they had any social network at the time, and online forums must have been reserved to a tiny fraction of the population. At the time this was written, maybe a few rare people like Kurzweil foresaw what we'd have by now: his prediction of AGI around 2030 seems very plausible to me, but it seems to have been met with disbelief when it was made - and not just this one, but his predictions in general. On Wikipedia I see: "Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate" but that in October 2010, Kurzweil claimed his accuracy rate comes to 86%.