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Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change
- danso 13y agoBefore you actually click on this link, here's what you'll be seeing: http://i.imgur.com/7oDm4Ax.png http://i.imgur.com/7oDm4Ax.png Here is apparently the original source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3961130.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3961130.ece C'mon, has the art of detecting blogspam been lost?
- lae 13y agoYou can't read the entire article without a subscription, though.
- VLM 13y ago"check out the glaciers for the last time" No need to wait until 2040 as per the article, people do this right now at Glacier National Park in Montana. (edited: I understand now, the reason the article listed 2040 and the alps instead of GNP, is the latest estimate for GNP is its last glacier will melt around 2020-2030 timeframe, figure in the next decade, so by 2040 you'll be going to the alps to see a glacier not GNP...) Some of the comments are amusing, mostly unintentionally. The general public is much less educated and intelligent than HN. If you think we're uncomfortable with self driving cars and digital womens fashion, imagine how those clowns are going to feel.
- chillingeffect 13y ago> Some of the comments are amusing, mostly unintentionally. > Vinegar is set to become the non-alcoholic drink of choice, brb guise, investing in vinegar.
- sp332 13y agoBoutique vinegar is hardly new, it's just not mainstream yet. Alton Brown predicted this in 2005 (Good Eats season 9 episode 8 "Good Wine Gone Bad")
- mmastrac 13y agoThere's an odd typo in this post: "Ma##achusetts Institute of Technology". Or is that some sort of weird inside joke?
- chillingeffect 13y agoNo, that's the brilliance of artificial intelligence, don't you know? > artificial intelligence to be able to a##ess what’s going on in their environment.
- VMG 13y ago> a##istant > Google Gla## > cla##mate genius
- Raphmedia 13y agoI'm guessing they can't write "ass" in there so it goes "a##".
- mattmaroon 13y agoIt's a splog that has a profanity filter, and a not very good one.
- sp332 13y agoYeah, I think it's a joke. A self-censoring hip-hop website with an "eye candy" section?
- ben1040 13y ago>wrote his first computer program in 1963 aged 15, went on to study at the Ma##achusetts Institute of Technology Scunthorpe bug in the CMS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- pre 13y agoIndeed, it makes them read very potty-mouthed! "Personal A##istant search engine" is way ruder than a personal assistant.
- brickmort 13y agowhoa, whoa! easy with the language there buddy
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y agoI see that they mention Google Gla##. Huh. The rise of strap-on computing.
- cruise02 13y ago2050: A working profanity filter
- Ygg2 13y ago2060: All of English language is now filtered by profanity filter. `A` is word depicting erection and `The` is missionary pose.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Zigurd 13y ago> 2033: 100 per cent of our energy from solar If he means solar becomes economically competitive for general purpose household and industrial power generation in most places on Earth by 2033, ok, but that's just the starting line for an incredible amount of capex needed to replace fossil fuels.
- joosters 13y ago100% ? Does he really think that people will abandon geothermal and hydroelectric power where they are already freely/easily available?
- Zigurd 13y agoHydro power is proven economical, but it can be, approximately, tripled worldwide IF you displace tens of millions of people. In North America only small increments can be added.
- a-priori 13y agoI don't understand why 100% solar would be a good thing. Sure, it could hypothetically meet our daytime demands, but what about night time? There's only two options there: import power from another time zone where the sun shines, or store the energy during the day. The first is very lossy: HVDC is the most efficient way to transport bulk electricity, and it loses 3.5% per 1000km. You would need to transport electricity about half the way around the earth of the earth's circumference, or about 20,000km, meaning you would lose about 50% in transit. So this would depend on a drastically more efficient way of transporting power (superconducting power lines?). The second is not possible with current battery technology. And that still doesn't answer why this arrangement would be better than a nuclear (base load) + solar (daytime variable load) + natural gas (nighttime/cloudy conditions variable load) mix.
- fit2rule 13y agoI think Kurzweil is a total blow-hard, along with the Mathematica guy. All these great 'predictions' don't take a lot of intellectual depth to make, to be fair .. all you had to do was read a bit of sci-fi in the 60's and 70's, and try to understand that your fellow engineers were reading the same (mostly Vernor Vinge) stories, on the basis of a few top-10 lists .. and oila: you can see what is going to happen. Big Sci-Fi has been driving technology - and thus, our modern culture - for decades now. There's not a single advance in our modern lives that wasn't speculated first, by some sci-fi author. So I don't really think that 'this guy makes amazing predictions' is such a new-worthy article. All this is doing is promoting the Kurzweil brand, and by proxy, the Google brand. What does get me more interested, is the general reaction to cultists like Kurzweil and Wolfram; because these reactions are a far greater predictor of the future than the original subject. If the industry says "hmm.. Kurzweil is a genius, lets listen to what he has to say" - well then, its a self-fulfilling prophecy. tl;dr - postulate what will happen, then MAKE IT SO. This is the mantra of any and all technologists - not just those with the wherewithal to spend their idle time pimping themselves, as both Kurzweil and Wolfram do.
- 11001 13y agoHere's a good (rather snarky) talk by Norvig about all these experts and their futuristic predictions. http://vimeo.com/33961355 http://vimeo.com/33961355
- joosters 13y agoYou can only judge these people if you have a big list of all the predictions that they make. Highlighting the ones that came true is of no use if they made 1000s of other predictions that turned out to be rubbish. Also, beware of all the predictions that don't have good timelines. Predicting a stock market crash is easy; there's bound to be one at some point or other. Predicting when the next crash might be is much much harder.
- mixedbit 13y agoPredicting when the next crash will be is also easy. Once you have hundreds of "experts" doing it, someone will certainly guess correctly.
- angersock 13y agoGah, some of this is worded so poorly: "Thanks to the Human Genome Project, medicine is now information technology, and we’re learning how to reprogram this outdated software of our bodies exponentially." What does this even mean? "We’ll be able to send little devices, nanobots, into the brain and capillaries, and they’ll provide additional sensory signals, as if they were coming from your real senses." Yes, the magic of -~=nanomachines=~-! Some of it is not unreasonable, some of it is tame (VR), and some of it is hogwash.
- Spearchucker 13y agoWhat does this even mean? Is this a common/standard way of disagreeing with how something is phrased, is it derogatory, or are you really not able to parse the meaning of that sentence? Sincere question. I saw this same phrase used a while ago by someone else, and while the sentence it referred to was as poorly worded as the one you refer to, parsing the meaning is easy. Isn't it?
- angersock 13y agoSo, if I were to say, "what does this mean?" I am usually asking either a question or posing a question I immediately intend to answer. The addition of the "even" intensifier usually signals exasperation or annoyed bewilderment.
- pessimizer 13y agoI have no idea how to program exponentially. Or, choosing a different way to parse the sentence, I have no idea how to learn exponentially. I really don't know what the sentence is supposed to mean.
- ams6110 13y agoIt's fine to cherry-pick the predictions that he got right, but how many was he wrong about? I confess I don't follow Kurzweil, and don't put much stock in "futurists" generally, because a lot of the things that are "predicted" correctly seem like pretty safe bets to me.
- pessimizer 13y agoI'm not sure that Kurzweil has ever gotten anything right that the majority of the industry didn't also get right. Every prediction of his that wasn't common was wrong. I welcome any citations that prove me wrong, though.
- Houshalter 13y agohttp://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/
- gshubert17 13y ago"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- Alan Kay
- syncerr 13y ago> 2023: Full-immersion virtual realities .... We’ll be able to send little devices, nanobots, into the brain and capillaries, and they’ll provide additional sensory signals, as if they were coming from your real senses. Great, a new source for PTSD.
- namelezz 13y agoThese are not Ray Kurzweil's predicts. These are mankind's dreams.
- edward 13y agoBetter: http://jimidisu.com/?p=6013 http://jimidisu.com/?p=6013
- michaelochurch 13y agoAfter my mother died in early 2013, this "technology will solve death" fantasy lost all appeal to me. I finally accepted that there are losses in this world that can never be reversed. If there's something on the other side, then I look forward to seeing it. Joining the 120 billion people who have already died can't be the worst thing. If there's nothing on the other side, and death is the end of existence, then there's nothing to fear in it. I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but a total end seems unlikely. I don't believe in religion or gods in the anthropomorphic sense of "god" but whatever causes brought me to exist in a world can occur again. As with religion, this idea of a perfect future (heaven?) in the Singularity can become a dangerous distraction from the real problem. It's not death that is a hard problem. It's life. Economic scarcity is the real enemy. That is what we should be fighting with all our force. We should fight first to make life better, and second to prolong it. If we "solve death" and still have to live with scarcity and inequality, then we've just failed in a way that lasts much longer. (On practical grounds, of course, I'm all for life-saving medical advances and research that reduces or eliminates costly illnesses. In fact, if rejuvenation were an option, I'd probably take it. I'm OK with death, but I hate getting sick. My point is that the real purpose of technology should be to kill scarcity first, and then aim for immortality second.) Ok, done ranting.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoNow now, this is a Ray Kurzweil thread. Real wisdom and understanding of life is not supposed to make an appearance here.
- incision 13y ago>"It's not death that is a hard problem. It's life. Economic scarcity is the real enemy. That is what we should be fighting with all our force. We should fight first to make life better, and second to prolong it." That's very well put. Perhaps not coincidentally, I completely relate to the perspective change brought by such a loss.
- Houshalter 13y agoThese are not mutually exclusive goals. A singularity would fix scarcity as well.
- nswanberg 13y agoReading optimistic future predictions is a lot of fun. And it's also fun to read those from the past because they help to point out eternal human motivations as well as trends of the time. Here are a series of postcards created by some artists at the end of the 19th century that imagined the year 2000 in France: https://www.google.com/search?q=Jean-Marc+Côté&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&biw=1264&bih=1320 https://www.google.com/search?q=Jean-Marc+Côté&source=lnms&t... For context, the industrial revolutions, both the first and second, were by this point old news, so the notion of creating a machine to accomplish a task was familiar. There isn't much in these postcards to delight cynics and pessimists, though, since World War I, when people turned these machines on each other, had not yet happened.
- simonh 13y ago1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do." 1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'. 2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made. So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year. So I predict that when we get to 2045 strong AI will be on the slate to be achieved by about 2090.
- pessimizer 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051088
- Houshalter 13y agoI might be wrong but I believe Kurzweil's prediction of AI by 2045 goes back much further than 2011.
- higherpurpose 13y agoI was watching The World in 2030 speech by Michio Kaku in 2009, and I was thinking "wow, Larry Page definitely saw this a few times", because some of Google's objectives since then seem to have been born from this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219YybX66MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219YybX66MY