5 ms·

Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(

by bioweek 17y ago

WilliamLP 17y ago
Indeed. What did Kurzweil predict in 2000 that would happen by 2010? That our phones would be basically the same, MP3 players would achieve more market penetration, that a high end PC bought three years ago would be good enough to run any of today's high-end games or apps? (When was the last time you could say that?) That human genome research would turn out have practically no near-term usefulness? That we'd all be somewhat poorer than we were a decade ago?
- Chickencha 17y ago
  For what Kurzweil actually predicted around 2000, check out his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. It's wildly wrong about some things and overly optimistic about others, but still a pretty interesting read.
ugh 17y ago
2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?
- gloob 17y ago
  Well, what's the difference between the average human lifespan in 2000 and the average human lifespan in 2010? The Internet is very different than it was (though more in form than in function), various industries have risen or fallen, and so on, and - probably what the parent post was talking about - that all fits very tidily into the normal pattern of human history. No-one can meaningfully predict what technologies will be popular in 2020, or what the geopolitical situation will be, but it seems a plausible bet that there will not be anything fundamentally different about it.
  - troystribling 17y ago
    The average human lifespan in the United States has been increasing linearly by about 2 months per year since 1980. In 1990 average life expectancy was 75.5 in 2000 it was 77 and 2010 will be 78.5 http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+united+states http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+unite...
    - mleonhard 17y ago
      That's life expectancy at birth. The increase of life expectancy at birth may be due to reduced infant mortality. I'm more interested in the life expectancy of people born in the 1980s. Is that increasing?
- nzmsv 17y ago
  And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.
  - emmett 17y ago
    Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.
    - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
      Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
      - michael_nielsen 17y ago
        What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.
      - mquander 17y ago
        I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s? Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Actually, I think Kurzweil is on to something. 2010 looks a lot different to me from 2000, but what's even more interesting is that I perceive the difference between 2000 and 2010 to be greater than the difference between 1990 and 2000. Same for 1980 to 1990. I really think change is accelerating, both in terms of the more quantifiable things like bandwidth and processing power, but also in more qualitative ways, like how we consume information, or how technology is integrated into our daily lives.
kaveri 17y ago
To an American, perhaps. Ask someone from China the same question.
Micand 17y ago
I was just picking through a copy of The Singularity is Near today. Kurzweil makes several specific predictions in his "2010 scenario": * Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth. * We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times. * Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas. * Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments. * "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance. * We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name. * Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist. * Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3." I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted. I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling.
cma 17y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE

Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(

by bioweek 17y ago

Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(

Indeed. What did Kurzweil predict in 2000 that would happen by 2010? That our phones would be basically the same, MP3 players would achieve more market penetration, that a high end PC bought three years ago would be good enough to run any of today's high-end games or apps? (When was the last time you could say that?) That human genome research would turn out have practically no near-term usefulness? That we'd all be somewhat poorer than we were a decade ago?

Chickencha 17y ago
For what Kurzweil actually predicted around 2000, check out his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. It's wildly wrong about some things and overly optimistic about others, but still a pretty interesting read.

ugh 17y ago

2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?

gloob 17y ago
Well, what's the difference between the average human lifespan in 2000 and the average human lifespan in 2010? The Internet is very different than it was (though more in form than in function), various industries have risen or fallen, and so on, and - probably what the parent post was talking about - that all fits very tidily into the normal pattern of human history. No-one can meaningfully predict what technologies will be popular in 2020, or what the geopolitical situation will be, but it seems a plausible bet that there will not be anything fundamentally different about it.
- troystribling 17y ago
  The average human lifespan in the United States has been increasing linearly by about 2 months per year since 1980. In 1990 average life expectancy was 75.5 in 2000 it was 77 and 2010 will be 78.5 http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+united+states http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+unite...
  - mleonhard 17y ago
    That's life expectancy at birth. The increase of life expectancy at birth may be due to reduced infant mortality. I'm more interested in the life expectancy of people born in the 1980s. Is that increasing?
nzmsv 17y ago
And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.
- emmett 17y ago
  Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
    - michael_nielsen 17y ago
      What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.
    - mquander 17y ago
      I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s? Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

Actually, I think Kurzweil is on to something. 2010 looks a lot different to me from 2000, but what's even more interesting is that I perceive the difference between 2000 and 2010 to be greater than the difference between 1990 and 2000. Same for 1980 to 1990. I really think change is accelerating, both in terms of the more quantifiable things like bandwidth and processing power, but also in more qualitative ways, like how we consume information, or how technology is integrated into our daily lives.

kaveri 17y ago

To an American, perhaps. Ask someone from China the same question.

Micand 17y ago

I was just picking through a copy of The Singularity is Near today. Kurzweil makes several specific predictions in his "2010 scenario": * Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth. * We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times. * Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas. * Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments. * "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance. * We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name. * Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist. * Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3." I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted. I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling.

cma 17y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE