A Look Back At Kurzweil's Predictions For 2009 307
marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergence of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.
Not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite a bit of that was eerie, when you consider it was written ten years ago. Most decade predictions are way off, with maybe one in ten or twenty hitting near the mark.
Re:Automated Telephone Systems (Score:5, Interesting)
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/04/logitech_quickcam_orbit_mp_1.html
roadrunner visual cortex simulation (Score:3, Interesting)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/2014225 [slashdot.org]
Re:So, basically (Score:4, Interesting)
People have never really wanted a speech interface, it's been around FOREVER and has not taken off even when it's quite good.
Re:So, basically (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. Kurzweil thinks they're awesome, in part I believe because he sees it as an incremental stepping stone to developing machines that think. In real life, users get tired after talking for a long time. Imagine how hoarse you'd be if you had to talk to a computer all day long in order to dictate a Word document, launch apps, navigate the interface, etc.
Pointers and keyboards are far more efficient for such tasks. Are there tasks for which a voice interface would be better suited? Perhaps, but I don't think we've seen the applications developed yet that work better with voice than by manual input. Maybe voice-dialing for your cell phone? Nothing else springs to mind.
Would having a conversation with a computer that was capable of understanding conversational english be awesome? I imagine it would be. But what would we talk about? What would I do with such a computer that I couldn't do with my current PC?
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. but that's nowhere near being on the horizon yet, and I don't know that we'll ever get there, because where's the demand for the intermediary steps that would lead us there, and what would those intermediary steps even be??
Re:So, basically (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the problem is that developers focus on creating a pure speech interface rather than a mixed one.
Also complicating things is the fact that we already use speech to interface with the world around us, other people telephones and such are often talked to while using the computer keyboard and mouse. How is the computer to know what is a command and what is being spoken to someone else?
You either have to offset spoken commands with some token that won't come up in conversation and normal background speech or you have to give the computer context recognition which is also difficult.
I'd like to bring back a revival of latin. Make all speech control software respond to latin phrases while normal speech is carried out in everyday language. Latin would be ideal because it is dead, and has a focus on commands in its grammatical makeup.
Re:problematic economics... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that in deflationary periods incomes drop as well as prices, either by direct cuts in salaries or layoffs followed by new jobs that don't pay as well; otherwise everyone would be rich, by magic, which never happens. Thus my family's outstanding mortgage -- currently a fairly reasonable 120 percent or so of our annual income -- would become more and more of a burden.
Re:Will someone shut him up yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Devices are all capable of talking to each other, via bluetooth or other means. Contactless smart cards fit as the ID protection on a chip, so do RFID passports, even if they aren't as secure as he had hoped. Memory on portable devices has moved away from the rotating platters. Kindle and other e-books are out there, and while I still prefer the contrast of paper and the lack of DRM, they are popular. Telephones do send high res pictures and video, my 'new' cellphone is capable of both. It's only new to me, the model has been out for some time. And his prediction of dating online/ virtual sex, I think it nicely sums up all the problems of Second Life. As for people preferring to interact with female AI, he's right. Wasn't there an article here about more people choosing the female workout instructor in Wii Fit?
For his predictions of art, I've seen a lot of the things he dreamed up. People are making music with Guitar Hero 'toys', and cooking up strange new instruments with accelerometers. He didn't get it all right, but he was close.
Re:So, basically (Score:2, Interesting)
Right. He knows that what we want is what we end up achieving. And I'm sure he knows that he will be wrong on some of his predictions. A large part of what he is doing when he makes these predictions is trying to get people informed about what is possible, to stimulate people's imaginations, so that we will want the things that he thinks are important and good for our future. The goal of making predictions is more than just to be Slashdot fodder ten years from now.
So, Slashdotters, what do you want in ten years?
I have a better track record than he does. (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Downside [downside.com], where, in 2000, I called the dot-com crash before it happened and named names. Check my track record. Since then, I've occasionally pointed out the obvious before it became conventional wisdom:
The next crash looks to be housing-related. Fannie Mae is in trouble. But not because of their accounting irregularities. The problem is more fundamental. They borrow short, lend long, and paper over the resulting interest rate risk with derivatives. In a credit crunch, the counterparties will be squeezed hard. The numbers are huge. And there's no public record of who those counterparties are.
Derivatives allow the creation of securities with a low probability of loss coupled with a very high but unlikely loss. When unlikely events are uncorrelated, as with domestic fire insurance, this is a viable model. When unlikely events are correlated, as with interest rate risk, everything breaks at once. Remember "portfolio insurance"? Same problem.
Mortgage financing is so tied to public policy that predictions based on fundamentals are not possible. All we can do is to point out that huge stresses are accumulating in that sector. At some point, as interest rates increase, something will break in a big way. The result may look like the 1980s S&L debacle.
The 2004 prediction describes exactly what happened in housing. No question about that.
The 2006 predictions took longer to happen than I'd expected. The Fed cut rates sharply in 2007, accelerating the economy when it should have been hitting the brakes. This deferred the collapse of the housing bubble, but not for long. When it did pop, it was worse than it had to be.
I expected one of the car manufacturers to go bust. Instead, they all almost went bust, and only a Government bailout saved them. The fundamentals indicated something had to give. The housing bubble and interest rate cuts resulted in something of a "car bubble", deferring the inevitable a few more more years.
The hurricane prediction was kind of off the wall, but Galveston was duly flattened.
It's nice to be right, but it isn't happy-making.
Re:Will someone shut him up yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication.
Wrong, we don't have ever-present worldwide network. Even finding 'hot-spots' are hard.
I beg to differ. Two weeks ago today, I stood on a beach in Australia — at Hat Head, which, for the curious, is a small and fairly unremarkable seaside town in New South Wales, about 500 km from the nearest large city — where I had no trouble using my Swedish mobile phone/SIM to
Now... You were saying something about the lack of world-wide wireless connectivity...? :)
Re:I Predict... (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason is that otherwise hardly anyone would ever start a company - other than people who already own truckloads of money.
Let's say you have this really great idea for a word processor software. You can build it and bring it to market, no problem. But you know that MS will probably sue you and you can't be sure about the outcome of that. With limited liability you at least know that the worst that can happen is that your company goes out of business and you wasted a few years of your life.
Without limited liability on the other hand... Well, good luck paying off those seven digit "virtual damages" that some court may bill you for.
Re:So, basically (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Gaming is dead-on, too. In fact it's surprising it's been used so little. There was ancient c64 game that already could be taught 3 speech commands. Given the modern cpu and memory capabilities it should be all over the place, especially since X360 has microphone as standard issue.
Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already, no reason why you shouldn't be able to give AI voice commands in single-player too.
Re:So, basically (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Well, when I'm talking about "programming" using a natural language text interface, I don't mean what we currently think of as programming, I just mean programming in the sense of "giving a computer instructions to execute" -- basically, how they portray in Star Trek, where Kirk says "Computer: Do..." and the computer figures out what Kirk means by that, how to do it, and does it.
It's very unrealistic based on how we understand computers today, of course, but perhaps a super-advanced computer could be developed that could behave this way.
I suppose the argument could be made that Kirk interacting with the computer in this way is merely using the computer, not programming it. But I consider it to be programming at least in the sense that usually the computer is doing something it was not designed for to address some ad hoc situation that came up in the course of the episode.
Of course, in Star Trek they also do a fair amount of fiddling with buttons and dials and such, so to me the voice interface that Kirk uses on the bridge is more a dramatic device than a well thought out concept for a futuristic interface. But it's still a dream for many to one day be able to say things to their computer in a natural language and have it be able to interpret and execute successfully some appropriate actions.
Re:Thanks for agreeing with Kurzweil (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't agree with him, I reverse engineered his thought process ;-). Saying that trends are logarithmic is like saying that all distributions are Gaussian anyways. Often true, but you can't rely on that. And everyone knows that computer power expends logarithmically anyways, hence the Moore law. Or rather, not quite, in the real world shit happens, perhaps why he was arguably a bit off on that.
Oh and that's no hyperbole, I grew up and went to high school in France, not Mississippi.