This is from Ray’s 2001 response to an essay by Jaron Lanier. I came across it while researching another post.
To correct a few of Jaron’s statements regarding (my) time frames, it’s not my position that the “singularity” will “arrive a quarter of the way into the new century” or that a “new criticality” will be “achieved in the about the year 2020.” Just so that the record is straight, my view is that we will have the requisite hardware capability to emulate the human brain in a $1,000 of a computation (which won’t be organized in the rectangular forms we see today such as notebooks and palmtops, but rather embedded in our environment) by 2020. The software will take longer, to around 2030. The “singularity” has divergent definitions, but for our purposes here we can consider this to be a time when nonbiological forms of intelligence dominate purely biological forms, albeit being derivative of them. This takes us beyond 2030, to perhaps 2040 or 2050.
So it’s 2021. Do we think for ~$1000 dollars we could buy the hardware to emulate the human brain? Will we not know until we have the software?
There’s a list on Wikipedia of his predictions and there’s a link from that article to Long Bets, but it looks like Ray only has one bet there. Would be interesting to see an up-to-date, batting average.
See this report. TL;DR: See the figure from it, below. This displays different estimates for how much computation it would take to perform tasks as well as the human brain. It also displays some GPUs for reference, with their prices.
Note that it’s important what Kurzweil means by “emulate the human brain.” If he means literally build brain emulations, i.e. a uploaded version of a particular human, then it would probably take more towards the higher end of this scale. If he means just make an AI that is just as good at various tasks, it’s probably towards the lower end of this scale.
Also, hardware prices have probably gone down somewhat since this report came out.
See Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results.