Your judgment on all of these is ridiculously positive. Just about everything you claim as true or partly true seems to be mostly false to totally false to me.
I kind of agree. I ticked off the predictions in my own head before scrolling down to see everyone else’s assessment, and here’s what I decided. (I didn’t consult Google or look things up, so take this with a pinch of AFAIK.)
5: false. Wired mice, displays, and printers remain common, more common than their wireless equivalents in my experience. In absolute terms there are surely more wired computer components out there than in 1999.
7: false. Even if the technology exists, I’m almost certain more text is still created by typing than CSR. And CSR is still less accurate than (sufficiently careful) human transcription; I vaguely remember Google recently beating Siri on this count.
8: false. Even if one counts these LUIs as ubiquitous, they aren’t frequently combined with animated personalities, and interacting with Siri et al. isn’t much like talking to a person through video conferencing. I can’t recall using LUIs or anything like them for simple business transactions (when I call businesses on the phone, for instance, it’s usually a human, a recording, or a press-one-for-this-press-two-for-that menu that answers). Worse, calling my local cinema and navigating their non-CSR LUI shows that even when recognising simple phrases (like my town’s name or a film’s name) from a circumscribed list of possibilities some LUIs remain unresponsive and imprecise.
18: weakly true. Computers aren’t used in every classroom lesson and they’re not in every classroom, but they’re in almost every school and kids routinely use them for writing essays, learning through educational games, and doing research. Nowadays, they probably do learn more from school computers than home computers.
20: false. Students now typically have a computer of their own but they aren’t all smartphones. Those who do interact with smartphones don’t mainly rely on styluses or speech and most of the text they enter is done with a keyboard (whether real or displayed virtually on-screen).
26: false? The second sentence is true (as SA writes, screen readers confirm this prediction). However, I’m not aware of cheap, real-world, real-time, handheld OCR that reliably & automatically processes text on signs & displays (although I’m open to correction).
29: true enough. I was going to call this false but that’s just down to my own ignorance because I didn’t know these systems existed. SA’s NYT link shows they do.
44: false. Intelligent roads, as far as I know, basically don’t exist (at least not in a novel form that didn’t exist in the ’90s).
48: false. I’d call the first sentence true. The second is probably false and the third is surely false, given the impact of the Great Recession. For unskilled people the economy was surely worse on average in 2009 & 2011 than it was in 1999.
53: false. I generously interpreted “virtual experience software” as computer games in general. These do let users “experience fantasy environments with no counterpart in the physical world”, but chances are there still isn’t a game out there where you can have virtual sex with your favourite actor. Moreover, the fact that few games are virtual reality games suggests that the visual and auditory experience of VR remains uncompelling.
So I’d give Kurzweil 10-20% here, not 50+%. I think the main reason is that SA was prepared to give Kurzweil a “weakly true” if most of a prediction was solid, whereas I required every part of a prediction to be basically right. If I broke the predictions down into individual sentences and scored those sentences one by one, Kurzweil would score higher.
So I’d give Kurzweil 10-20% here, not 50+%. I think the main reason is that SA was prepared to give Kurzweil a “weakly true” if most of a prediction was solid, whereas I required every part of a prediction to be basically right. If I broke the predictions down into individual sentences and scored those sentences one by one, Kurzweil would score higher.
I’m very much of mind that scoring this way was the correct course, since the predictions are cunjunctive, and for any prediction to be strong evidence for his overarching claims all its parts must be coherent and true. Intuitively, applying Occam’s Razor should, IMO, produce the results you’ve obtained.
Your judgment on all of these is ridiculously positive. Just about everything you claim as true or partly true seems to be mostly false to totally false to me.
I kind of agree. I ticked off the predictions in my own head before scrolling down to see everyone else’s assessment, and here’s what I decided. (I didn’t consult Google or look things up, so take this with a pinch of AFAIK.)
5: false. Wired mice, displays, and printers remain common, more common than their wireless equivalents in my experience. In absolute terms there are surely more wired computer components out there than in 1999.
7: false. Even if the technology exists, I’m almost certain more text is still created by typing than CSR. And CSR is still less accurate than (sufficiently careful) human transcription; I vaguely remember Google recently beating Siri on this count.
8: false. Even if one counts these LUIs as ubiquitous, they aren’t frequently combined with animated personalities, and interacting with Siri et al. isn’t much like talking to a person through video conferencing. I can’t recall using LUIs or anything like them for simple business transactions (when I call businesses on the phone, for instance, it’s usually a human, a recording, or a press-one-for-this-press-two-for-that menu that answers). Worse, calling my local cinema and navigating their non-CSR LUI shows that even when recognising simple phrases (like my town’s name or a film’s name) from a circumscribed list of possibilities some LUIs remain unresponsive and imprecise.
18: weakly true. Computers aren’t used in every classroom lesson and they’re not in every classroom, but they’re in almost every school and kids routinely use them for writing essays, learning through educational games, and doing research. Nowadays, they probably do learn more from school computers than home computers.
20: false. Students now typically have a computer of their own but they aren’t all smartphones. Those who do interact with smartphones don’t mainly rely on styluses or speech and most of the text they enter is done with a keyboard (whether real or displayed virtually on-screen).
26: false? The second sentence is true (as SA writes, screen readers confirm this prediction). However, I’m not aware of cheap, real-world, real-time, handheld OCR that reliably & automatically processes text on signs & displays (although I’m open to correction).
29: true enough. I was going to call this false but that’s just down to my own ignorance because I didn’t know these systems existed. SA’s NYT link shows they do.
44: false. Intelligent roads, as far as I know, basically don’t exist (at least not in a novel form that didn’t exist in the ’90s).
48: false. I’d call the first sentence true. The second is probably false and the third is surely false, given the impact of the Great Recession. For unskilled people the economy was surely worse on average in 2009 & 2011 than it was in 1999.
53: false. I generously interpreted “virtual experience software” as computer games in general. These do let users “experience fantasy environments with no counterpart in the physical world”, but chances are there still isn’t a game out there where you can have virtual sex with your favourite actor. Moreover, the fact that few games are virtual reality games suggests that the visual and auditory experience of VR remains uncompelling.
So I’d give Kurzweil 10-20% here, not 50+%. I think the main reason is that SA was prepared to give Kurzweil a “weakly true” if most of a prediction was solid, whereas I required every part of a prediction to be basically right. If I broke the predictions down into individual sentences and scored those sentences one by one, Kurzweil would score higher.
I’m very much of mind that scoring this way was the correct course, since the predictions are cunjunctive, and for any prediction to be strong evidence for his overarching claims all its parts must be coherent and true. Intuitively, applying Occam’s Razor should, IMO, produce the results you’ve obtained.
This is far more sensible judgement of Kurzweil’s prediction than OP’s.
Interesting. I was convinced I was erring on the other side. Which is another indication of how bloody subjective assessing these predictions is.