Skimming them, there are a lot of total misses (eg computer chips being carbon nanotubes—not even on the horizon as of 2020, silicon is king), but there’s also a fair number of ones which came true only just recently. For example, a lot of the software ones, like speech recognition/synthesis/transcription and being able to wear glasses with real-time captioning and using machine translation apps in ordinary conversation, really only came true within the last few years, and I don’t think this would have been predicted in 1999 based purely on trend extrapolation from n-grams machine translation or HMM voice recognition. Likewise, even allowing for “genetic algorithms” being wrong, “Massively parallel neural nets and genetic algorithms are in wide use.” would have been dismissed. I thought while grading his 2010 predictions back then that Kurzweil’s errors seemed to be to overestimate how much hardware and biology would be to change, but his software-related projections generally much better, and that seems even truer of his 2019 predictions.
As another decade has passed, his 2019 from 1999 predictions could be graded too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#2019
Skimming them, there are a lot of total misses (eg computer chips being carbon nanotubes—not even on the horizon as of 2020, silicon is king), but there’s also a fair number of ones which came true only just recently. For example, a lot of the software ones, like speech recognition/synthesis/transcription and being able to wear glasses with real-time captioning and using machine translation apps in ordinary conversation, really only came true within the last few years, and I don’t think this would have been predicted in 1999 based purely on trend extrapolation from n-grams machine translation or HMM voice recognition. Likewise, even allowing for “genetic algorithms” being wrong, “Massively parallel neural nets and genetic algorithms are in wide use.” would have been dismissed. I thought while grading his 2010 predictions back then that Kurzweil’s errors seemed to be to overestimate how much hardware and biology would be to change, but his software-related projections generally much better, and that seems even truer of his 2019 predictions.
Man, I really like the fact that LessWrong has now existed for a full decade, and we get to have comments like this.
Going for it here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TEqW7GFBuBvGo4fbW/call-for-volunteers-assessing-kurzweil-2019