Ray Kurzweil spouts more innumerate nonsense. Why does a date 15 years from now sound like some far-off future time to him? I could see how FM-2030 made the year 2030 as the arrival date of the Cool Future sound sort of plausible back in the 1980′s. But Ray should know better than to say something like this now:
I’ll give you a prediction I have more confidence in: According to the actuarial tables, a man Ray’s age has a 45 percent chance of dying over the next 15 years. I submit that the actuarial tables have a better track record for predicting “the future” than Kurzweil.
Suggestion: We should ask futurists to predict what will happen 5 years in the future. Then publish the results. Then publish it again 5 years later.
With shorter time period (but probably still long enough to trigger wild imagination in some) we could get more iterations, so we could filter out the worst ones, and still get a few useful predictions from the remaining ones.
It’s unfair to criticize someone making claims in that area that are based on the summary of a CNN journalist.
To me the most likely explanation is that the CNN journalist doesn’t provide a good summary of what Kurzweil said.
It’s interesting that Google seems to be following up on several of Kurzweil’s predictions, Google Glass/Magic Leap, Project Jacquard, and the self-driving car are all predictions Kurzweil made in The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.
Ray Kurzweil spouts more innumerate nonsense. Why does a date 15 years from now sound like some far-off future time to him? I could see how FM-2030 made the year 2030 as the arrival date of the Cool Future sound sort of plausible back in the 1980′s. But Ray should know better than to say something like this now:
Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/
I’ll give you a prediction I have more confidence in: According to the actuarial tables, a man Ray’s age has a 45 percent chance of dying over the next 15 years. I submit that the actuarial tables have a better track record for predicting “the future” than Kurzweil.
Suggestion: We should ask futurists to predict what will happen 5 years in the future. Then publish the results. Then publish it again 5 years later.
With shorter time period (but probably still long enough to trigger wild imagination in some) we could get more iterations, so we could filter out the worst ones, and still get a few useful predictions from the remaining ones.
It’s unfair to criticize someone making claims in that area that are based on the summary of a CNN journalist. To me the most likely explanation is that the CNN journalist doesn’t provide a good summary of what Kurzweil said.
It’s under the standards we should have on LW.
Agreed on all counts. It amazes me that anyone listens to that man.
It’s interesting that Google seems to be following up on several of Kurzweil’s predictions, Google Glass/Magic Leap, Project Jacquard, and the self-driving car are all predictions Kurzweil made in The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.