Comment by slacka
8 years ago
His predictions are hit and miss. From his 1999 predictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...
By 2009:
Y: The majority of reading is done on displays rather than paper
N: Most text will be created using speech recognition technology.
N: Intelligent roads and driverless cars are in use
N: People use personal computers the size of rings, pins, credit cards
Y/N (premature): Though desktop PCs are still common for data storage, individuals primarily use portable devices for their computer-related tasks.
Y/N (premature): Personal worn computers provide monitoring of body functions, automated identity and directions for navigation.
N: A $1,000 computer can perform a trillion calculations per second.
... seemed a total mixed bag, many 2009 predictions just beginning to coming true today
By 2019:
N: The computational capacity of a $6,000 computing device is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (claims that is ~20 petaFLOPS. Nvidia DGX-2 is 2 petaFLOPS "AI" supercomputer for $399,000). [
N: Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).
Y(easy win): Most people own more than one PC
N: Cables connecting computers and peripherals have almost completely disappeared.
Y/N: People communicate with their computers via two-way speech and gestures instead of with keyboards. (can but in my home and my office most words entered are not)
N: Most business transactions or information inquiries involve dealing with a simulated person
N: Rotating computer hard drives are no longer used.
N: Three-dimensional nanotube lattices are the dominant computing substrate.
N: The algorithms that allow the relatively small genetic code of the brain to construct a much more complex organ are being transferred into computer neural nets.(Could be decades off. Need several breakthroughs to even put this on the horizon)
N: Most roads now have automated driving systems—networks that allow computer-controlled automobiles to safely navigate.
N: Most decisions made by humans involve consultation with machine intelligence. For example, a doctor may seek the advice of a digital assistant.
... few hit but we're mostly heading that way. To me seems 5-15 years premature
>Most people own more than one PC (easy win)
What's interesting is that I think most people own just one general purpose computing device these days, their cellphone. Yeah, they maybe also have a TV that can play netflix or a game console, but my observation is that most people don't even have one PC in the old sense of "a general purpose computer with a physical keyboard that you use by sitting down" - and if you exclude laptops from the definition it's even more rare.
> Cables connecting computers and peripherals have almost completely disappeared.
This one is unfortunately happening right on schedule, at least if you use Apple hardware. "A $1,000 computer can perform a trillion calculations per second" should be considered "premature" as well, seeing as current GPGPU hardware can go well beyond 1 TFLOPS.
As with most technologists and futurists, he fails to grasp that things take time, lots of time, to make meaningful progress and adoption.