Congrats on your predictions, i suppose it wouldn't be very easy to understand the possibilities..
But thinking that these technologies are mostly exponential, do you still have a very hard time believing in predictions for 2030-2040 that may seem outlandish now? A few decades are a lot of time for exponential growth. What's your say?
My predictions started with video games. I was 7 when I played on a mainframe, 10 when "programming" on the Commodore PET (10 lines long, and spagehetti code at that young age as well!) but almost addicted to reading about new computers in the 80s. That culminated with the Amiga, and InfoWorld printed my letter bashing them for giving an IBM clone an 'A' and the Amiga a "D" or something low. I was able to predict what video games would look like in 1985, 1995 ...but was off on 2005 -- those should be here in around 2012, though. I don't think those predictions were too tough IF you kept in mind the exponential.
I have a hard time believing "everyone" in niner's crowd knew how big the internet would be by 1995. Bill Gates was downplaying the internet in 1995, but maybe niner's crowd was different.
I'm a lot like Kurzweil in the sense that my predictions stemmed from caring about an issue, or people saying something "can never happen"
The machine translation prediction in 1996 that European languages would be very good by 2006 seemed clear as a bell, but I didnt think of Google doing it for free. There was no google. I differed from Kurzweil in that I knew Japanese and Korean were harder, so assumed 5 years later. Then in 2001, when translator friends pushed me (and said I was nuts), I said Japanese and Korean into English between 2008 and 2015. Still on track if you follow the progress.
My highschool friend who was in a bad car accident in 1995 seemed essentially normal to me , but she had memory issues. She laughed after I told her about the machine translation prediction, "OK, Mr. Future, so when will I be normal? My neurologist says never." I also thought 'never' for 5 seconds, then thought "hold it... she's 25. If she lives to 75, that's... 2045...easily mild brain repair by then, and I didnt know about stem cells, etc. HIV was just nailed with inhibitors in 1995, a big deal, and I thought while 10 years of computer modeling wasn't enough, 20 years would be, so I told her 2016 as a ball park number.
Next up, I was the only person in a summer program with a science degree (physics) and the other 30 in the program thought it was weird I wasn't worried about global warming since that was a big topic in 1998. I tried to explain why the models are likely way off and how technology in the 2020s and 2030s should easily take care of any problem. I couldnt convince the social scientists that technology really will look different in 2030.
Cancer seemed likely to be 100% treatable by 2013 after the human genome was cracked, and if considering far better models by 2012. Kurzweil said 2009, but I think he changed in his latest book. I'll stick with 2013, and the NCI says the same thing by 2015. I hope it is sooner.
My point is that with basic information and assuming exponential computer power, the predictions may seem wild, but aren't. I admit that when I told my friend 2016 for mild brain repair, I was going out on a limb, and my conclusion surprised me as well since I thought mostly of things like limb regeneration by 2030s, etc. Not brain repair.
As for Kurzweil's 2030s and 2040s, to me that is still a black box as it was when 2040s scared me in highschool just because it seemed like it would be a very strange place relative to 1988. The only thing I don't buy is Kurzweil's immortality (not sure about them brain downloads either...), but do think he could be on the right track if he would let go of trying to find a mechanism like he does in his movie: "Super advanced AI will come down and collect the genetic material from my father's grave..." Say it takes until 433,150,432 March 7 before the dead rise, he cant possibly know how that could happen.
Edited by opendoor, 07 November 2009 - 11:39 AM.
