Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called Ray Kurzweil “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” In a book published in 1998, Kurzweil prognosticated the future we would see in 2009. Here are some of his hits and misses.
HIS PREDICTION HITS
2009 prediction: Digital objects such as books, music albums, movies and software will be rapidly distributed wirelessly as data files.
What happened: Movies, TV shows, music, books and applications are increasingly delivered over Wi-Fi and cell phone networks.
2009 prediction: Telephonic communication will routinely include moving images, allowing meetings among geographically disparate participants.
What happened: Though we still use voice-only telephones, Internet messaging with video has become more and more common.
2009 prediction: Personal computers with high resolution displays will come in a range of sizes, including some small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry.
What happened: Today devices are hung from belt loops, worn on blouses as jewelry pins and embedded into hearing aids.
2009 prediction: Although traditional classrooms will still be common, Web-based courseware will become a popular means of learning.
What happened: There is now a growing movement of Web-based universities, and major traditional universities are putting all of their courses online.
HIS PREDICTION MISSES
2009 prediction: The majority of text will be created by speech recognition dictation software.
What happened: Though speech recognition is now extremely accurate and is used by millions of people, most text is still created using keyboards.
2009 prediction: Translating telephone technology – allowing people who speak different languages to talk to one another in real-time – will be in common use.
What happened: Though there is now a downloadable iPhone application that provides this capability, it is not yet in common use.
Some of Kurzweil’s all-time best predictions
In the mid- 1990s, a worldwide communication network will emerge. It will connect hundreds of millions of people to each other and to vast knowledge resources (prediction made in mid-1980s, when the Internet as we know it was a fantasy).
Reality: The Internet as we know it was born, just around this time.
By 1998, a computer will take the world chess championship (prediction made in mid-1980s, when an average player could beat the best computer).
Reality: In 1997, the computer Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov.
The Soviet Union would be swept away by decentralized communication technologies such as e-mail over teletype machines and fax machines (prediction made in the mid-1980s, when the Soviet Union was going strong).
Reality: The Soviet Union collapsed for a number of reasons, with the rise of modern communication technologies playing a crucial role
Read more: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/12/13/2009-12-13_ray_kurzweils_crystal_ball.html