Ray predicted stuff, and is doing so at an exponentially more cautious rate. Ray is the spiritual heart of ‘technological expectationism‘; i.e. Ray exemplifies the most optimistic and far reaching expectations about the future. Even the future where we all may live to experience it.
That degree of being permitted to anticipate radical change is surreal beyond anything we have seen in history. I have read TSIN a few times with a wry grin. Central to who I am as a human being is the near pathological and inborn loathing I feel for contemporary constraints – and as a result the equally inborn desire I have to feel liberated from them through what I’d feel would be magic. My life has been lived crooked, twisted and deformed and other than jumping off a high ledge the only hope I have live to see a radical reshake to this whole ‘contemporary constraints’ business. I want the human state changed and I have very little sympathy for the people that don’t want that. I will be completely inconsiderate towards their interests – my finger is firmly on the fast forward button. Because I want out of the current constraints.
Ray is clearly charting a future where the granularity of human ingenuity will deconstruct and reconstruct the human state. The result will plausibly be transitional, and thus Transhuman and what will come next will be to human as is an Orion rocket to a horse cart.
So the question remains – is Ray the crazy flutist leading his merry bunch of futurophiles in a crazy march into the graveyard of dead ideologies? Judge for yourself 🙂
How My Predictions Are Faring
Ray Kurzweil
October 2010
OVERVIEW
How my predictions are faring In this essay I review the accuracy of my predictions going back a quarter of a century. To my knowledge, a comprehensive exercise along these lines is reasonably unique. Included herein is a discussion of my predictions from The Age of Intelligent Machines (which I wrote in the 1980s), all 147 predictions for 2009 in The Age of Spiritual Machines (which I wrote in the 1990s), plus others. Perhaps my most important predictions are implicit in my exponential graphs. These trajectories have indeed continued on course and I discuss these updated graphs below. My core thesis, which I call the ―law of accelerating returns,‖ is that fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories, belying the conventional wisdom that ―you can‘t predict the future. ……
http___c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com_predictions
After having read the complete Kurzwiel response I have to say he’s still pretty much right on track, though he and his critics are splitting a few mighty fine hairs.
It’s amazing how many people can refuse to see the massive changes we are already in the midst of, even though if you had tried to tell anyone back in the 70’s what we have going on daily, they would have called you mad.
I think it has to do with the fact that historically, there were “breaks” between waves of change, making each change pretty easy to pin down and define. Now, there is wave after wave after wave, coming from so many different directions that we can’t distinguish one change from another, and so, because we are looking for tsunami’s we can’t see the tiny waves that are speeding us along to a vastly different future.
Which is why I don’t think even Kurzweil has it close to right, he’s just closer than the vast majority. He still refuses to examine the actual social impacts that his projections are likely to create, which will affect the projections he’s made, and he has also not examined the potential orders of magnitude jump in processing power we are likely to get from graphene computers or quantum computers.
Basically I think some developments are likely to happen much quicker than Ray predicts, and others considerably slower. I think we’re about to see some large efforts to prevent Ray’s predictions from coming true by some world governments, which is going to accelerate the development of certain technologies while impeding the development of a couple of others, the end result of which is going to be a massive purging of corruption from the various worlds governmental bodies followed by the establishment of a single governing body committed to the elimination of human suffering and to world wide technological development.
Yeah, it could get bad for a bit, but the backlash will finally start us on the path to adulthood.