I do subscribe to his ideas that technological growth is not currently exponential but even steeper
They corrected it and made it even dumber, tech growth is steeper than exponential growth.
i gues we’re all living in the post-scarcity utopia then, because otherwise such growth would exhaust resources.
Kurzweil has been right on tons of his predictions.
What a shitty, ignorant title.
Easy peasy:
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Computers would beat humans at chess(happened in 1998)
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Digital information explosion(The information on the internet rapidly becoming too much for the entire world to read)
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Medicine becoming information technology(genomic, sequencing and crispr)
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The inevitability of direct human computer interfacing (neuralink)
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Life extension(cryonics/neuralink)
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AI becoming a major industry(AI)
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Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
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Cpu processing speed explosion(Moore’s law)
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PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
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Exoskeletons render the disabled able (3d printable prosthetic limbs)
There are many, many more correct predictions by this guy
@Varyk @jonhendry Neuralink? How’s that going? I presume extremely well with no problems, I haven’t got time to check right now
are these meat popsicles in the room with us?
gif, sorry for being annoying
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2009:
- “Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
- “The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
- “Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
- “the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
- “Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
- “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
- “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion”
- “Cables are disappearing.”
- “grammar checkers are now actually useful”
- “Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.”
- “The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software”
- “Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.”
Cryonics is a grift, nobody is going to be cured of death by future Dr Jesus.
| AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Yes, but in the same way that tax shelters and carbon offsetting are major industries. All the useful things done by “AI” tend to happen outside of the hype mills and be relatively boring statistical models like autocomplete, which nobody points to as a sign of the coming Computer God.
| Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
They build single-use computers into pregnancy tests. They’re powerful enough to run DOOM, despite being doomed to immediately become e-waste. Is this a sign of the imminent Singularity as well?
| PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Someone built a radio into a computer? Really? I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
- Sure, I’m not even going to verify this one since it’s so low stakes.
- This is ill-defined.
- Again ill-defined, and I need dates on this, we’ve been sequencing DNA for like 50yrs at this point.
- Lol, Neuralink kills monkeys, there’s zero indication of its “inevitability”.
- Lol^2, none of that shit works mate. Name one person whose life was extended with cryonics.
- AI is ill-defined, plus dates please.
- And how well did that go?
- First of all, that’s called Moore’s Law after the actual guy who made this prediction, you can’t credit someone else than Moore for Moore’s Law, wtf. Second, this hasn’t held for at least a decade now; we’ve been focusing on completely different things than raw CPU speed to actually increase compute.
- “Answer questions” there is a load-bearing term. Did he mean search engines? Is this deriberately vague?
- I’m sorry? First, a 3D printed prosthetic is not an exoskeleton, what kind of a logic leap is that. Second, citation needed on “3D printable prosthetic limbs” actually being in use right now on any scale.
I predict you are going to have a bad time here. And that is far before 2045.
(Edit: I hear you think, but predicting after a thing has already happened and keeps happening, that isn’t really predicting now is it. And Varyk was enlightened).
Haha, see, one prediction and it’s already wrong.
That’s why kurzweil is so impressive with all of his correct predictions.
Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
In the US? Fat fucking chance. The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
I don’t believe I’ll see UBI in my working lifetime. There are too many powerful interests that oppose it.
The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
In .nl our far right gov has seen this and decided to uncouple unemployment and wages/inflation as well. So yeah lol.
A friend of mine got the shit end of a “restructuring” at work the other day and immediately started applying for unemployment. Florida hasn’t increased that benefit in almost a decade (probably longer) so he’ll be getting the same paltry $275/wk that I got many many years ago when I was on unemployment for a bit. I hope he finds a new job soon because there’s absolutely no way to live on that.
Yes, so many people fail to see the existential stakes here. They think that even a bandaid like ubi is inevitable, because they don’t acknowledge the possibility that we could just die.
Like that if it’s cheaper to let us gather in unregulated tent cities and croak from the new plagues that blossom there, then that’s what’ll happen.
Obviously it’s not good for anyone in the long term, but corpos can’t think long term.
but corpos can’t think long term
they can. it’s just that, structurally, incentives are far more strongly geared to not do that in almost all cases.
I hovered on that word while writing it; almost put “can’t afford to think long term,” but that is even more ambiguous…
Anyway, thank you, I agree with your distinction.
My feeling is those incentives are so strong that anyone behaving too long term will usually get their lunch eaten by someone who is just out to make a quick profit.
You hear UBI thrown around a lot by the AI crowd, often before or after the word “obviously” and the phrase “the government will.” The people who talk about such-and-such political solution being INEVITABLE due to (some non political thing over here) have almost never spent even a moment paying attention to actual policy conversations that touch on their proposal. They usually have not looked at the political context either.
It is, in the year 2024, a Herculean effort to get the U.S. Congress to pass a functioning BUDGET. Every. fucking. year. The institution nominally in charge of the country grinds to a halt as it debates “Hey, should society continue existing? I’m not sure” for a few weeks because some asshole decides to throw sand in the gears over what the culture war issue is trending that day. Modest improvements to existing infrastructure or policy areas are MONTHS and YEARS long battles to get passed. And in the lucky event something does get happen, no one ever looks deeply into either the sustainability of the policy nor the implementation of the policy. Making sure the-thing-we-passed-helps-the-people-we-intended-and-is-functioning is always a Next Year problem for Somebody Else.
The very idea that, like, our government could get it together long enough to create and fund a long-term permanent UBI program is laughable. Insulting. “Well, it’s a very obvious problem that a government will have to solve” you say. “How could they not solve it?”
My dude. Not solving very obvious problems that it is their job to solve is our legislature’s speciality. It’s what it lives and breathes for. On the metaphorical resumé of Congress, “finding reasons to not do things” is the first bullet point under “Strengths.”
And UBI is not some trivial post-office naming bill. It would be a hugely contentious issue, as you’d have to decide fun questions like who qualifies to receive the money, how much money do they get and, most fun of all, who is going to pay for this. And whatever clever answer you think you have for that third question, I guarantee you they will immediately launch an all-out assault on your very soul once they catch a whiff of you attempting to redistribute THEIR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to hoard piles of cash large and small alike.
It’s an annoying statement to hear repeated because it’s such a STEM-head “on my napkin this is all very simple” reflex that totally ignores the reality of the human beings and the society they live in.
His synths are still legendary
@AllNewTypeFace @cstross did he ever leave his bullshit?
@AllNewTypeFace @cstross if a couch potato is someone who never leaves their couch, does this make Kurzwell a bullshit potato?
