This is interesting. Kurzweil did pretty well on technological predictions—I count him 6 for 7 on purely technical predictions. He did very badly on socio-economic predictions. I give him 5 out of 24 based on a lot of half points. In many cases however the technological component of these predictions was available (except on speech recognition which is interesting in itself for HalFinney’s reasons) and he was just wrong on his predictions of how society would adopt it. I score him 12⁄18 where he was right about the technology but wrong about the socio-economics. Ignoring speech recognition he’s 12 for 13 on the tech (I granted a couple of half points).
I note that this was posted in December 2008 so given Kurzweil’s exponential growth theory it seems a bit premature to pass judgement at that point—you would expect quite a few of the claims to only come true in the last year of the decade if his theory were correct.
This is interesting. Kurzweil did pretty well on technological predictions—I count him 6 for 7 on purely technical predictions. He did very badly on socio-economic predictions. I give him 5 out of 24 based on a lot of half points. In many cases however the technological component of these predictions was available (except on speech recognition which is interesting in itself for HalFinney’s reasons) and he was just wrong on his predictions of how society would adopt it. I score him 12⁄18 where he was right about the technology but wrong about the socio-economics. Ignoring speech recognition he’s 12 for 13 on the tech (I granted a couple of half points).
I note that this was posted in December 2008 so given Kurzweil’s exponential growth theory it seems a bit premature to pass judgement at that point—you would expect quite a few of the claims to only come true in the last year of the decade if his theory were correct.