"you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..."
Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation?
First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert.
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html
"I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor."
Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy?
What was hard to estimate was when it would happen.
"He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now."
But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve.
However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant
* that the technology could be implemented, or
* had been implemented in a lab, or
* was commonly available.
Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met.
This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions.
It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact.
However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was.
As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy.
I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one.
I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.
Okay - for all the Kurzweill naysayers - how about going out on a limb, and telling me which of his predictions are ones that we'd "eventually have" (+/- let's say five years or so), and which ones are just plain wrong.
For example - I think a _lot_ of people in 1990 would have (and in fact, they did) say that voice data entry would be the majority method for communication with computers in 2010. Totally and completely wrong. Kurzweil admits that he was way off on that one. (By at least 10 more years, he figures) But, at the time - it really seemed to be much more likely that we would automate voice entry, rather than teaching the entire human species to touch type.
So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish".
Alternatively, do you have some that he hasn't seen?
What drives me crazy about the Kurzweil Naysayers is that
A) They Nitpick - overlooking his general correctness.
(I include myself in that category, btw. )
B) They do it after the fact - I'd love for them to
pick a few of his future predictions and say that
(1) They will never happen or (2) They are obviously
going to happen.
I simultaneously have issues with Kurzweil's tendency to be overly generous with his "Mostly Correct/Correct" categories (check out my comments in other threads) - yet, at the same time believe it's important to look beyond the nitpicking of minor details. In the _specific_, Kurzweil is overly generous - but I think it's important that we don't lose sight of the fact that the general arc of his predictions, are, in fact, pretty good.
Critic is not necessarily pejorative. A critic can point out the good and bad.
"So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish". "
I'm not claiming to be able to make long term predictions.
I'm also not egomaniacal enough to think that anyone will care enough to come back and check my post in 5/10 years :)
I'm just saying to accurately evaluate how good his correct predictions were, we would need a benchmark of predictions of other people.
I think there's a lot of value to reading Kurzweils writing, and its entertaining. I just object to people who pick out the things he generously got right, and massively overestimate his success rate, including him. He recently announced an 86% success rate.
1) He shouldnt put sharp numbers quantifying things that have been loosely defined, and sloppily evaluated.
2) He has no-where near that, in my opinion.
Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation?
First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert.
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html "I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor."
Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy?
What was hard to estimate was when it would happen.
"He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now."
But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve.
However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant
* that the technology could be implemented, or
* had been implemented in a lab, or
* was commonly available.
Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met.
This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions.
It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact.
However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was.
As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy.
I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one. I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.