futurism and technology 6:29 pm
Tom McCabe at the Rational Futurist has a new article up; “The Real Story Behind Fusion Energy”. I suggest you check it out — it dispels a great many myths that we have been told about fusion power, and recommends the construction of thorium-powered fission reactors instead.
futurism 3:09 pm
My long-time friend and associate Tom McCabe has a nice personal website up, Rational Futurist. At the site, you can read Tom’s popular articles, like “The Top 5 Technology Panics of 2009″, which was recently Slashdotted, “Reducing long-term AI risk”, and Tom’s brief summary of his life so far.
futurism and technology 9:00 pm
John Robb on Homemade Microwave Weapons
James Hughes: Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs. Technocratic Absolutism
Technology Review: Defining an Algorithm for Inventing from Nature
New Study: Human Running Speeds of 35 to 40 mph May be Biologically Possible
NASA’s Puffin: Will It Be the Personal Transport Vehicle of our SciFi Future?
Simon Conway Morris: Aliens are Likely to Look and Behave Like Us
Current TV’s Max and Jason on Connecting Science and Culture
Patrick Millard: Open Sim Project
Nick Bostrom: Moral Uncertainty: Towards a Solution?
Humanity+ Conference in London in April
Wired: Removing Part of Skull Makes for Better Brain Scans
Scientific American: Time to Ban Production of Nuclear Weapons Material
Ray Kurzweil at SU/MIT/X Prize BCI Workshop (More from Singularity Hub)
Gary Kasparov on AI: The Chess Master and the Computer
Nanowerk: Simple DNA Nanomachine is Capable of Continuous Rotation
Video Gamers: Size of Brain Structures Predicts Success
Robots Climb Up the Wall (w/ Video)
Retail Meat Linked to Urinary Tract Infections: Strong Evidence
The Human Brain Uses a Grid to Represent Space
Scientists Identify Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park as one of the Most Biodiverse Places on Earth
Face Recognition Ability Inherited Separately from IQ
Bill Gates’ New Website
Researchers Discover Ebola’s Deadly Secret
Study suggests theory for insect colonies as ’superorganisms’
Explained: the Shannon Limit
Wired: Never Mind the Singularity, Here’s the Science
Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy
A Lawyer’s View of the Risk of Black Hole Catastrophe at the LHC
Aubrey de Grey in Helsinki, Finland
Will the First Self-Replicating Machine Be Our Last Invention?
futurism and technology 2:18 pm
Here is the link. This is a good place to start to review Kurzweil’s 1996-1997 predictions. I remember reading this chapter myself in 2000 and analyzing the way in which the predictions did sync up with my own and the way they did not.
There are two categories of qualifying words used for the technology predictions: either they’re 1) “ubiquitous”, “common”, or the like, or 2) they simply exist. For something to qualify as “common” in my eyes would perhaps mean that a third of the white collar business world in the United States uses it on a weekly basis. (To be very generous.) For #2, the prediction can be regarded as having come “true” even if the product only exists as a prototype in a lab and has for some time.
Here’s a comment from Keith Norbury on the Kurzweil response post that I agree with:
It looks as though Kurzweil and Anissimov are both quibbling. I had similar thoughts as Anissimov did when I scrolled through the predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines. But I also thought, well, Kurzweil is just a little hasty in his enthusiasm. Yes, there’s a danger in setting firm dates for predictions of technological progress. However, because he makes them, Kurzweil gets people’s attention. Even when he is wrong on the exact date, he is still able to point to a trend that indicates he will be right soon enough (in most cases). So far, though, the dates have passed for the easier predictions. It gets harder going ahead.
Kurzweil’s main point is that technology is improving exponentially not linearly. That’s a difficult point to grasp. However, we still don’t know if even exponential growth is enough to tackle some sticky problems, such as simulating human intelligence. Nobody knows where the goal posts are yet. Nor do we understand yet the principles involved in uploading a human mind to computer, never mind the engineering it would require. The answers might be just around the corner, or they might be a long way away. Time travel, for example, is possible under the laws of physics. However, the huge energies required pose a giant obstacle to making it a reality.
I’m now reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent Red Mars, which points out the difficulties in making predictions. It’s speculative fiction but also hard science fiction. The trouble is, though, that the hard science in Red Mars is the science of 1993 when it was written. In the book, the voyage to Mars took nine months, as predicted using the technology that was proven in 1993. Since then, an ion propulsion system is well along the road to development that promises to shorten the trip to about 40 days — when it happens. That certainly doesn’t look like it will be by 2026, as in Red Mars. One could argue that Robinson wasn’t being a futurist when he wrote Red Mars. However, at the time he was striving to imagine as accurately as he could, based on the knowledge available, what that future mission would look like. Unfortunately, he didn’t imagine that humans would develop a better technology for getting to Mars, even though the principles of ion propulsion were already well known back in the 1990s.
My guess is that Robinson, in writing Red Mars, was thinking too linearly about technological progress and not in the exponential way that Kurzweil does. That’s what sets Kurzweil apart from other intelligent people who speculate about the future.
I agree with Kurzweil that many important technological metrics are improving exponentially, and that his linear-thinking critics are incorrect. I have always argued that major change is likely in the relatively near future. I regard a Singularity at 2029 or earlier as definitely within the realm of possibility. I am a “Singularitarian” of the type that Kurzweil describes in his book. Much of my life is focused around the idea of a Singularity, similar but not the same as Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity. I object to Kurzweil’s statements that MNT and nanorobots will certainly be a reality in the 2020s. I object to a lot of other things. I agree on the broad outlines of exponential change. I do not think Kurzweil is an “idiot”, as Singularity Hub misleadingly claimed recently. I think Kurzweil is a genius and I applaud him for making predictions at all.
It is much easier to criticize than to make predictions, I admit that. I believe that Kurzweil’s model is a good framework, and my model of the future is extremely similar to his relative to the mainstream. Still, the fine points are worth arguing. My main focus is on the points themselves. Perhaps I should have just listed the items and not even called them Kurzweil’s predictions, so I could criticize them at will without in any way threatening his reputation. In any case, I don’t think that Kurzweil’s reputation is at risk here. As he pointed out, I just poked at 7 out of 108 of his predictions in the book. I apologize for the sensationalist title of my original post — I didn’t mean that ALL of Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 had failed, just “Here’s a few failed predictions that I found on this specific web page and I agree with”.
I’m sure that everyone is interested in seeing Kurzweil’s point-by-point analysis of his predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines. Considering the concerns raised by those seven predictions I mentioned, I think a thorough review of the book is in order, and I’m pleased that Kurzweil himself has taken up the task. I gave the original post a provocative title because I strongly believed that investigation would benefit the entire futurist community, and I hoped to start a conservation on it. In that respect, it appears to have succeeded.
futurism 9:06 am
I have written Ray a short initial response, which I pursued one or two lines of criticism but mostly admitted that he’s right that 7 is a narrow selection of predictions and that if he is 102 for 108 then I would be very impressed. The key issue is how vague or precise these predictions were to start with, as Brian writes here.
Kurzweil requested that I withhold further judgment until he produces his point-by-point analysis of his 1996-1997 predictions, so I will be waiting on that before posting my full response. In truth, it’s been a few years since I looked at The Age of Spiritual Machines, but I remember reading it several times in the 2000-2005 date range.
I think that Kurzweil is one of the best futurists out there, but here he is essentially claiming that his ability to predict the future is unparalleled. I think that such a claim deserves a lot of skepticism and verification before acceptance. Maybe he is right, though — this issue is complex, and requires time to go through the whole thing. The reason why I focused on 7 predictions in my initial criticism is because I found them listed at another place on the Internet and addressing all 108 predictions would have been quite time-consuming. It could be that they are a highly non-representative sample.
Reflecting that, I have updated the title of my original post from “Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions” to “7 of 108 of Ray Kurzweil’s 1996-1997 Predictions for 2009 Which Seem Incorrect to Me”.
Today, I received an email from Ray Kurzweil responding to my January 5th post titled “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions”, where I said that I found a list of seven of his “1999 predictions for 2009″ that I thought were false. Below is the letter in its entirety. I have read the letter and am thinking about it. I will conduct further research on all the claims and produce a response with my new thoughts shortly.
—–
January 17, 2010
Dear Michael,
I want to respond to your Blog post “Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009.”
This starts out “Michael Anissimov notes that Ray Kurzweil had several predictions from 1999 for 2009 and those predictions are in general wrong.”
You also write “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions. In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.”
Your review is biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways.
First of all, I did not make “several predictions” for 2009. I made 108 predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines (TASM), which, incidentally, I wrote in 1996 to 1997. It takes a year to publish, so the book came out at the end of 1998. It is very misleading to take 7 predictions out of 108 and present that as all of my predictions for 2009.
I am in the process of writing a prediction-by-prediction analysis of these, which will be available soon and I will send it to you. But to summarize, of these 108 predictions, 89 were entirely correct by the end of 2009.
An additional 13 were what I would call “essentially correct” (for a total of 102 out of 108). You will note that the specificity of my predictions in TASM was by decades. There were predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. The 2009 predictions were providing a vision of what the world would be like around the end of the first decade of the new millennium. My critics were not saying “Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 are ridiculous, they will not come true until 2010 or 2011.” Rather, they were saying that my predictions were off by decades or centuries or would never happen. So if predictions made around 1996 for 2009 come true a year or a couple of years after 2009, given that the specificity was by decade, and the critics were saying that they were wrong by decades or centuries, then I would consider them to constitute an essentially accurate vision of what the world would be like around now.
My critics are very quick to jump on and exaggerate the slightest issue with my predictions. For example, earlier this year, one critic wrote that my prediction (made in 1996) that by 2009 there would exist a supercomputer that would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)” was “not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong.” I wrote back that IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer was already under construction and that IBM has announced that it will be operational in 2012. Since that time, another 20 petaflop supercomputer has been announced that will be operational next year, in 2011. Is it fair or reasonable to call this prediction “wildly, laughably wrong?”
I make this very point in my movie The Singularity is Near, A True Story about Future. One of my key (and consistent) predictions is that a computer will pass the Turing test by 2029. The first long-term prediction on the Long Now website (www.longnow.org) is a bet that I have with Mitch Kapor regarding this prediction. Mitch and I put up $20,000, and this amount plus interest will go to the foundation of the winner’s choice. I will win if a computer passes the Turing test by 2029 (and we have elaborate rules that we negotiated) and Mitch will win if that does not happen. In the movie, I create an AI-based avatar named Ramona and she fails the test in 2029 and Mitch wins the bet. However, she goes on to pass the test in 2033. If that is indeed what happens in the future, whose vision of the future can we say was correct?
From a strictly literal point of view and in terms of the rules of the bet, Kapor will have won the wager. But Kapor’s critique is not that “Kurzweil’s prediction of a computer passing the Turing test in 2029 is ridiculous, it won’t happen until 2033.” Rather he is saying I am off by centuries if it ever happens at all. My point is that if a computer passes the Turing test by 2033 rather than 2029 my vision of the future would be “essentially correct.” And so it is with the 13 predictions out of 108 that I made in TASM that are likely to come true in the next year or couple of years. By my calculation, 102 out of 108 predictions are either precisely correct or essentially correct.
Another 3 are partially correct, 2 look like they are about 10 years off, and 1, which was tongue in cheek anyway, was just wrong.
So for starters, your list of 7 predictions is misleading and is the result of severe selection bias. Moreover, most of these are not actually wrong. You have also changed the wording in ways that change the meaning of the predictions, or have just misinterpreted either the prediction or the current reality.
Take, for example, the first one you cite. The correct prediction was “Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry…” When I wrote this prediction, portable computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm. Today they are indeed embedded in shirt pockets, jacket pockets, and hung from belt loops. Colorful iPod nano models are worn on blouses as jewelry pins or on a sleeve while running, health monitors are woven into undergarments, there are now computers in hearing aids, and there are many other examples. The prediction does not say that all computers would be small devices, just that this would be “common,” which indeed is the case.. And “computers” should not be restricted to the current category we happen to call “personal computers.” All of these devices – iPods, smart phones, etc. are in fact sophisticated “computers.” By a reasonable interpretation of the prediction and the current reality, it is correct, not “false.”
There are indeed “computer displays that project images directly onto the eyes.” The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common.
You cite the prediction that “three-dimensional chips are commonly used” as false. But it is not false. Many if not most semiconductors fabricated today are in fact 3D chips, using vertical stacking technology. It is obviously only the beginning of a broad trend, but it is the case that three-dimensional chips are commonly used today.
“Translating Telephone technology” was indeed available only in prototype form earlier in 2009, but now is a popular iPhone app and the technology is available on Symbian phones and on Google’s popular new Nexus One, using Google’s voice translation server. My prediction was that it would be “commonly used,” not that it would be ubiquitous. I suppose we could argue how “common” its use is, but it is already a popular app. Having been introduced late in 2009, it is likely to become quite popular on many phones worldwide in 2010.
“Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices” is certainly true in Afghanistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air war … has escalated under McChrystal’s watch….” Also there are munitions that are about the size of birds that can be released from larger aircraft and that have their own intelligent navigation.
So even of this highly selective list, your interpretation of the predictions is rigid and idiosyncratic. You have a certain vision of how these types of developments will or should manifest themselves, but under a reasonable interpretation, most of your selected predictions are in fact not false.
The status of these predictions changes very quickly. In November 2009, the idea of large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition on a cell phone was still off in the future. Just one month later, this became one of the most popular free apps for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation from Nuance, which used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first major company) as well as the popular Google Search on iPhones and in Google Droid and Nexus One phones.
Two or three years from now is a very long way off, and the world will again be quite different, so for the handful of my 108 predictions for 2009 that are not literally true now, most will likely become true over that time.
So I agree with you that there should be accountability for predictions, but such reviews need to be free of bias, fair, and not subject to selection bias and myopic interpretations of both the words used and the current reality.
In this essay I am working on, I will also review my predictions written in the mid 1980s in The Age of Intelligent Machines, which were also very accurate.
I am not saying that there are no misses, but it I believe it is fair to say that the vision of the future that I have painted in the past for the current world is quite accurate, especially compared to the critics who at the time said that these predictions were off by decades or centuries.
Best,
Ray Kurzweil
futurism 3:16 pm
Update: Ray Kurzweil’s January 17th, 2010 response to this is posted below my initial post. He said, “your review is biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways”.
In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.
Futurism should not be about storytelling, with overly specific scenarios and dates. Rather, scenarios should be offered as vague guesses at what the future might be like, not declarative prophesizing. I do believe that Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 will come true, but maybe not until 2016 or 2018.
Here are the failed predictions:
1. Personal computers with high resolution interface embedded in clothing and jewelry, networked in Body LAN’s.
2. The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software.
3. Computer displays built into eyeglasses project the images directly onto the user’s retinas.
4. In terms of circuitry, three-dimensional chips are commonly used.
5. Translating Telephone technology is commonly used for many language pairs.
6. Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices. Many of these flying weapons are the size of small birds, or smaller.
7. Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel. Once your car’s computer guidance system locks onto the control sensors on one of these highways, you can sit back and relax.
All false! Sometimes Kurzweil’s predictions sound more like a visionary wish list of technological goodies than carefully calibrated technological forecasting. Useful for inspiration, certainly, but as far as correctness goes, the dates seem a little premature.
Update: I have absolutely nothing against Kurzweil, and I consider him a transhumanist role model, in a way. The only reason I point out that he got his predictions wrong is that basic idea of accountability. Why bother making predictions if you aren’t held accountable for them, and people like me don’t point it out? Of course some of the technologies exist today — the implication from Kurzweil is that they would now be commonplace. One commenter pointed out that people always ask “when?”, but it wouldn’t kill futurists to give probability distributions rather than discrete dates. The movement towards probability distributions in futurism rather than discrete dates is something that I and a few others are currently pioneering in a world irrationally biased towards specific dates (like 2012, for instance, which acquired fame without any scientific support whatsoever) and vivid narratives.
So far, I haven’t seen Kurzweil straight-up admit that he was wrong. I think he would benefit from doing so on some of these points. Perhaps the masses would take him less seriously if he acknowledged he was wrong, but it would make serious forecasters take him more seriously. If writing for a popular audience is a tradeoff where you necessarily sound less credible to serious forecasters, then a writer has to choose one or the other. It might not be possible to be popular and accurate at the same time. My role is to improve futurism by pointing out inaccurate predictions. I commend Kurzweil for making predictions at all, but we must raise the bar. Concrete date-centric predictions ought to be thrown out, and replaced by probability distributions.
Some futurism-oriented friends of mine have pointed out that you can say anything you want in futurism and it doesn’t matter, because you will never be held accountable for your predictions. Some of the comments on this blog post are proving that true — because people like Kurzweil for his thought-provoking books, they pretend as if the accuracy of his predictions don’t matter. They do. We can consider his works thought-provoking and still look at his predictions with a critical, rational eye. One example of a terribly failed futurist is Ian Pearson, who predicted human-equivalent AI in 2015, and was recently let go from British Telecom, where he was “resident futurist”. I feel bad that terrible futurists like Pearson exist because trashy newspapers like the Daily Mail then go and write up their predictions without knowing any better, thereby giving futurism a bad name.
I’ve been disturbed by the most recent media articles covering Kurzweil that claim that immortality could be here within 20 years. It could, but maybe not, and when articles like that say, “The 61-year-old American, who has predicted new technologies arriving before, says our understanding of genes and computer technology is accelerating at an incredible rate”, and people don’t care about which new technologies he has predicted and what error rate he had, that is intellectually pathetic. We must know, and we must create records for accountability.
~~~~
Ray Kurzweil response:
January 17, 2010
Dear Michael,
I want to respond to your Blog post “Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009.”
This starts out “Michael Anissimov notes that Ray Kurzweil had several predictions from 1999 for 2009 and those predictions are in general wrong.”
You also write “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions. In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.”
Your review is biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways.
First of all, I did not make “several predictions” for 2009. I made 108 predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines (TASM), which, incidentally, I wrote in 1996 to 1997. It takes a year to publish, so the book came out at the end of 1998. It is very misleading to take 7 predictions out of 108 and present that as all of my predictions for 2009.
I am in the process of writing a prediction-by-prediction analysis of these, which will be available soon and I will send it to you. But to summarize, of these 108 predictions, 89 were entirely correct by the end of 2009.
An additional 13 were what I would call “essentially correct” (for a total of 102 out of 108). You will note that the specificity of my predictions in TASM was by decades. There were predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. The 2009 predictions were providing a vision of what the world would be like around the end of the first decade of the new millennium. My critics were not saying “Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 are ridiculous, they will not come true until 2010 or 2011.” Rather, they were saying that my predictions were off by decades or centuries or would never happen. So if predictions made around 1996 for 2009 come true a year or a couple of years after 2009, given that the specificity was by decade, and the critics were saying that they were wrong by decades or centuries, then I would consider them to constitute an essentially accurate vision of what the world would be like around now.
My critics are very quick to jump on and exaggerate the slightest issue with my predictions. For example, earlier this year, one critic wrote that my prediction (made in 1996) that by 2009 there would exist a supercomputer that would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)” was “not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong.” I wrote back that IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer was already under construction and that IBM has announced that it will be operational in 2012. Since that time, another 20 petaflop supercomputer has been announced that will be operational next year, in 2011. Is it fair or reasonable to call this prediction “wildly, laughably wrong?”
I make this very point in my movie The Singularity is Near, A True Story about Future. One of my key (and consistent) predictions is that a computer will pass the Turing test by 2029. The first long-term prediction on the Long Now website (www.longnow.org) is a bet that I have with Mitch Kapor regarding this prediction. Mitch and I put up $20,000, and this amount plus interest will go to the foundation of the winner’s choice. I will win if a computer passes the Turing test by 2029 (and we have elaborate rules that we negotiated) and Mitch will win if that does not happen. In the movie, I create an AI-based avatar named Ramona and she fails the test in 2029 and Mitch wins the bet. However, she goes on to pass the test in 2033. If that is indeed what happens in the future, whose vision of the future can we say was correct?
From a strictly literal point of view and in terms of the rules of the bet, Kapor will have won the wager. But Kapor’s critique is not that “Kurzweil’s prediction of a computer passing the Turing test in 2029 is ridiculous, it won’t happen until 2033.” Rather he is saying I am off by centuries if it ever happens at all. My point is that if a computer passes the Turing test by 2033 rather than 2029 my vision of the future would be “essentially correct.” And so it is with the 13 predictions out of 108 that I made in TASM that are likely to come true in the next year or couple of years. By my calculation, 102 out of 108 predictions are either precisely correct or essentially correct.
Another 3 are partially correct, 2 look like they are about 10 years off, and 1, which was tongue in cheek anyway, was just wrong.
So for starters, your list of 7 predictions is misleading and is the result of severe selection bias. Moreover, most of these are not actually wrong. You have also changed the wording in ways that change the meaning of the predictions, or have just misinterpreted either the prediction or the current reality.
Take, for example, the first one you cite. The correct prediction was “Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry…” When I wrote this prediction, portable computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm. Today they are indeed embedded in shirt pockets, jacket pockets, and hung from belt loops. Colorful iPod nano models are worn on blouses as jewelry pins or on a sleeve while running, health monitors are woven into undergarments, there are now computers in hearing aids, and there are many other examples. The prediction does not say that all computers would be small devices, just that this would be “common,” which indeed is the case.. And “computers” should not be restricted to the current category we happen to call “personal computers.” All of these devices – iPods, smart phones, etc. are in fact sophisticated “computers.” By a reasonable interpretation of the prediction and the current reality, it is correct, not “false.”
There are indeed “computer displays that project images directly onto the eyes.” The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common.
You cite the prediction that “three-dimensional chips are commonly used” as false. But it is not false. Many if not most semiconductors fabricated today are in fact 3D chips, using vertical stacking technology. It is obviously only the beginning of a broad trend, but it is the case that three-dimensional chips are commonly used today.
“Translating Telephone technology” was indeed available only in prototype form earlier in 2009, but now is a popular iPhone app and the technology is available on Symbian phones and on Google’s popular new Nexus One, using Google’s voice translation server. My prediction was that it would be “commonly used,” not that it would be ubiquitous. I suppose we could argue how “common” its use is, but it is already a popular app. Having been introduced late in 2009, it is likely to become quite popular on many phones worldwide in 2010.
“Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices” is certainly true in Afghanistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air war … has escalated under McChrystal’s watch….” Also there are munitions that are about the size of birds that can be released from larger aircraft and that have their own intelligent navigation.
So even of this highly selective list, your interpretation of the predictions is rigid and idiosyncratic. You have a certain vision of how these types of developments will or should manifest themselves, but under a reasonable interpretation, most of your selected predictions are in fact not false.
The status of these predictions changes very quickly. In November 2009, the idea of large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition on a cell phone was still off in the future. Just one month later, this became one of the most popular free apps for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation from Nuance, which used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first major company) as well as the popular Google Search on iPhones and in Google Droid and Nexus One phones.
Two or three years from now is a very long way off, and the world will again be quite different, so for the handful of my 108 predictions for 2009 that are not literally true now, most will likely become true over that time.
So I agree with you that there should be accountability for predictions, but such reviews need to be free of bias, fair, and not subject to selection bias and myopic interpretations of both the words used and the current reality.
In this essay I am working on, I will also review my predictions written in the mid 1980s in The Age of Intelligent Machines, which were also very accurate.
I am not saying that there are no misses, but it I believe it is fair to say that the vision of the future that I have painted in the past for the current world is quite accurate, especially compared to the critics who at the time said that these predictions were off by decades or centuries.
Best,
Ray Kurzweil
SIAI and friendly ai and futurism 12:02 pm
Here is a summary of the Singularity Institute’s 2009 accomplishments that myself and other SIAI staff and friends compiled recently in preparation for our 2010 Singularity Research Challenge, where every dollar donated up to $100,000 will be matched. You can also select which research you choose to support, if you like. We compiled almost 20 grants to choose from. Without further adieu, here is the summary, and be sure to visit SIAI’s website for proper formatting and links:
2009 has been a year of growth and new horizons for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). We achieved a number of milestones relevant to our mission — pursuing dialogue, research, and activism to promote a beneficial Singularity. The response we’ve received has been considerable — SIAI is more high-profile and frequently-mentioned now than it has ever been.
Our key accomplishments in 2009 were holding the Singularity Summit in New York, hiring three new employees (Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov, and Amy Willey), establishing a continuous SIAI Visiting Fellows Program, delivering eight presentations across four conferences, improving cooperation with allied organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute, and establishing the Less Wrong web community, which receives thousands of visitors per day and fosters many high-quality discussions on philosophical and practical issues related to decision theory and rationality. The Uncertain Future, an interactive web application for quantitatively modeling future possibilities such as human-level AI, human intelligence enhancement, and global catastrophic risk, was also released as a beta version in December.
In April, Eliezer Yudkowsky completed two years of posting sequences on Less Wrong (which will be edited into a book on rationality and Singularity-relevant topics like reductionism and decision theory), drafting strategy documents for improving internal organization and long-term planning. Throughout the year, we continued consolidating SIAI staff, Visiting Fellows, volunteers, and interns in the San Francisco Bay Area. SIAI Visiting Fellow Peter de Blanc revised a paper on unbounded utility functions. The Singularity Institute received media coverage for its work in The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other venues. An article by SIAI President Michael Vassar, “Machine Minds”, made it into the Forbes special “The AI Report”.
The Singularity Institute’s long-term mission is to maximize the probability of a beneficial Singularity, through dialogue, research, and activism. All of our activities are ultimately chosen to further this purpose. The Singularity Institute particularly focuses on the possibility of a Singularity through artificial general intelligence, but also analyzes other potential pathways, including whole brain emulation and human cognitive enhancement.
To summarize our major accomplishments over the past year:
1. Singularity Summit 2009 in New York. Our fourth annual Singularity Summit was the first Singularity-focused conference ever held on the East Coast. Held October 3-4, the Singularity Summit featured 25 excellent speakers on topics including biotechnology, futurism, decision theory, artificial intelligence, quantum computing. the scientific method, cognitive ability, philosophy, computer science, and even synthetic neurobiology. Over 800 people attended, and the conference attracted reporters from over two dozen news organizations, including the New York Times. Coverage was provided by Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Forbes, and many other media venues. Speakers this year included venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Wired magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf, AI researchers Juergen Schmidhuber, Marcus Hutter, and Itamar Arel, SIAI employees Anna Salamon, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, philosopher David Chalmers, futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame, and many others. Videos from the Summit are online at Vimeo. After the Summit, SIAI held an in-depth workshop, which allowed the speakers and SIAI staff to share ideas and brainstorm about the risks and benefits of a possible Singularity.
2. Hiring of new employees. Early in the year, Executive Director Tyler Emerson departed the Singularity Institute and his role was filled by a new President, Michael Vassar. Mr. Vassar holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State and an MBA from Drexel University, and was previously Founder and Chief Strategist at Sir Groovy, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Throughout the year, he participated in numerous interviews and podcasts on behalf of SIAI, including interviews at Accelerating Future, The Futurist, Future Blogger, and h+ magazine.
Two new research fellows, Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk, were hired by SIAI in late 2008. Salamon and Rayhawk had previously participated in the 2008 SIAI Summer Program, which was led by Salamon. Salamon holds degrees in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and Great Books from St. John’s, and Rayhawk holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara. Salamon and Rayhawk are both focusing on applying computational Bayesian decision theory to problems in technological forecasting, risk management policy, and social epistemology, and form the core of our Visiting Fellows Program, bringing visiting scholars up to speed on the work that SIAI does. In early 2009, SIAI also hired a Media Director, Michael Anissimov, responsible for compiling, distributing, and promoting SIAI media materials including our writing, websites, and videos, and communicating the activities of SIAI to the public. Anissimov is author of Accelerating Future, a popular blog focused on science and futurism. Most recently, in December, SIAI hired Amy Willey, who holds a law degree from New York University, as Chief Compliance Officer.
With the addition of these new employees, SIAI brought its total full-time employee count to six, including Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has worked for SIAI since he co-founded the organization in 2000.
3. In 2009, SIAI established a Visiting Fellows Program, based in Silicon Valley. The program began with SIAI’s 2009 Summer Fellows, brought together to work on challenging projects in decision theory, philosophy, technological forecasting, heuristics and biases, and planning for the Singularity Summit 2009. Primarily graduate students, the Fellows came from educational backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, and physics, with the remainder ranging from philosophy to economics and biochemistry. They attend or hold degrees from universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Auckland University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Fellows traveled to Silicon Valley from throughout the United States and from Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Some of these researchers stayed on past the summer or joined shortly thereafter to work with SIAI as volunteers or Visiting Fellows on a more extended basis. Some of the work that came out of the Visiting Fellows Program has been presented in papers and talks at venues like the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy, the Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy, and a Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting. The Visiting Fellows Program has been instrumental in fostering a devoted community of Singularity Institute supporters making useful contributions towards SIAI’s ultimate goal, and SIAI recently put out a fresh call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows.
4. SIAI researchers, volunteers, and Visiting Fellows presented the following nine talks and papers throughout 2009:
* “Changing the frame of AI futurism: From storytelling to heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions”, by Steve Rayhawk, Anna Salamon, Tom McCabe, Rolf Nelson, and Michael Anissimov. (Presented at the European Conference of Computing and Philosophy in July ‘09 (ECAP))
* “Arms Control and Intelligence Explosions”, by Carl Shulman (Also presented at ECAP)
*“Machine Ethics and Superintelligence”, by Carl Shulman and Henrik Jonsson (Presented at the Asia-Pacific Conference of Computing and Philosophy in October ‘09 (APCAP))
*“Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence”, by Carl Shulman and Nick Tarleton (Also presented at APCAP);
*“Long-term AI forecasting: Building methodologies that work”, an invited presentation by Anna Salamon at the Santa Fe Institute conference on forecasting;
*“Shaping the Intelligence Explosion” and “How much it matters to know what matters: A back of the envelope calculation”, presentations by Anna Salamon at the Singularity Summit 2009 in October;
* “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”, a presentation by SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Cognitive Biases and Giant Risks”, a presentation by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky at Singularity Summit 2009;
* “Convergence of Expected Utility for Universal Artificial Intelligence”, a paper by Peter de Blanc, an SIAI Visiting Fellow.
Many more talks and papers are in the works for 2010, including a talk by SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov at the Foresight 2010 conference in January.
5. One of the primary goals of the Singularity Institute in 2009 was to strengthen our ties to academia and allied organizations, which was accomplished through talks, papers, and direct dialogue. SIAI researchers and representatives built closer ties to organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, Santa Fe Institute, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Foresight Institute, and many others. SIAI researcher Anna Salamon was invited to give a talk at an exclusive conference on technological forecasting held by the Santa Fe Institute. The Singularity Institute has been using videoconferencing, blogs, and mailing lists to keep in contact with our supporters and collaborators around the globe. SIAI more than tripled its representatives through the Visiting Fellows program, allowing it to better interface with a larger network.
6. 2009 saw the founding of the Less Wrong web community. Less Wrong was founded as a rationalist community to “systematically improve on the art, craft, and science of human rationality”. Thousands of people visit the site every day, with hundreds participating regularly in the comments sections. Less Wrong grew out of Overcoming Bias, a blog co-authored by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky and George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. Yudkowsky wrote extensively on Overcoming Bias from 2007-2009, and his posts have been ported over to Less Wrong, where they are organized into sequences that address topics such as reductionism, determinism, human rationality, metaethics, mathematics, and many others.
Less Wrong is important to the Singularity Institute’s work towards a beneficial Singularity in providing an introduction to issues of cognitive biases and rationality relevant for careful thinking about optimal philanthropy and many of the problems that must be solved in advance of the creation of provably human-friendly powerful artificial intelligence. At the same time, it has gathered a community that can provide rapid feedback and significant progress on such problems. For instance, Less Wrong participants Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov proposed decision algorithms that can deal with a certain classes of problems where Bayesian updating seems to lead decisionmakers astray. This work was closely related to decision theory work done in-house at SIAI, namely Eliezer Yudkowsky’s timeless decision theory, an algorithm that computes the counterfactual consequences of possible actions using an extension of Judea Pearl’s formalism of causal networks to logical uncertainties, and additional work by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk. These developments have received positive attention from Gary Drescher and philosopher David Chalmers, and will be written up for peer review in the coming year.
Besides providing a home for an intellectual community dialoguing on rationality and decision theory, Less Wrong is also a key venue for SIAI recruitment. Many of the participants in SIAI’s Visiting Fellows Program first discovered the organization through Less Wrong.
7. This year Eliezer Yudkowsky finished his posting sequences on Less Wrong, which attracted thousands of enthusiastic readers and came to serve as the seed of a new community. Yudkowsky used the blogging format to write the substantive content of a book on rationality, enabling that work to be read and receive feedback as it progressed. Throughout the summer, Yudkowsky engaged in Friendly AI research with Marcello Herreshoff, a Stanford mathematics student who previously spent his gap year working for SIAI. Yudkowsky is now converting his blog sequences into the planned rationality book, which he hopes will significantly assist in attracting and inspiring talented individuals to effectively work towards the aims of a beneficial Singularity and reduced existential risk.
8. In December, a subset of SIAI researchers and volunteers finished improving The Uncertain Future web application to officially announce it as a beta version. The Uncertain Future represents a new kind of futurism — futurism with heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions. The purpose is to provide a tool for use by futurists and the informed public to input probability distributions over quantitative questions like, “how much computing power would be necessary to implement neuromorphic AI?”, combining them into a “picture of the future according to you”. Another goal of the project is to provide an alternative to the futurist methodologies of storytelling and scenario building, which dominate the field even though they often cause futurists to overestimate the probability of precise, vivid stories at the expense of a wider space of neglected possibilities.
futurism 8:47 pm
The Winter edition of h+ magazine is out. There is strong representation from the Singularity Institute among the article contributors, with pieces by myself, Tom McCabe, and Ben Goertzel. Definitely check out McCabe and Goertzel’s interesting articles.
On page 12, I talk about Ned Seeman’s latest totally-awesome robotic nanomanipulating arm. It places atoms and molecules with 100% accuracy.
The theme of the issue is DIY, which is great. It makes use of leverage. If the goal of h+ magazine is to promote scientific research into human enhancement, then promoting DIY technology is an effective use of their money.
In the DIY realm, I’ve lately been following 3D fabbing with interest, as have many mainstream news sources.
I notice that the website has a thoughtful article on the significance of 4chan. Jason Louv writes:
Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we’re headed. The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us.
Yes, yes, yes. This is so true, and barely anyone knows it. On 4chan, people talk with pictures. I believe that the future of human communication will include talking with pictures to a greater degree than we see today.
H+ is being a pioneering website by being one of the first to feature intelligent analysis of the 4chan phenomenon and getting past the “rubbernecking disgust” of the mainstream media. The dominant communications fora of the future will look a lot more like 4chan than like a town hall meeting, but the number of writers available to comment on that compelling and barely-explored future vision is very low.
A webapp that I worked on with Steve Rayhawk, Anna Salamon, Tom McCabe, and Rolf Nelson, during the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Summer 2008 Research Program, with helpful discussions with a few others, is now in beta and ready for public announcement. It is called The Uncertain Future.
The Uncertain Future represents a new kind of futurism — futurism with heavy-tailed, high-dimension probability distributions. In fact, that’s the name of the paper presented at the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy that unveiled the project: “Changing the frame of AI futurism: From storytelling to heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions”.
Most futurism is about telling a story — more like marketing than an honest attempt at uncovering the possible range of what the future may hold. Better than creating a single story is scenario building — but this falls short as well. Scenario building is human nature, but it leaves us susceptible to anchoring effects where we overestimate the probability of vivid scenarios. To quote “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks”, page 6:
The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts. Two independent sets of professional analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the probability of “A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983″ or “A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983″. The second set of analysts responded with significantly higher probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1983.)
The conjunction fallacy means that people overestimate the probability of vivid, detailed scenarios even though each additional detail necessarily decreases the probability that the event will occur.s
To combat against the conjunction fallacy and storytelling fallacies in our particular area of futurism, which includes intelligence enhancement, AI, and global catastrophic risk, we created an interactive system that allows the user to input their own probability distributions for different variables potentially associated with the future of AI and humanity, including a probability distribution of how much computing power would required to create human-level AI, a probability distribution for the likelihood of global thermonuclear war in the next century, and many other variables. Our toy model includes variables for the creation of AI, the possible success of intelligence amplification technology, and the potential extinction of the human species by technological mishap before either of these occurs.
Our system is built on the assumption that breaking down a challenging prediction task into its constituent parts can be beneficial because it forces us to think about the task in greater detail and avoid obvious biases associated with specific scenarios we may be anchoring on. Some people may criticize such a view for being excessively reductionist, but many prediction tasks really can be broken down into component pieces. The alternative is making “expert” guesses based on a holistic evaluation of the prediction task, which leaves us open to many well-documented biases.
Here is the opening blurb for the webapp, by Tom McCabe:
The Uncertain Future is a future technology and world-modeling project by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Its goal is to allow those interested in future technology to form their own rigorous, mathematically consistent model of how the development of advanced technologies will affect the evolution of civilization over the next hundred years. To facilitate this, we have gathered data on what experts think is going to happen, in such fields as semiconductor development, biotechnology, global security, Artificial Intelligence and neuroscience. We invite you, the user, to read about the opinions of these experts, and then come to your own conclusion about the likely destiny of mankind.
Interested? It’s not perfect, but we think that our system might be a seed for looking at futurism in a different way — providing an alternative to storytelling and scenario building. This sort of “probabilistic futurism” encourages would-be seers to widen their confidence bounds when confronted with uncertainty, instead of irrationally making overconfident guesses to seem like “experts”. The particular issues we focus on are controversial — human-equivalent AI, biotechnology used to select gametes with genes associated with intelligence, the probability of planet-ending catastrophe — but we chose these issues specifically because there is disagreement about what degree of uncertainty is warranted from our present position is evaluating these scenarios.
We visualize this tool being used among futurists to specify their quantitative background assumptions regarding the technologies discussed. This might be used to clear aside straw men and zoom in on the core disagreements. It might also be used to evaluate the degree to which respective futurists have considered the technological prerequisites and other assumptions underlying their scenarios.
Go ahead and try the quiz now. Take it slowly, thinking carefully about each question. Scroll down to see predictions from experts, and, where applicable, you can click a button to load a probability distribution that I estimated to be roughly associated with the quote we provided. After taking a look at what the experts say, think about your own position on the issues, and input a probability distribution accordingly.
If you like the system or find it useful, be sure to post a link to it on Facebook or suggest it to your friends. The system still has quite a few bugs; we used Java applets for the probability distributions, and designed it so that the Java applet makes calls to the surrounding HTML which may fail on some combinations of OS and browser. If you use a Mac, you should use Safari, and if you use Linux/Windows, use Opera or Firefox.
futurism and nanotechnology and singularity 11:59 am
My latest article (#3) in the Singularity series on Good.is is up, a piece that describes exponential manufacturing titled Building “The Everything Machine”. Meanwhile, Roko’s article on “Why the Fuss About Intelligence?” is the 2nd most discussed article on the site in the last week. I will repost my article here for further discussion, but I also encourage you to register on the site and comment there. Here it is:
Building the “Everything Machine”
Nanotechnology and exponential manufacturing could help us make whatever humanity needs, atom by atom.
Part three in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.
Last week, Roko Mijic talked about how human intelligence made civilization possible, and how genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence—what some call “superintelligence”—would change everything, by magnifying nearly all of our capabilities.
It is important to note that organizations or countries are not smarter-than-human intelligences any more than a tribe of chimps is a smarter-than-chimp intelligence. We are talking about thinkers with fundamentally improved cognitive architectures, either through brain-computer interfacing or the creation of creative, flexible, brilliant artificial intelligence. Engineered intelligences with greater memory, creativity, pattern-matching capabilities, decision-making skills, self-transparency, and self-modification abilities.
This category of enhanced intelligences may not be as far away as you think. MIT scientists are already working on optically-triggered brain-computer interfaces that could link up many thousands of neurons to computers in the near future. Ed Boyden, who works at the MIT Media Lab, has called for the creation of an “exocortex” that assists our natural brains with an external, artificial cognitive assistant, also called a “co-processor.” We may even discover drugs or gene therapies that qualitatively improve intelligence by increasing the speed at which neurons can communicate, as was recently done with a rat, Hobbie-J.
When discussions of superintelligence crop up, a common question that is asked is, “okay, these entities are smarter-than-human, but wouldn’t they still be very limited by their environment and the intelligence of humans they have to work with?” Couldn’t we just pull the plug on a very clever artificial intelligence? Wouldn’t an enhanced human intelligence be limited by the slower people around it?
Not necessarily. One way superintelligent entities could leapfrog human industrial infrastructure and communication time lag would be by creating self-replicating manufacturing units, which might be based on synthetic biology or just sophisticated robotics. There already exists a self-replicating manufacturing unit today: RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper), developed by a team at the University of Bath in Britain. It just requires human assistance for assembly—from there, the machine can print out practically all of its own parts, except for a few standard parts like computer chips. Completely autonomous self-replication is on the horizon.
The ultimate self-replicating manufacturing unit would be based on nanoscale fabrication—the rapid manipulation of individual atoms to build large products from raw materials. In 1959, the legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” During the talk, he said “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.” Since Feynman’s talk, we have made leaps and bounds towards the goal of bottom-up manufacturing, building tiny robotic arms that can manipulate single atoms, molecular switches, gears, “nanocars,” even a nanoscale walking biped.
If we could design and fabricate the appropriate nanoscale machines and put them into a system capable of building all its own parts, we’d have something called a nanofactory, or to put it another way, an “everything machine.” The earliest nanofactories might only build products out of a couple types of atoms, say carbon and hydrogen, but they would have a tremendous impact because they would be automated by necessity, could self-replicate, and would be capable of building almost any chemically stable structure (as long as it used atoms the machine could handle) with atomic precision. Powered by the Sun and using purified natural gas for feedstock molecules, these nanofactories could quickly and easily build huge numbers of residences, greenhouses, appliances, medical equipment, water purification equipment, and much more, at a cost thousands of times lower than the manufacturing technology of today.
Humans are making progress towards nanofactories today, but I’ll bet that smarter-than-human intelligences could make much more rapid progress. In fact, it’s possible that the most direct route to nanofactories is through smarter-than-human intelligence.
And if you combine a smarter-than-human intelligence with self-replication and nanoscale production, it’s difficult to put a limit on how quickly superintelligence could change the world.
Michael Anissimov is a futurist and evangelist for friendly artificial intelligence. He writes a Technorati Top 100 Science blog, Accelerating Future. Michael currently serves as Media Director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and is a co-organizer of the annual Singularity Summit.
