Google CTO Raymond Kurzweil is known for his predictions of the future. Some of them come true with amazing accuracy, others do not find their place in reality. To understand if it is really possible to foresee the coming events.
Success: In his first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1990, Kurzweil wrote that by the end of the decade, the computing machine would beat humans at chess. This happened already in May 1997, when the Deep Blue supercomputer beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Partial success: in the same book, Raymond predicted the collapse of the USSR due to the loss of state control over information flows. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The role of informatization of society and the development of electronic means of communication in these events was not key. Although later Mikhail Gorbachev told Kurzweil that he was right.
Unconditional success: his main prediction from the same book was that by the beginning of the 21st century, the Internet will begin to explode not only in the number of users, but also in the amount of content. Kurzweil also assumed that the most common method of connecting ordinary users to the global network would be wireless.
Failure: Raymond believed that by the end of the decade, pocket-size speech-to-text converters and vice versa would be common. In his opinion, such devices will be cheap, compact and will become everyday for people with hearing or vision impairments. Unfortunately, nothing like this has appeared.
Partially successful prediction: The second book of the futurist, The Age of Spiritual Machines, was published in 1999. There was a whole section in it devoted to the significant, in the author's opinion, milestones of the future. By the early 2010s, Kurzweil predicted the disappearance of the computers we are used to. They were supposed to be so small that they would be built into clothes or other household items and replace the usual desktops in most applications. Technologies have not developed so quickly and now we go with smartphones in our pockets, which have become the main electronic device for most.
Limited success: Ray pushed his prediction for speech converters by ten years to 2009. Contrary to his custom, he did not just talk about the future, but tried to realize his prediction personally. In cooperation with the US National Association of the Blind, Kurzweil has developed and marketed the K-NFB Reader. This is a special "reader" for the visually impaired or blind, consisting of a camera and a pocket computer. The cost of the device was $ 3,495. Later, the software was ported to Symbian smartphones and sold for $ 1,595. In 2014, it became possible to buy the K-NFB Reader app for $ 99 for iOS and Android devices. The task was completed, but it was possible to make it accessible only 15 years later.
Promotional video:
Failure again: in The Age of Spiritual Machines, several more unfulfilled predictions are made. By 2009, most of the text will be generated by speech recognition. But even after 10 years from the appointed date, such systems do not show an acceptable result. Undoubtedly, there is progress, but the prediction did not come true.
Mistake: most of the routine operations between the client and the business will be done using virtual personalities, animated images, possibly three-dimensional or holographic, with a human face. In reality, such technologies are available, but users have received them negatively.
Almost guessed it: by 2010, according to Ray, displays will be built into glasses or even the image will be projected onto the retina. A wearable computer with a display-glasses Google Glass made a splash in 2013, but the technology did not receive further development.
In addition to the coming decades, Kurzweil made predictions up to 2099. It is difficult to say how true they will turn out to be. A brief overview of his most famous predictions makes it clear that the recognized oracle of technology is often wrong. Most often this happens with long-term assumptions. Some of the predictions can be interpreted in two ways.
The year 2019 opens the next decade in the books of the futurologist and there is an opportunity to test his most interesting hypotheses. For example, Ray believes that within a decade, scientists will be able to recreate the human brain, and based on this research, artificial intelligence, equal or superior to ours, will appear. About a year ago, an international team of scientists announced that the latest algorithm for simulating neural connections has been developed, which will allow to recreate the mammalian brain in real time on current generation supercomputers.
Vasily Parfenov