Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil


American author, inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has become well known for his predictions about artificial intelligence and the human species, mainly concerning the technological singularity. He predicts that Artificial Intelligence would outsmart the human brain in computational capabilities by mid-21st century. His first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990, put forth his theories on the results of the increasing use of technology and predicted the explosive growth in the internet, among other predictions. Later works, 1999's The Age of Spiritual Machines and 2005's The Singularity is Near outlined other theories including the rise of clouds of nano-robots called foglets and the development of Human Body 2.0 and 3.0, whereby nanotechnology is incorporated into many internal organs.

Accuracy of predictions

''The Age of Intelligent Machines''

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. It forecast the demise of the already crumpling Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In 2005, Mikhail Gorbachev told Kurzweil that emerging decentralized electronic communication "was a big factor" for fostering democracy in the Soviet Union.
Kurzweil extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament.
Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was often unreliable outside academic, military, corporate and other heavily invested settings, difficult for non-technical users to use, and mostly lacking a broad range of content. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

''The Age of Spiritual Machines''

In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil believes the world will experience over the next century. Titled "To Face the Future", the section is divided into four chapters respectively named "2009", "2019", "2029", and "2099". For every chapter, Kurzweil issues predictions about what life and technology will be like in that year.
Kurzweil restated his earlier prediction from The Age of Intelligent Machines regarding the advent of pocket-sized, cheap, text-to-speech converters for the blind by 2009. The "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" was introduced in 2005 at a price of $3,495. The device was portable, but not the cheap, pocket-sized device of the prediction. By 2008, a software version for the Nokia N82 smartphone was available for $1,595. A version for iOS phones was released for $99 in 2014 and Android for $75 in 2015.

''The Singularity Is Near''

While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines did, Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity Is Near, though longer-term visions abound.
Kurzweil predicted that, in 2005, supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. The protein folded and unfolded, with the results closely matching experimental data.
The biyearly protein structure prediction contest CASP shows that the current algorithms for structure prediction are still impractical for determining the previously unknown structure of most proteins.

Ray Kurzweil's response

According to Ray Kurzweil, 89 out of 108 predictions he made were entirely correct by the end of 2009. Kurzweil later released a more detailed analysis of the accuracy of his predictions up to 2009, arguing that most were correct.

Future predictions

''The Age of Intelligent Machines'' (1990)

Late 20th century

Kurzweil has even wagered that his predictions will be true, on the site betting against Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Software Corporation for a payout of $20,000, or $10,000 each.

Centuries hence

2009

2010

10 terabytes of storage have been already reached for $535 in mid 2016.

2010s

Kurzweil made the following predictions during a November 5, 2006 interview on C-SPAN's Book TV program.
Kurzweil has said that by 2014, humanity will reach a "tipping point" where the cost-per-watt from solar energy is cheaper than from coal and oil: By capturing only 0.03 percent of the sun's energy that falls on Earth, humanity could meet virtually all of its projected energy needs up to 2030 ; this will be capable through with extremely inexpensive, lightweight, and efficient nano-engineered solar panels together with nano-fuel cells to store and distribute the captured energy. Kurzweil believes, by the end of the 2020s, humans will be able to completely replace fossil fuels.
Kurzweil has said that by the 2030s, people will be able to send nano-bots into their brains through their capillaries. The nano-bots will take up positions in close physical proximity to each interneuronal connection coming from each physical sense and cause the firing of neurons to result in full-immersion virtual reality, similar to the way psychedelic drugs alter consciousness. The nano-bots will also allow people to "connect their neocortex to the cloud". This technology is based on “neuron transistors” developed by scientists at the Max Planck Institute that can control the firing of neurons.
Kurzweil said the following in a November 2007 Computerworld interview:
In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum, John Rennie criticized Kurzweil's predictions: "On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable."
In a January 2017 blog article on his website, software developer Paul Feakins found that Kurzweil's analysis of his own prediction accuracy was heavily biased in his favour. Feakins rated Kurzweil's accuracy at closer to 36% on predictions that could be verified at that time.