Ray Kurzweil reviews all of his predictions for dates up to 2010

Ray Kurzweil responds to the IEEE Spectum article about his predictions.

While I appreciate some of the things John Rennie has to say, his review of my predictions is filled with inaccuracies, including misquotes of mine, and misunderstandings of the meaning of my words and the reality of today’s technology. For starters, he takes note of my point about selection bias, but his entire article suffers from this bias. While he acknowledges that I wrote over 100 predictions for 2009, in a book I wrote in the late 1990s, he only talks about a handful of them. And he persistently gets these wrong. He writes that I predicted “widespread, foolproof, real-time speech translation.” We do in fact have real-time speech translation in the form of popular phone apps. But who ever said anything about “foolproof?” Rennie just made that up like a lot of the factoids in this article. Not even human translators are foolproof. Apparently that has now been removed from the online version.

Ray Kurzweil has provided his own comprehensive review of his predictions. (148 pages)

There is still the issue of qualifying terms. What is common ?
What is dominate in regards to UAV warfare ?
There is a segment of warfare where this is the case but most of the
US effort is still regular ground and air forces.

What is needed impact and relevance assessment and how it changed from the time of the prediction to today or the time of the prediction fulfillment.

The greatest gains continue to be in the value of the stock market ?
There were gains in the stock market, and real estate has tanked but there has been more of a runup in commodities and bond markets have also done well.
The general assumption is that this would be referring to asset class comparisons.
“greatest”. Would gains relative to other investment options. Seems implied.

The easiest are predictions where you just need to find one instance. Those are unequivocal.

It is definitely useful to list the predictions, categorize them and
explain a point of view about them. Others can then judge them independently and provide there own determination of
* unambigiously correct
* could be judged correct
* marginally correct
etc…

Also, the relevance and impact measures can also be done more easily by others.
A live online wiki version could also have discussion of topics of
relevance and impact and further projections.

Where are things going with UAV weapons.
Economic and computer forecasts .

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