Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism

"It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thinner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes," he wrote, and if he had ended the sentence there, surely no one would disagree. But instead he continues: "—and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book." And: "People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked using 'body LANs' (local area networks)."

"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"
Michael Anissimov, Accelerating Future blog

Is that all true? Accept for now that smartphones, music players, and even chip-enabled credit cards should all count as computers because they contain a microprocessor, and that they can even be loosely called jewelry, clothing, or body ornaments. Even so, how many of us have more than a dozen of these "computers" on our persons? Beyond a Bluetooth-coupled phone and earpiece, how many are in any sense networked together? How many sport a "high-resolution visual interface"?

Or consider what Kurzweil wrote about education. He correctly projects that technology will play a much larger role in the classroom and that distance learning and teaching software will trend upward. But he also asserted that students would own and use computers that weigh less than a pound, with which they would interact primarily by voice and stylus. Teachers would "attend primarily to issues of motivation, psychological well-being, and socialization," while software handles instruction. Is this a recognizable, accurate description of schools today?

He also seems to have had high hopes a decade ago for the antitumor compounds called angiogenesis inhibitors. His footnotes direct attention to a front-page New York Times story from 3 May 1998 that is notorious in science-writing circles for having grossly overhyped the promise of the research. In his book's formal discussion, Kurzweil merely suggests that angiogenesis inhibitors would help to reduce cancer. Yet in a puckish chapter where Kurzweil chats with a fictional interviewer from the future, he has her say that his prediction was "actually quite understated. Bio-engineered treatments, particularly antiangiogenesis drugs…have eliminated most forms of cancer as a major killer." To which Kurzweil replies, "Well, that's just not a prediction I was willing to make." Talk about having it both ways.

It seems only fair to allow some latitude for interpretation on the dates. But even then, it is hard to define the rightness or wrongness of Kurzweil's predictions.

Kurzweil himself has no such difficulty, however. He knows precisely how well he's doing. Last January, Michael Anissimov of the Accelerating Future Web site posted an item in which he suggested that seven of Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 seemed to be wrong. Kurzweil replied with a note that argued it was wrong to single out merely seven predictions when he had actually made 108 in The Age of Spiritual Machines.

"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," he wrote. "But to summarize, of these 108 predictions, 89 were entirely correct by the end of 2009." Another 13 were "essentially correct," by which he meant that they would be realized within just a few years. "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," he wrote. So by his own scoring, he is at least 94.4 percent accurate.

Kurzweil has not yet released that analysis of his track record, so it is hard to know how some of his predictions for 2009—the adoption of intelligent highways and self-piloting cars, sharp reductions in cancer, and continuous economic growth for the United States and the stock market through 2019, for example—fit into his tally. Maybe one of those was meant tongue in cheek, or maybe he doesn't regard them as real predictions; otherwise, it seems as though he regards all of them as at least partly or imminently correct. Judge for yourself.

Based on Kurzweil's defenses of the items that Anissimov had questioned, however, his analysis seems unlikely to satisfy his critics. For instance, Kurzweil stood by his assertion that in 2009, 3-D chip architectures would be common. "Many if not most semiconductors fabricated today are in fact 3D chips, using vertical stacking technology," he wrote. "It is obviously only the beginning of a broad trend, but it is the case that three-dimensional chips are commonly used today."

Actually, 3-D integrated circuits are currently very much a niche product, with limited uses in DRAM, image sensors, and a few other applications. A market survey by Yole Développement, in Lyon, France, from 2008 projected that by 2015 3-D devices would represent about 25 percent of the memory market and only about 6 percent of the rest of the semiconductor market. Kurzweil is surely right that 3-D chips will become widespread within another few years, but it is simply wrong to insist that they already are.

Kurzweil also stands by his claim that computer displays built into eyeglasses would project images into users' eyes because some such systems do exist, and says, "The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common." Similarly, he defends his claim that translation software would be "commonly used" to allow people speaking different languages to communicate by phone by pointing to smartphone apps that emerged at the end of 2009. He allows that one could quibble about how "common" their use is.

"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," says the blog post by Anissimov, who seems to admire the man but thinks futurists should be accountable for their statements.

Kurzweil's reply asserts that he is all for futurist accountability, "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." Still, it is hard to square his objection to "myopic," literal interpretations with his lawyerly defenses of his predictions that hinge on their precise wording and creative interpretations of the meaning of everyday words.

Kurzweil is extremely well informed about technologies in development and highly insightful about how they can feed into one another, particularly over the relatively near term. He is very good on trends, and his predictions are thought provoking. For the people who pay to hear him speak or to read his books, perhaps that is enough.

On the other hand, if Kurzweil is right that a failure to understand the timing of technological change is a major reason that businesses fail, then let's hope that nobody listening to Kurzweil takes his predictions at strict face value. Anyone who was encouraged 10 years ago to hit the market during the '90s with products or services contingent on cybernetic chauffeurs or widespread real-time speech translation could be in trouble.

Nevertheless, his unwavering confidence in the law of accelerating returns allows him to shrug off contradictory facts and perspectives as mere temporary inconveniences. A year here, a decade there: The accelerating returns of technology will sweep them all away en route to a singularity beyond human imagination ruled by one eternal truth—that Ray Kurzweil was, is, and always will be right.

At least 94.4 percent of the time, anyway.

Editor's comment, 30 December 2010:  Mr. Kurzweil's objection to John Rennie's critique begins with, and makes much of, the use of the word "foolproof." In fact, that word was never used by Mr. Rennie. In an editing error, the word "foolproof" was inserted into a sentence in Mr. Rennie's article, after Mr. Rennie had reviewed the editing. IEEE Spectrum regrets this lapse.