• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    You claim having both the date and the actual prediction wrong is a technicality. With that criteria, a wrong prediction is impossible.

    Yes, he did have some accurate predictions. From the Forbes article where the author went through them all and highlighted a few, Kurzweil was about 25% correct.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Here’s a more complete and correct list showing that his predictions are correct 86% of the time.

        That’s the list that I referenced earlier where Kurzweil rated himself.

        • Varyk
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          4 months ago

          That’s cool that he changed his name to Dominic for the article.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            That author is simply republishing Kurzweil’s self promotion essay titled “How my predictions are faring.”

            • Varyk
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              4 months ago

              And you don’t believe in the law of accelerating returns, or you just don’t like that the list so clearly lays out how his predictions are correct?

              • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                As I already said, Moore’s law died over 10 years ago. Kurzweil’s accelerating returns predictions were based on it continuing. He didn’t know about the silicon power wall that the industry was about to hit because they didn’t know either. Progress has continued but it stopped being exponential growth.

                CPU’s used to double their performance every 18 months. Now it’s 5-10% every 18 months. If performance scaling had continued from 1999 to 2019 like it had from 1979 to 1999, his list of predictions would have been mostly right.

                That the list so clearly lays out how

                What list? The article you linked simply quoted the 86% as a fact when that “fact” came from Kurzweil’s self evaluation.

                Terrance Howard thinks Terryology is correct too.

                • Varyk
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                  4 months ago

                  Your Moore’s law argument is so weird.

                  Let me check out your gotcha here: kurzweil predicted CPU processing increases via the law of accelerating returns, you’re interpreting that to mean specifically and only Moore’s law, ignoring the part of Moore’s law that worked for 50 years, and claiming that since Moore’s law recently stopped being applicable it never worked at all?

                  That misunderstanding of one prediction is what you’re starting out with?

                  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    He made predictions in 1999 about the state of technology in 2009 and 2019 based on the idea that CPUs would continue to double in performance every 18 months for the foreseeable future.

                    Moore’s law has been working for 30 years so it was reasonable to think it would continue for another 30. So he based his predictions on that.

                    5 years after he made his predictions, Moore’s law stopped. That’s why his predictions failed.

                    claiming that since Moore’s law recently stopped being applicable it never worked at all?

                    I very clearly said that Moore’s law worked for decades. I very clearly said that Kurzweil made his predictions based on Moore’s law continuing. But Moore’s law stopped shortly after his predictions. That unforseen event threw off his timeline.

                    Have you ever planned anything in your life and and unforseen event caused a delay?