Kurzweil Defends His Predictions Again: Was He 86% Correct?

 figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.” –Alan Cox

How would you grade yourself if you had a chance to write your own report card? Ray Kurzweil is giving himself a high B. With his recent essay “How My Predictions Are Faring” the noted futurist reviews forecasts he made more than a decade ago for our current times. His predicted future is now the present, so it’s time to see how he did. The report looks at 147 predictions that Kurzweil made in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and goes on to briefly explore comments in The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) as well as his more recent The Singularity is Near (2005). Of the 147 predictions Kurzweil maintains that 115 were ‘entirely correct’, 12 ‘essentially correct’, and 17 ‘partially correct, with just 3 being outright wrong. Counting only the entirely and essentially correct, Kurzweil claims an accuracy of 86%. The report, dated October 2010 and now widely available on the web, has sparked heated discussions on various tech forums. I’ve read “How My Predictions Are Faring” and have drawn my own conclusions about Kurzweil’s prowess: If you’re pouring over each of the 147 statements and debating their accuracy then you’re probably wasting your time. When it comes to evaluating predictions, I’m not sure we’re doing it right.

 Before I Cop Out, A Review

For years, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the foremost futurists in the public arena. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the internet. He’s also predicted the rise of artificial intelligence and the eventual union of man and machine to occur in the 21st century. While he didn’t coin the term ‘Singularity’, he has brought the concept of an exponential growth in technology to the masses through books, documentaries, and countless speeches around the world. In many ways, Kurzweil has become the face of the Technological Singularity, and that has made him a target to techno-optimists and Luddites alike.

Perhaps rightfully so – many world leaders in industry and government listen to his opinions. For instance, he’s an advisor to the U.S. Army for developing a rapid response to biological threats. If Kurzweil’s beliefs about the future affect public policy it’s important we understand why he’s given such clout, and that we challenge him about his errors.

In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (written in the late 90s and published in 1999), Kurzweil made definitive statements about the state of technology in the year 2009. Actually, he was talking about that period in time in general, so we can add some error bars of plus or minus a few years around 2009. Now that we’re entering 2011, though, we can get a good idea about whether or not Kurzweil’s 2009 predictions were correct.

Hence the “How My Predictions are Faring” report. It’s a 147 page review of his 147 predictions (can’t be coincidence) from ASM and it goes into each statement in full detail. Kurzweil steps you through numbered lists of these predictions as divided by topic and gives you his reasoning for why each was correct, essentially correct, partially correct, or wrong. For someone looking to review Kurzweil’s precognition the report is easy to access.

With access has come the opportunity for controversy. Critics are able to go through and evaluate not only the original predictions, but Kurzweil’s explanations of those predictions. We now have 147 more pages of text to debate on forums and in comments. You could, if you like, do exactly that yourself. The essay is freely available on Kurzweil’s site, and mirrored on Scribd. You could spend hours looking through that document and analyze every sentence for accuracy and then share your thoughts with the internet-capable world.

But please don’t waste your time.

And Now the Cop Out

Look, I encourage people to read things for themselves and I encourage healthy debate. These are essential parts of the scientific process, crucial skills for society as a whole, and the only way we can shape the internet into a tool for enlightenment. Yet I’m deeply worried when I see the techno-optimistic community putting efforts into these kinds of debates, because I believe that they are largely unnecessary. Why?

Judging the accuracy of predictions like these is simply too subjective. Predictions are drastically influenced by interpretation, as you can see in Kurzweil’s report. When he reviews each statement, Kurzweil is selecting those parts he finds relevant and commenting on them. You and I might choose to make judgments based on completely different sections. Take #13 in Education: “Many children learn to read on their own using their personal computers before entering grade school.” Kurzweil deems this as correct by focusing on the developmental aid young children experience after using computers habitually. He also points to a report that 9% of children who enter kindergarten already know how to read. A critic, on the other hand, might have called this a fail because developmental skills are not the same thing as actually reading, and increases in pre-K reading skills aren’t necessarily due to computer usage. By focusing on different parts of a prediction you can draw drastically different conclusions.

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