One gotcha of predicting is thinking of advancements as an invention followed by an almost inevitable progression towards better, cheeper and ubiquitous. Flying cars, household nuclear plants & lunar holidays have been possible with money-is-no-object technology but have stayed there while computers went from on Paper Turing machines to smartphones in your pocket thanks to Moore's law. Engines became ubiquitous in an economic process started by their invention. But, the economic process can independent to the discovery. They multiply each other so one can be worthless without the other. For space fairing, nuclear power, and lots of other things we never got a Moore's Law.
An interesting anecdote from the article is the first video call in 1964. That "invention" of the video call wasn't even an important event on the way to ubiquitous video calling. Modern video calls are a practically an inevitable outcome of a process driven by Moore's law and the internet. The idea of invention followed by iteration leading to ubiquity just doesn't apply here.
I think this is the strength and weakness of Ray Kurzweil (I like Ray Kurzweil warts, misfires and all). You might say that he gets caught by this gotcha. He expects an initial invention followed by improvements and refinements to launch a self propelled economic cycle like engines and computers did. Those things are rare and truly paradigm shifting. Also hard to predict.
OTOH, you might say he's on the right track because he's looking for the paradigm shifts. AI, Immortality. Etc.
I personally read Kurzweil similarly to the way I read Asimov. It's a form of art. I like Kurzweil's ideas aesthetically.
An interesting anecdote from the article is the first video call in 1964. That "invention" of the video call wasn't even an important event on the way to ubiquitous video calling. Modern video calls are a practically an inevitable outcome of a process driven by Moore's law and the internet. The idea of invention followed by iteration leading to ubiquity just doesn't apply here.
I think this is the strength and weakness of Ray Kurzweil (I like Ray Kurzweil warts, misfires and all). You might say that he gets caught by this gotcha. He expects an initial invention followed by improvements and refinements to launch a self propelled economic cycle like engines and computers did. Those things are rare and truly paradigm shifting. Also hard to predict.
OTOH, you might say he's on the right track because he's looking for the paradigm shifts. AI, Immortality. Etc.
I personally read Kurzweil similarly to the way I read Asimov. It's a form of art. I like Kurzweil's ideas aesthetically.