Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2019:
A $1,000 computing device is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere. Three-dimensional virtual-reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, provide the primary interface for communication with other persons, the Web, and virtual reality. Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural-language spoken communication. Realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody regardless of physical proximity. People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.
Also:
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
And:
Autonomous nanoengineered machines can control their own mobility and include significant computational engines.
And:
ʺPhoneʺ calls routinely include high‐resolution three‐dimensional images projected through the direct‐eye displays and auditory lenses. Three‐dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.
And:
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness. Although the visual and auditory aspects of virtual reality involve only devices you have on or in your body (the direct‐eye lenses and auditory lenses), the ʺtotal touchʺ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth. These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions with other human partners or simulated partners. In fact, it is often the preferred mode of interaction, even when a human partner is nearby, due to its ability to enhance both experience and safety.
And:
Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads.
And:
The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual‐experience software, which ranges from simulations of ʺrealʺ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.
And:
The expected life span, which, as a (1780 through 1900) and the first phase result of the first Industrial Revolution of the second (the twentieth century), almost doubled from less than forty, has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred.
Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness.
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
I’ve reread this sentence a few times now and I am just gobsmacked as to what it was intended to have meant. never dug into this particular espouser because from the moment I came across their name I smelled the kook, but I’m not now almost deathly curious to know exactly what the context of this particular prediction was (which near certainly was some shit riffed on from half a bit of statement of research people were looking into)
To be fair, those words were written around the End Of History, when fascism was known to be safely extinct and nobody in their right mind would have assumed that such a phrase referred to it.
Something about redefining a person as a shield based on how much of their body absorbs the blast. Below that threshold they contain the property of the US military and are considered potential recycling recepticles.
yeah, and it’s been like this since brits used freshly invented heavy machine guns in their colonial wars. machines killing machines is just what will cause army bean counters to burn at stake operators of these machines
Drones mostly target humans and crewed vehicles, not other drones (and disable rapidly and suddenly un-crewed vehicles) (with rare exceptions of recon drones crashing other recon drones by breaking their propellers and like 1 or 2 cases of FPV drones shooting down fixed wing recon drones. anti-drone warfare is mostly EW, then AAA and things like MANPADS or even bigger missiles depending on how valuable that drone is as a target)
Besides, last time i’ve checked it was not drones that took or retook Vovchansk (80% ish Ukrainian controlled last week), it was tanks, arty, mechanized infantry, maybe a dash of CAS and loads of AA and jammers, you know, just like in every war since 80s or even bit earlier. Loads of small cheap PGMs do work great in anti-vehicle role, and drones are just that, so it makes everybody hide fair bit harder
if i have to guess, the thing that prevents mobility now is constant surveillance, also by drones + lots of artillery, and some attack drones too. the thing that will enable large scale movements will be air dominance and even more EW
You also need an extremely well ran, integrated, well-trained, well-supplied army to run modern system warfare. Russia’s army is hardly modernised, and I suspect they wouldn’t be really willing to run a command model that gives a lot of authority to the lower ranks.
I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.
Sure, I’m not even going to verify this one since it’s so low stakes.
This is ill-defined.
Again ill-defined, and I need dates on this, we’ve been sequencing DNA for like 50yrs at this point.
Lol, Neuralink kills monkeys, there’s zero indication of its “inevitability”.
Lol^2, none of that shit works mate. Name one person whose life was extended with cryonics.
AI is ill-defined, plus dates please.
And how well did that go?
First of all, that’s called Moore’s Law after the actual guy who made this prediction, you can’t credit someone else than Moore for Moore’s Law, wtf. Second, this hasn’t held for at least a decade now; we’ve been focusing on completely different things than raw CPU speed to actually increase compute.
“Answer questions” there is a load-bearing term. Did he mean search engines? Is this deriberately vague?
I’m sorry? First, a 3D printed prosthetic is not an exoskeleton, what kind of a logic leap is that. Second, citation needed on “3D printable prosthetic limbs” actually being in use right now on any scale.
“Computers will be really good at chess” was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don’t get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.
ah you see cryonics does increase life expenctancy, i.e. E(life length). As long as P(cryobubonics works) > 0, which, according to Yudkowskian Probability Theory, is true for any probability, then E(life length) = infinity, since cryonica will let us live forever /big fat fucking S
Why did you think it was working well with no problems?
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
You hecka optimistic.
I mean, it’s pretty crazy how well the design did work considering it’s the first of its kind.
The latest thing I saw, a bunch of the wires are becoming detached from the very first prototype, which of course is being worked into the subsequent models.
the only thing neuralink seems to add is wireless control, which doesn’t work, partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements, but mostly because it’s a project driven by Musk’s whims
partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements
It still amazes me they publicly posted a request for help with these compression req which are physically impossible to achieve. Nobody with a CS degree is anybody near the leadership of neuralink. In other words, you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention
I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it
I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.
all the musksucking sub-linkedin reply guys chittering at each other about how this is clearly the kind of breakthrough musk was hoping for when he devised this genius-level challenge. you know, basic lossy audio compression applied by an asshole pretending to be an audio engineer (or maybe this fuckhead is the reason the FLACs I pay for are sometimes just converted from MP3s?)
e: I got to the post where he supposedly makes a point about ADC and container bit depths. this fucking idiot is almost certainly an audiophile cosplaying, and the only audio engineering he’s done is set his amp on a block of wood
The multi-electrode systems at the lab I worked in 2009 used a fiber connection to the host PC and generated terabytes of data, for just 128 or 92 electrodes (I forget) at not-all-that-many samples per second.
I seriously don’t know where these fuckers have been that they’re supposedly excited about implanted BCIs now that musk’s doing a monstrously shitty one, but somehow they managed not to ever read about any of the previous research into this that had the same outcome as neuralink (basic, inaccurate computer mouse control) with the same major caveats (the electrodes become unusable in short order due to scarring and can’t be repaired), except that the neuralink version is unnecessarily risky* cause startups gotta go fast
[*] and the risk here is that something truly fucking awful will happen to the patient, because it’s the fucking human brain and they’re treating it like a submarine made of secondhand carbon fiber, including the ignored track record of failed lab tests before disaster struck
I still don’t think cortical electrodes should even be described as a direct interface. A direct interface would speak action potential and connect to your spinal cord, like Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix. I do not see a lot of people lining up to test what would probably entail having your brainstem dissected!
Yes, but in the same way that tax shelters and carbon offsetting are major industries. All the useful things done by “AI” tend to happen outside of the hype mills and be relatively boring statistical models like autocomplete, which nobody points to as a sign of the coming Computer God.
| Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
They build single-use computers into pregnancy tests. They’re powerful enough to run DOOM, despite being doomed to immediately become e-waste. Is this a sign of the imminent Singularity as well?
| PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Someone built a radio into a computer? Really? I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
what is nice about this, half of the shit you listed is either scam for hype-susceptible cultists or is not what you present as when marketing fluff is removed
@Varyk
Name ten.
Easy peasy:
Computers would beat humans at chess(happened in 1998)
Digital information explosion(The information on the internet rapidly becoming too much for the entire world to read)
Medicine becoming information technology(genomic, sequencing and crispr)
The inevitability of direct human computer interfacing (neuralink)
Life extension(cryonics/neuralink)
AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
Cpu processing speed explosion(Moore’s law)
PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Exoskeletons render the disabled able (3d printable prosthetic limbs)
There are many, many more correct predictions by this guy
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2009:
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2019:
Also:
And:
And:
And:
And:
And:
And:
Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)
The Nostradamus play.
if only he’d written in quatrains!
I’m picturing the VR dildo-suit from Upload.
You know he also did.
I’ve reread this sentence a few times now and I am just gobsmacked as to what it was intended to have meant. never dug into this particular espouser because from the moment I came across their name I smelled the kook, but I’m
notnow almost deathly curious to know exactly what the context of this particular prediction was (which near certainly was some shit riffed on from half a bit of statement of research people were looking into)(e: whoops hella-freudian typo)
Jesus, Ray, phrasing
To be fair, those words were written around the End Of History, when fascism was known to be safely extinct and nobody in their right mind would have assumed that such a phrase referred to it.
Francis should not have, in fact, lightened up
if you have budget for that, against an enemy that doesn’t
“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle” (if you don’t count the people that the drones are blowing up)
To be fair, this can be made true by the simple expedient of redefining who counts as “human”
Something about redefining a person as a shield based on how much of their body absorbs the blast. Below that threshold they contain the property of the US military and are considered potential recycling recepticles.
yeah, and it’s been like this since brits used freshly invented heavy machine guns in their colonial wars. machines killing machines is just what will cause army bean counters to burn at stake operators of these machines
If only there was any large active warzone that has largely devolved into positional warfare for two years now to disprove that claim, damn.
Damn, if only.
Drones mostly target humans and crewed vehicles, not other drones (and disable rapidly and suddenly un-crewed vehicles) (with rare exceptions of recon drones crashing other recon drones by breaking their propellers and like 1 or 2 cases of FPV drones shooting down fixed wing recon drones. anti-drone warfare is mostly EW, then AAA and things like MANPADS or even bigger missiles depending on how valuable that drone is as a target)
Besides, last time i’ve checked it was not drones that took or retook Vovchansk (80% ish Ukrainian controlled last week), it was tanks, arty, mechanized infantry, maybe a dash of CAS and loads of AA and jammers, you know, just like in every war since 80s or even bit earlier. Loads of small cheap PGMs do work great in anti-vehicle role, and drones are just that, so it makes everybody hide fair bit harder
if i have to guess, the thing that prevents mobility now is constant surveillance, also by drones + lots of artillery, and some attack drones too. the thing that will enable large scale movements will be air dominance and even more EW
You also need an extremely well ran, integrated, well-trained, well-supplied army to run modern system warfare. Russia’s army is hardly modernised, and I suspect they wouldn’t be really willing to run a command model that gives a lot of authority to the lower ranks.
yeah if you want to have so different pieces working together, you need training that makes exploitation of it all possible, goes without saying
well, it’s not there yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tou8ahLZvP4
I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.
???
“In the future, there will be brain-generated music”, said Ray Kay, to a young disciple.
“But Master Ray, isn’t music generally brain generated?”, the disciple asked.
“No, you fucking idiot. You fucking buffoon. How dare you question me,” replied Ray. It was then that the disciple reached enlightenment.
my response to ray involves making music with an entirely different organ
Neuralink
VRChat
Algoraves
Obamacare
Asimo
You are dumb
Thanks!
Buh bye now.
you might not be tall enough for this ride
Absolutely amazing post, thank you so much. So that’s one correct prediction and nine on a spectrum from wrong to meaningless!
@Varyk
Cryonics is a grift, nobody is going to be cured of death by future Dr Jesus.
The pioneers of cryonics ended up as a very rich soup
Only plebs pay for e-girl bathwater. I prefer to drink 30-year aged billionaire bisque (chilled of course)
“Computers will be really good at chess” was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don’t get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.
ah you see cryonics does increase life expenctancy, i.e. E(life length). As long as P(cryobubonics works) > 0, which, according to Yudkowskian Probability Theory, is true for any probability, then E(life length) = infinity, since cryonica will let us live forever /big fat fucking S
what a throwback
🭋🭛🮣🮧🮢 🭋🭛 🭲🭲🭲 🭋🭛 🮥🮩🮤 🭋🭛 🭲🭲🭲 🭋🭛 🮡🮦🮠those codepoints very didn’t survive into the local view, haha. will have to see if it renders elsewhere
@Varyk @jonhendry Neuralink? How’s that going? I presume extremely well with no problems, I haven’t got time to check right now
Hey, that guy’s brain was holding it wrong
He still loves the brain though.
Why did you think it was working well with no problems?
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
You hecka optimistic.
I mean, it’s pretty crazy how well the design did work considering it’s the first of its kind.
The latest thing I saw, a bunch of the wires are becoming detached from the very first prototype, which of course is being worked into the subsequent models.
I wish I had the confidence of a techbro who thinks any of the BCI tech in neuralink is new and isn’t just a set of techniques that have existed for decades and have a shitty track record
the only thing neuralink seems to add is wireless control, which doesn’t work, partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements, but mostly because it’s a project driven by Musk’s whims
It still amazes me they publicly posted a request for help with these compression req which are physically impossible to achieve. Nobody with a CS degree is anybody near the leadership of neuralink. In other words, you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention
I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it
I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.
okay but if they hadn’t done that we wouldn’t have gotten this work of art
holy fuck I read the comments
all the musksucking sub-linkedin reply guys chittering at each other about how this is clearly the kind of breakthrough musk was hoping for when he devised this genius-level challenge. you know, basic lossy audio compression applied by an asshole pretending to be an audio engineer (or maybe this fuckhead is the reason the FLACs I pay for are sometimes just converted from MP3s?)
e: I got to the post where he supposedly makes a point about ADC and container bit depths. this fucking idiot is almost certainly an audiophile cosplaying, and the only audio engineering he’s done is set his amp on a block of wood
What is the original requirement? I’ve never seen this and I feel a mighty sneer that I’m missing. A Fear of Sneering Out if you will.
Some 100 times+ compression, very fast and also at very low power (because it was inside the brain), and lossless.
And not stated but because it was inside the brain, I assume possible memory usage also wasn’t that high etc. Sorry have no direct link to the specs.
ye iirc we can remember like 7 things so that might be hard /s
@Soyweiser @V0ldek
The multi-electrode systems at the lab I worked in 2009 used a fiber connection to the host PC and generated terabytes of data, for just 128 or 92 electrodes (I forget) at not-all-that-many samples per second.
Pretty sure keyboards are older
@Varyk @pikesley
Not the first, actually a late entrant.
I worked in a lab using implanted brain-computer interfaces 14 years ago.
Other labs using the same system had monkeys controlling robot arms, and a human controlling a computer.
I seriously don’t know where these fuckers have been that they’re supposedly excited about implanted BCIs now that musk’s doing a monstrously shitty one, but somehow they managed not to ever read about any of the previous research into this that had the same outcome as neuralink (basic, inaccurate computer mouse control) with the same major caveats (the electrodes become unusable in short order due to scarring and can’t be repaired), except that the neuralink version is unnecessarily risky* cause startups gotta go fast
[*] and the risk here is that something truly fucking awful will happen to the patient, because it’s the fucking human brain and they’re treating it like a submarine made of secondhand carbon fiber, including the ignored track record of failed lab tests before disaster struck
I still don’t think cortical electrodes should even be described as a direct interface. A direct interface would speak action potential and connect to your spinal cord, like Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix. I do not see a lot of people lining up to test what would probably entail having your brainstem dissected!
@self
A lab I worked in (as an IT guy) used them for data collection, studying visual attention in monkeys.
Not a happy place for the monkeys although I’m confident the scientists did their best to not make it any worse than it had to be.
@Varyk oh wait so it *doesn’t* work? But it’s still a good idea to attach it to your brain?
you do not have much medical knowledge, do you?
| AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Yes, but in the same way that tax shelters and carbon offsetting are major industries. All the useful things done by “AI” tend to happen outside of the hype mills and be relatively boring statistical models like autocomplete, which nobody points to as a sign of the coming Computer God.
| Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
They build single-use computers into pregnancy tests. They’re powerful enough to run DOOM, despite being doomed to immediately become e-waste. Is this a sign of the imminent Singularity as well?
| PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Someone built a radio into a computer? Really? I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
are these meat popsicles in the room with us?
gif, sorry for being annoying
Haha, nice
what is nice about this, half of the shit you listed is either scam for hype-susceptible cultists or is not what you present as when marketing fluff is removed
If you think those are impressive, you’re very very stupid
I think this has been satisfactorily established by now