The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil

It is perhaps fitting that on my way to and from Future Camp (aka Singularity Point) at Burning Man I read this book. The book has several interesting passages and makes for entertaining reading. Here, I will limit my comments to the chapter on Kurzweil's 1999 predictions for 2009, as those can be verified against what really happened. It turns out that he was overly optimistic. Despite writing himself that people tend to overestimate progress in the short term, he fell victim to the same trap. He got a few things right, but here are 25 of the many predictions that Kurzweil got wrong:

1. People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies.
2. PCs have no moving parts.
3. Most portable computers do not have keyboards.
4. Human musicians routinely jam with electronic musicians.
5. The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition.
6. Computer displays built into eyeglasses that project onto the user's retinas are also used.
7. Computers routinely reliably identify their owners from their faces.
8. 3-D chips commonly used.
9. $1k PCs can perform a trillion calculations per second.
10. Students interact with their computers primarily by voice and by pointing with a device that looks like a pencil.
11. Preschool and elementary school children routinely read using print to speech technology.
12. Translating telephone technology is commonly used.
13. Virtually all communication is encrypted.
14. Haptic technologies allow people to touch and feel objects and other people at a distance.
15. People have sexual experiences at a distance with other persons as well as virtual partners.
16. Phones routinely include high-resolution, real-time moving images of the person on the other end.
17. The ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity.
18. Intelligent roads are in use.
19. A company west of the Mississippi has surpassed a trillion dollars in market cap.
20. There is a growing neo-Luddite movement.
21. The underclass is politically neutralized through the generally high level of affluence.
22. The creation of music has become available to persons who are not musicians.
23. Cybernetic authors are emerging.
24. Bioengineered weapons constitute the greatest threat to our national security.
25. Telemedicine is widely used.

It's not enough to point out a few research studies in a few isolated labs around the world—there is a long road from demo to mass market. In sum, Kurzweil got a lot of it wrong. Perhaps because while a few quantitative measures do grow exponentially, a lot of the things that affect life do not. Change is limited by man's willingness and ability to change, and by the inertia of large organizations like governments and corporations.

In the time since his mistaken predictions, Kurzweil and his followers have created conferences and even a university focused on those predictions. If they are to help bring the world into a better future, I believe they must start by examining the failed predictions and the reasons behind them. As exciting as Kurzweil's predictions are to fathom, I'm afraid we'll have to wait a little longer to make his science fiction fact.