For those who don’t know, Ray Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, and director of engineering at Google. He has been involved in the development of many technologies, including optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, and the first CCD flat-bed scanner. He is also a futurist and has been described as “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Inc. magazine. But how accurate are his predictions? Let’s take a look at some examples.
Kurzweil’s first big predictions were made in the late 1990s about the Singularity — the moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to a future where machines can design and improve upon themselves, potentially leading to exponential gains in intelligence. While this idea may have seemed far-fetched at the time, it is now taken seriously by many researchers in the field of AI.
In 2001, Kurzweil predicted that a computer would beat a world champion chess player by 2018. This actually happened in May of 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Garry Kasparov.
In 2005, Kurzweil predicted that computers would pass the Turing Test — a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human — by 2029. While this has not yet happened, it is worth noting that in June of 2014, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman fooled 33% of judges into thinking it was human during the Loebner Prize Turing Test Competition — the highest percentage ever achieved by a machine in this contest.
Finally, Kurzweil predicted that by 2025 we would have cyborgs — humans with biological brains enhanced with artificial intelligence — and that these cyborgs would be capable of doing “a million times more computation” than unaugmented humans. While this prediction may seem outlandish, it is important to remember that we are already seeing preliminary steps towards this goal with implantable devices such as cochlear implants and deep brain stimulation devices becoming more common. In addition, Elon Musk has founded Neuralink — a company aimed at developing brain-computer interfaces — with the goal of creating working prototypes within four years.
