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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

I think that even this article is overly generous, marking predictions as "true" that were equally true when they were made as they are today. For example, "Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually" is marked as "true", which reads to me as particularly laughable in light of the enormous disruption to universities that COVID-19 has caused. Yeah, distance learning is a thing; it was a thing in the 70s too.

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Yes, to take predictions seriously, we should ask the visionary for a rough timescale. And we should also ask not just them but their peers on how likely they think the prediction is to come true. It's not impressive to identify an existing trend and say that it will continue; all of Kurzweil's peers would have been able to see that. Similarly, it's not impressive to keep kicking the can down the road as a prediction eventually becomes truer, but only 50-100 years behind the timeline the visionary implied. Ultimately if the prediction doesn't follow fairly rigorous criteria, it's neither falsifiable nor impressive.

IMO Kruzweil doesn't make predictions, he makes wish lists.

It's useful to consider obvious misses - for example, he failed to predict fake news or the dystopian surveillance and behavioural influencing culture being created by ad tech.

This has obvious implications for practical AI. If the black-hat possibilities aren't considered and mitigated, experience to date suggests they'll dominate.

> he failed to predict fake news

In former days, "fake news" was simply named "propaganda" or "bad/manipulative journalism".

Yes, but its ubiquity and political impact was vastly underestimated. We'll pay dearly for that.

Considering "fake news" (literally commandeering the media and planting untrue stories) was a tactic used by Hitler and is considered to be a basic tool of authoritarianism, I'd suggest that no one has underestimated its impact.

In fact, fake news started WWI.

> literally commandeering the media and planting untrue stories

We assumed that only happened with state-controlled media, that one would first take control of the State, before taking over the media to sediment it. We weren't prepared to deal with the Murdochs taking control of the State by controlling part of the media.

I think "fake news" at least started as something a bit different - propaganda sure, but of a particular form, i.e. in the form of a fabricated news event propagated through media channels as if it were true.

This is not a new thing. The yellow-press journalism of the US happened well over a century ago, and indeed you have papers which talk about Elvis and aliens, which would meet my definition of "fake news".

The only thing that changed was the distribution method (i.e. over the internet/social media).

That's true. There does seem to be some difference though - stories like Elvis Found Alive in Anchorage and Batboy Graduates with MBA were pretty much regarded as entertainment, whereas Clinton Eats Babies and Trump Videotaped Getting Peed On were received as true by large segments of both the population and the media that normally does not make up stories.

American intervention in Cuba due to newspapers absolutely fits the “most people believed it” criterion [1]:

> American newspapers fanned the flames of interest in the war by fabricating atrocities which justified intervention in a number of Spanish colonies worldwide.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish–Am...

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