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Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any links to this? Would be interesting to look at.

According to Wikipedia, he "extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue..."[0] There are a number of additional predictions listed on the page below as well, including things such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosion in internet use. It also lists his predictions for the coming 50 years.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...

The chess one sounds like Moore's law and knowing something about the complexity of chess. Considering the following predictions for early 2000s (made in 1990):

- Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.

- Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words.

- Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk.

- Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority.

- "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads.

he sounds a bit like a sharp shooter from Texas. Some of them are pretty cool though, but hard to judge without more knowledge of the state of things in the AI world back then. Anyone care to comment?

Here's what someone more knowledgeable had to say about the matter: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...

"Kurzweil predicts that [in a book published in 2005] supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. "

This is a great one. When I worked for IBM in 2002-2003ish they were already working on the machines for this. It was public knowledge.

Fast forward 25 years when the dates are a bit fuzzier and someone reads his book published in 2005 and they conclude "Kurzweil predicted the future of genetics!!!". Sucker.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...

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