Ask A Genius 153 – Ray Kurzweil and the Future
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/19
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Rick Rosner: Most of what he got true was for 2015 and later. Even over a 10-year time period, what he said would take 10 years, it took closer to 15 years, which is probably true for reasonable science fiction. Things that can be reasonably expected to come to pass will come to pass, but take twice as long as the futurist thinks. A guy named John Brunner wrote a couple of books in the later 60s called Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up.
It was the word 10 years hence from the 1960s. The fashion trend I remembered because I was a horny little kid and it made me excited that people in the future would let you wear clothing that would allow you to see their panties, “Wow, I cannot wait for the future.”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: [Laughing].
RR: It didn’t happen in the 70s, but, by now, performer—the idea of performing in a swimsuit or a skirt that is missing anything like a leotard-type bottom is a common thing. The panties came to be, but it took 30 years. Computer displays built into eyeglasses for augmented reality are in widespread use. Not really, Google Glass didn’t work out. People thought they were assholes and it didn’t catch on.
Computers can recognize their owners face from a piece of video, pretty much. A $1,000 computer can perform a trillion calculations per second. Yup. There’s increasing interest in massively parallel neural nets and other chaotic computing. Research has been initiated on research engineering the brain based on non-invasive methods. Elon Musk mentioned the enterprise.
What he thought would take 10 years is taking 15-18 years or more, for 2019, 20 years after he writes this book, he said for $4,000 you should be able to buy a computer with the computing capacity of the human brain.
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