Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conversation Interpreter

Re:Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conver... by ghshephard on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @08:14PM (#2098384)

Okay - for all the Kurzweill naysayers - how about going out on a limb, and telling me which of his predictions are ones that we'd "eventually have" (+/- let's say five years or so), and which ones are just plain wrong.

For example - I think a _lot_ of people in 1990 would have (and in fact, they did) say that voice data entry would be the majority method for communication with computers in 2010. Totally and completely wrong. Kurzweil admits that he was way off on that one. (By at least 10 more years, he figures) But, at the time - it really seemed to be much more likely that we would automate voice entry, rather than teaching the entire human species to touch type.

So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish".

Alternatively, do you have some that he hasn't seen?

What drives me crazy about the Kurzweil Naysayers is that

  A) They Nitpick - overlooking his general correctness. 
    (I include myself in that category, btw. ) 

  B) They do it after the fact - I'd love for them to 
     pick a few of his future predictions and say that 
    (1) They will never happen or (2) They are obviously
        going to happen.

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Re:Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conver... by storm on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @09:59PM (#2098646)

You're a "huge Kurzweil critic" one reply back, now you're railing against the sins of his "naysayers"?

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Re:Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conver... by ghshephard on Thursday January 13, 2011 @05:02AM (#2099359)

I simultaneously have issues with Kurzweil's tendency to be overly generous with his "Mostly Correct/Correct" categories (check out my comments in other threads) - yet, at the same time believe it's important to look beyond the nitpicking of minor details. In the _specific_, Kurzweil is overly generous - but I think it's important that we don't lose sight of the fact that the general arc of his predictions, are, in fact, pretty good.

Critic is not necessarily pejorative. A critic can point out the good and bad.

From: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/critic

Critic: One who forms and expresses judgments of the merits, faults, value, or truth of a matter.

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Re:Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conver... by feral on Thursday January 13, 2011 @11:33AM (#2100325)

"So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish". "

I'm not claiming to be able to make long term predictions. I'm also not egomaniacal enough to think that anyone will care enough to come back and check my post in 5/10 years :) I'm just saying to accurately evaluate how good his correct predictions were, we would need a benchmark of predictions of other people.

I think there's a lot of value to reading Kurzweils writing, and its entertaining. I just object to people who pick out the things he generously got right, and massively overestimate his success rate, including him. He recently announced an 86% success rate. 1) He shouldnt put sharp numbers quantifying things that have been loosely defined, and sloppily evaluated. 2) He has no-where near that, in my opinion.

I dont want to go through 2 in detail, but I think its fairly clear from reading his prediction summary, or http://us.penguingroup.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excer... that while he got a good few things right, he got a lot wrong too.

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