Asimov is not a simple "science-fiction writer," he was a real genius with fantastically broad and clear knowledge. Try to read his non-fiction books, you'd be surprised how good grasp he has whatever subject he takes.

I firmly believe he was right to say:

"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

For a brilliant intro into his non-fiction essays, I can't recommend The Left Hand of the Electron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_the_Electron) enough. Snagged my copy from the peace corps library in Liberia. Ahem.

Thanks for the book tip, I've just found the pdf!

For others interested, here's the list with all his works:

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html

I'm just reading

http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book225.html

It's available in iBooks.

I wasn't saying anything negative about Asimov, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the man, it was more about the contrast between someone supposed to write fiction and the other supposed to predict the future and how one got thing righter than the other. The irony seemed rich.

Asimov and Kurzweil seem (to me) to be making similar predictions in terms of the gap between their predictions and the status quo. 50 years is probably a lot easier for that kind of progress to be made than 10. Did Asimov make any 10 year predictions? Not knocking either, but it would be interesting to see if Asimov had trouble with a shorter horizon.

I don't consider Kurzweil being able to make an good predictions in any time frame, his ideas are more a wishful thinking than showing the real understanding. I believe his major trait is just extrapolating wrongly, like here:

http://xkcd.com/605/

Still I admit that by expecting and actively promoting "more" he inspires people who otherwise wouldn't be motivated.

One gotcha of predicting is thinking of advancements as an invention followed by an almost inevitable progression towards better, cheeper and ubiquitous. Flying cars, household nuclear plants & lunar holidays have been possible with money-is-no-object technology but have stayed there while computers went from on Paper Turing machines to smartphones in your pocket thanks to Moore's law. Engines became ubiquitous in an economic process started by their invention. But, the economic process can independent to the discovery. They multiply each other so one can be worthless without the other. For space fairing, nuclear power, and lots of other things we never got a Moore's Law.

An interesting anecdote from the article is the first video call in 1964. That "invention" of the video call wasn't even an important event on the way to ubiquitous video calling. Modern video calls are a practically an inevitable outcome of a process driven by Moore's law and the internet. The idea of invention followed by iteration leading to ubiquity just doesn't apply here.

I think this is the strength and weakness of Ray Kurzweil (I like Ray Kurzweil warts, misfires and all). You might say that he gets caught by this gotcha. He expects an initial invention followed by improvements and refinements to launch a self propelled economic cycle like engines and computers did. Those things are rare and truly paradigm shifting. Also hard to predict.

OTOH, you might say he's on the right track because he's looking for the paradigm shifts. AI, Immortality. Etc.

I personally read Kurzweil similarly to the way I read Asimov. It's a form of art. I like Kurzweil's ideas aesthetically.

Seems like Asimov's main genius was just looking at what the trends of his time were - long distance communication, television/media, cheaper/nuclear energy, automation (robots are the ultimate automation, right?), and increasing inequality and just forecasted that those trends would get cheaper and more widely accessible.

Futurists like Kurzweil seem to forecast much more drastic changes in human behavior (although the link to predictions made by RK is actually a lot more accurate than I would have guessed. Still out there, but none of them seem "impossible" to me. He seems to mainly just be too aggressive in his "when."

"a science-fiction writer"

And in his spare time, a PHD in biochem, and a university professor of biochemistry, and author of a couple dozen popular science non-fiction books. Not exactly the kind of guy who merely wrote Jar Jar Bink's movie lines all day, or decided which red shirt gets it on Trek.

Some of those were obviously never going to happen in those timescales though. Automated cars by 2000? As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition in the early 90s I could have told you that that required component alone wouldn't be up to the required standard in 10 years and probably not 20.

Similarly automatic translation. These are just tough problems that will take time to solve and even in the heady anything-is-possible-90s that was obvious to anyone who had the remotest understanding of what they were dealing with.

> As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition

The "vision" for automated cars at the time didn't involve image recognition -- it involved sensors in the road and on each car. The technology for this was certainly available by 2000, but the justification for such a massive investment in infrastructure was not.

How would that work for avoiding pedestrians, animals or any of the other things not conveniently tagged?

I recently read about a self-driving car that was built using only machine vision by a neural network, in the 1990s. I was very surprised such a thing existed at all back then.

Asimov didn't really have an agenda. Kurzweil is trying to push the envelope. He has to, the chance that singularity or cryogenics will be available within his lifetime is pretty small.

I don't think agenda is the right term - more like wishful thinking.

Agenda here is appropriate -- Kurzweil is unabashed in his desire to push health & tech to the point where he can live forever.

At the very least he had, as of a few years ago when I met him at a speaking event, very few wrinkles for someone his age. I don't think he's got magical life extension kool aid yet, but it seems like he's doing something that at least reduces the appearance of aging a little bit. Although all the meta-analyses recently reporting the potential negative effects of supplementation are in disagreement with his approach.

Actually, doing such futuristic predictions may make people not work on them; they expect the technology will occur.