> He did admit on stage Wednesday that he thought we'd have self-driving cars by 2009.

> "Now that's not completely wrong," he said. "If I had said 2015, I think it would've been correct, but they're still not in mainstream use. So even the [predictions] that were wrong were directionally correct."

So if we're going to ignore the year, he might as well make all of his predictions just be "eventually, we'll accomplish X". The cognitive dissonance of Ray Kurzweil is impressive.

> So if we're going to ignore the year, he might as well make all of his predictions just be "eventually, we'll accomplish X". The cognitive dissonance of Ray Kurzweil is impressive.

So there's no value in being close? Being off by six years is the same as being off by eight centuries?

Well, where does he draw the line? Will he claim success when a prediction comes true, but ten years late? 15? What is the definition of a failed prediction, according to Ray Kurzweil?

Here's a scenario: It's 2028, and my doctor says I'm in the early stages of Alzheimers. Do I sell everything and try to knock items off my bucket list, or do I keep working like everything's normal and wait for the advent of nanobots? If Kurzweil had a model (other than a linear regression, please) I could at least make some educated guesses. But he's basically just a science fiction author who has decided to tack years onto his stories. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.

As the quarterly appearance of Ray Kurzweil to make a fantastic prediction of the future is upon us, perhaps a review of his previous predictions is in order: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...

It's interesting we're getting near the computer hardware equivalence to a human brain point - Kurzweil suggesting 2019 for a $4000 computer. I think he may be a bit optimistic there. He has brain equivalence at about 10^16 flops. Hans Moravec who also did some calculations figured about 10^14. I see present tech is around 7*10^12 for the $999 Nvidia Titan X GPU. So 15 of those just now for the Moravec number I guess.

hmm... I've always been a bit skeptical of the nanobots in our head thing

They'll sort that our for you.

Half human half iPhone

I have not a good opinion of all RK related. One thing he did not predict correctly (by his own design) is that open source will be the main component (already is) of IA in all current and future developments. Check the index of his 'Singularity' book, no mention whatsoever of Open Source, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman or any of the OS giants. So anything RK says sounds to me like just another Microsoft advertisement.

If you are going to post a negative value for my comment please state why. Nothing I said is untrue. Don't be a troll.