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Kurzweil’s Predictions for 2009…look pretty accurate

Posted by rob on January 6th, 2009

From Kurzweil’s Age of the Spiritual Machines from 1999:

Regarding Computers:

It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thinner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book.

Computers have been embedded in clothing and jewelry for a couple of years now…more so on the DIY scene than in mass production.  The laptop/portable computer prediction might have been more of a common sense prediction, but none-the-less still holds true.

Regarding Computer Memory and Digital Objects:

Rotating memories (that is, computer memories that use a rotating platten, such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDs) are on their way out, although rotating magnetic memories are still used in “server” computers where large amounts of information are stored. Most users have servers in their homes and offices where they keep large stores of digital “objects,” including their software, databases, documents, music, movies, and virtual-reality environments (although these are still at an early stage). There are services to keep one’s digital objects in central repositories, but most people prefer to keep their private information under their own physical control.

Uh, hello SSD drives (which see the tipping point for a higher usage of them with prices falling).  Central repositories for digital objects?  How about iTunes, XBMC, or any other media-center type software/hardware solution?  Services to keep one’s digital objects in central repositories?  One need look no further than Flickr, delicious, or even more broad services such as Amazon’s S3 service.

Regarding Networking:

Cables are disappearing.  Communication between components, such as pointing devices, microphones, displays, printers, and the occasional keyboard, uses short-distance wireless technology.

Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication. Digital objects such as books, music albums, movies, and software are rapidly distributed as data files through the wireless network, and typically do not have a physical object associated with them.

I’m not even going to go into detail here.  Look at technologies that have become widely used in the last ten years such as  WiFi, Bluetooth, and more recently with the advent of high-speed cellular networks.

I dunno, maybe I’m just rambling, but I think Kurzweil is the bees-knees.

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3 Responses to “Kurzweil’s Predictions for 2009…look pretty accurate”

  1. January 6th, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    brad says:

    This is very interesting, and I think Kurzweil does a great job. But I got to thinking, are his accurate predictions the result of an individual who has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry, or a tech industry that has their fingers in the imaginations of the consumers? That said, the fact that he put a timeline on his predictions is very impressive, and definitely shows a keen degree of foresight.

  2. January 6th, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    rob says:

    Bah…Google Docs is blocked here @ work, but I actually have the PowerPoint slides that Kurzweil made available after he came to RIT a couple of months ago.

    Essentially Kurzweil looks at the technological advances we’ve made since 1900 (in several categories such as processor speed, network speed, number of hosts on the internet, etc) and produces his own unique conclusions from said data.

    The thing one has to consider with these kinds of predictions (technological advancements) is that it just corresponds to just the straight tech, and not to the demands of the consumers CONSUMING said tech. I think that these predictions (especially the things that Kurzweil got wrong, such as a higher usage of speech to text interfaces), prove that technology advancement has much more to do with consumer/market demands than was believed before.

    You should see some of the things that Kurzweil predicts for 2100, it’ll blow your mind.

  3. January 7th, 2009 at 11:57 am

    beej says:

    Well, Kurzweil’s predictions actually do account for things like consumer demand. That’s because in order to make his predictions he using statistics gathered from actual advancement throughout history. So, in 1999 when he made these predictions he had available to him, the growth of transistor counts, the size of portable devices over time, the bandwidth of existing wireless technologies and their adoptions rates. Once he crunched the numbers, he just graphed them and looked at 2009 and made his predictions.

    He is a very intelligent man, but his process is not exactly a black art. He is very much guided by real numbers, which will of course take into account many different factors automatically, since they are gathered from the real world.

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