Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.
> He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything
Is he, though? It seems to me that a lot of his predictions were surprisingly close to the mark, especially given how long ago they were made.
I'm convinced all of Kurzweil's predictions through the years can be simplified as (and originate from) "whatever least-implausible dream scenario allows a man of Ray Kurzweil's exact age and health to barely avoid the hitherto-universal icy grip of mortality."
I was awed by the future he promised, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte
Looking back, he’s great at selling a future of possibility as long as you don’t track all the errors.
This SMBC comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100813.gif
Tangentially related in terms of "old stuff from other things I read", this 2006 critique [0] by Derek Lowe:
> Later in Kurzweil's article, he says:
> > "So what does the future hold? By 2019, we will largely overcome the major diseases that kill 95 percent of us in the developed world, and we will be dramatically slowing and reversing the dozen or so processes that underlie aging."
> [...] I really do expect to put cancer, heart disease, the major infections, and the degenerative disorders in their place. But do I expect to do it by 20-flipping-19?
It's hard to be optimistic when it's been those 13 years plus another 7 and somehow measles is back again, although I admit that's one isn't a pure technology-problem.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ray-kurzweil-s-fut...
But that's kinda the point, there's no such thing as "a pure technology-problem". I think that's the fundamental - and obvious - thing that these folks seem to constantly miss.
Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy.
If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions.
https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/
Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%.
One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
Fair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is.
We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.
I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats.
And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.
The list in the appendix is pretty telling: Yes, the moments are off by a lot, but many of the predictions describe reality well.
I'd say that 7% accuracy is on the low side and 86% on the high side. Looking through the list I'd put it more at 50-60% personally. For me that still means that I'd much rather hear about what he has to say about the potential future than most other people.
If you grade what was linked by whether it is "approximately achievable today", and not some less interesting metric like being predicted for the correct year or if it was outcompeted by some other thing, he's closer to 70-90% depending on how close you're willing to grade.
It's very easy to say 'person X made a highly specific testable prediction, while respectable people said nothing like it would ever happen, and it only 90% happened, so person X was a fool unlike all the respectable people', but it's a trap. In reality Kurzweil was directionally correct about most things, overspecified the details, and had optimistic timelines in the way that everyone has optimistic timelines about everything.
Kurzweil predicted in the late 90s that we will have AGI by 2029. And ASI by 2045. Seems very likely to me.
Altman and Zitron are like pro wrestlers. Their speech acts aren't for truth, they're for some spectacular effect on your feelings and your imagination that keeps you coming back for more.
I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.
Ed Zitrons wild claims might be for entertainment value, but Altman’s are for his own valuation. He’s bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars off those claims.
Talking one's own book is a grand and ancient American tradition!
Without reference to either person, I think this is essentially a misunderstanding of Frankfurt’s analysis: On Bullshit is about expressing sentiments without caring about their truth value, i.e. the concept of a “bull session.”
Both Altman and Zitron are the opposite of Frankfurt’s bullshitter, because they both appear to evince genuine care for the truth value of their position.
(Frankfurt is very subtle about this, in that he distinguishes the kind of performative lying you’re suggesting as distinct in moral and rhetorical content from bullshitting. The liar wants you to believe a specific thing; the bullshitter wants to regale you.)
Bullshitting is where you don't care about whether what you say is true. Your goal is to influence a certain way of thinking or feeling, and you just say stuff that you think will cause that in other people. Appearing to care about truth is not opposed to that, it's part of it.
I don’t think these mental states are in evidence for either of them. I think they’re both credibly earnest in their views.
(Frankfurt’s characterization of the bullshitter rests on not just the truth value being absent, but also on the bullshitter’s misrepresentation of what he’s “up to.” I don’t feel that either Zitron or Altman is misrepresenting what they’re getting up to.)
So, you don't see how someone could both be "credibly earnest" and misrepresenting what they're up to?
Do you think misrepresentation has to be consciously deceptive? That it feels insincere to the person doing it?
I mean, the point of Frankfurt’s bullshitter is that we know they’re bullshitting (or more expansively, Frankfurt gives us a set of criteria to test them against). We know they don’t care about the truth value of their statement, only that they are misrepresenting themselves because of a hidden “enterprise.” But there’s no such unknown enterprise in either’s case, and neither appears to be misrepresenting themselves (to my point about appearing earnest). Maybe that latter part is itself deception, but without the former they would fall into Frankfurt’s classification of a “liar” instead.
(I have to admit a bias when it comes to Frankfurt: I don’t think On Bullshit is that convincing. In particular, I think Frankfurt doesn’t do a good job of motivating the connection between bull sessions and bullshit in his strong sense, and many of his examples - like the Pascal/Wittgenstein one - don’t demonstrate misrepresentation either.)
> Both Altman and Zitron are the opposite of Frankfurt’s bullshitter, because they both appear to evince genuine care for the truth value of their position.
I can't really judge Zitron, but when it comes to Altman, I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at that assessment. In my view, he's clearly dishonest. I’ll remind you of his attempt to use government intervention to erect barriers to market entry for his competitors. Or his claims about AGI being just around the corner—claims that haven’t come true so far and were clearly aimed at investors. I’ve never heard a single statement from this man that struck me as honest.
I think it’s appropriate in this day that people have to really shout and lament on and on about their thing just to get a few people to listen and/or consider parts of their argument. Nobody listens if you’re just casually proselytizing your grift.
Kurzweil made one big claim — Singularity around 2045. Everyone at the time thought it was a total joke and hundreds of years off, if even possible. Now, that is seen as a laughably long timeline.
The rest is noise, I don't care what minor predictions he was wrong about, he called the big trend back when nobody else could make a trendline.
The fact that you know Ed Zitron's name means that, regardless of his predictions being consistently wrong (which they are), his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.
The question is whether he sincerely believes his own predictions or if he cynically is aware that you can create a career for yourself being a guy who says bombastic clickbait-worthy things people emotionally want to be true, instead of measured assessments of reality.
Problem is, you wouldn't know Ed Zitron's name if every piece he wrote basically said "AI might be a bit overhyped short term but will have lasting economic impacts." Booooorrrring.
The reverse is also true. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't going to get much media attention if they don't make silly claims like "all white collar jobs gone in 2 years."
And no, this isn't a new problem due to "the algorithm." Media has always been like this. Zitron is just another Peter Schiff with younger skin. The problem is human nature in general.
Hence why AI isn't going to kill media. We don't actually want sober, rational assessments of all available information from hyper-intelligent LLMs. This is unsatisfying. We want emotional validation, drama, adversarial identity and spectacle. Truth is rarely what we are seeking.
I don't care whether he believes his own predictions, only that they're so frequently incoherent and false.
> his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.
"Correct" is not the word you're looking for here. More like "very effective". His strategy for manipulating human attention is very effective, but the correctness of his strategy isn't relevant here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.
Because a sincere discussion of media (a fundamentally insincere medium with perverse incentives) is silly without addressing this.
Autistically pretending the world is rational and not factoring this in is just as false as Zitron’s predictions.
Nothing in acknowledging those perverse incentives requires that one misleadingly use the word “correct” in place of “effective”.
This is the most bizarre and trivial line of argument I’ve ever seen on HN.
Swapping those words changes nothing about that sentence.
I'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was wrong. AFAICT he was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.
It’s linked in the article. The 85% accuracy is just shameless self promotion.
https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/#:~:text=flowing%20i...
I'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.
I think you missed a "I won't respond further."
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What? no human in history has gotten anything 80% right. You're doing exactly what this piece complains about.