If you really want your mind blown look at how accurate Ray Kurzweil was from his 1999 book Age of Spiritual Machines
The most striking thing is that almost all of his missed predictions were missed not because the technology was not available, but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology
> but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology
OK, so imagine that in 1980, I predicted that we'll colonize Mars by the year 2020. Today, I'm arguing that I was right in my prediction - in broad strokes, we have the technology! Nothing is stopping us. It's just that politicians have different priorities.
Of course, that's a load of bull. You can't decouple predictions about the future of mankind from what said mankind actually decides.
I looked up the predictions on Wikipedia and I'd say that most of them are general enough that they'd hard to disagree with back in 1999 (there will be bioengineering, there will be portable computers, there will be robots, there will be AI), but the timing or the specifics are off on almost every single one of them.
Except, we don't have the technology to even get to Mars. Forget about colonizing. [0]
[0]: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
Explain what you mean by not being able to get to Mars?
Go to Dan Luu's evaluation (https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/), search for "Appendix: detailed information on predictions". Seems like Kurzweil's has a huge number of awful predictions. This is from four years ago, so a few things are closer to being real now. But many things he predicted for the early 2000s still haven't arrived.
To be clear I’m not saying he got everything right but if you look at the missed ones, many were/are possible technically
What’s the value of predictions if they’re not good enough to make decisions on?
I think it is largely domain dependent. He's had solid predictions around computing, but for biology (and longevity) he seems to be way off.
For instance, by his prediction, we're already many years past a 100 year average life expectancy (with 120 years expected by the end of the decade).
I think his mistake was tightly coupling exponential compute with exponential progress in biology - which has so far not panned out.
> but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology
I would argue that society would likely have been glad to adopt, but the profit-seeking motive got in the way (again).
Actually I think it’s the inverse
I was focused on augmented reality largely in part because it was such a big enabler of all other AI technologies
However people have almost uniformly rejected AR glasses my entire career for social reasons and that is only increasing
To the point where in 2016 I was debating with Jessica Alba and she was firm that they won’t take off cause most people don’t want to wear glasses
I don't like wearing glasses. I should wear my glasses more often, but I don't. But that isn't going to stop me from buying the Even Reality G2