Ray is no fool when predicting the future
Legendaryfilm producer Samuel Goldwyn once said: “Only a fool would make predictions – especially about the future.”
He was clumsily suggesting that making predictions is difficult for most of us.
For others, such as Ray Kurzweil, it’s a lifetime’s work.
Ray, born on February 12, 1948, has become the world’s foremost futurist, having successfully forecast the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the internet and a host of other startlingly accurate predictions.
He forged a successful career as a computer engineer and inventor but it wasn’t until 1990 that Ray attracted public attention with his book, The Age Of Intelligent Machines.
In it, he argued that technology would advance so rapidly it would change the world – and not in hundreds of years’ time, but in the next few decades. Some of these bold claims appeared ridiculous in the early 1990s, but most of them have come to pass.
The Soviet Union was crumbling, but Kurzweil predicted modern communication methods, such as mobile phones and faxes, would further strip the old-fashioned authoritarian government of its power, leading to its collapse. He pointed towards how increasingly powerful computers would be used to network with each other over phone lines – and this access “to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services” would change all of our lives. We would access this network via wireless technology, he suggested. There was much derision at this, almost as much as when he confidently predicted computer chess software would defeat the world champion by the year 2000.
That forecast came true when in 1997, the Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Gary Kasparov in a wellpublicised tournament.
In 1999 Kurzweil released a follow-up book that claimed in 20 years, computers wouldn’t be limited to clumsy desktop machines, but would also exist in smaller devices – which look a lot like mobile phones, or modern voice assistants.
The rise of weapons like drones were predicted. Kurzweil, who now works for Google, believes the rate of human advancement is changing.
In 25 years, he says, technology will advance further – to such a degree where diseases will be eliminated, resources such as food and fuel will be abundant and humans will have their whims catered to by robots.
We will even be surpassed by artificial intelligence. Will all this come to pass? Well, you know what they say about fools and predictions.