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This is: Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results, published by Stuart_Armstrong on the LessWrong.
EDIT: Mean and standard deviation of individidual predictions can be found here.
Thanks to all my brave assessors, I now have the data about Kurzweil's 1999 predictions about 2019.
This was a follow up to a previous assessment about his predictions about 2009, which showed a mixed bag. Roughly evenly divided between right and wrong, which I found pretty good for ten-year predictions:
So, did more time allow for trends to overcome noise or more ways to go wrong? Pause for a moment to calibrate your expectations.
Methods and thanks
So, for the 2019 predictions, I divided them into 105 separate statements, did a call for volunteers, with instructions here; the main relevant point being that I wanted their assessment for 2019, not for the (possibly transient) current situation. I got 46 volunteers with valid email addresses, of which 34 returned their predictions. So many thanks, in reverse alphabetical order, to Zvi Mowshowitz, Zhengdong Wang, Yann Riviere, Uriel Fiori, orthonormal, Nuño Sempere, Nathan Armishaw, Koen Holtman, Keller Scholl, Jaime Sevilla, Gareth McCaughan, Eli Rose and Dillon Plunkett, Daniel Kokotajlo, Anna Gardiner... and others who have chosen to remain anonymous.
The results
Enough background; what did the assessors find? Well, of the 34 assessors, 24 went the whole hog and did all 105 predictions; on average, 91 predictions were assessed by each person, a total of 3078 individual assessments[1].
So, did more time allow for more perspective or more ways to go wrong? Well, Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong:
Interesting details
The (anonymised) data can be found here[2], and I encourage people to download and assess it themselves. But some interesting results stood out to me:
Predictor agreement
Taking a single prediction, for instance the first one:
1: Computers are now largely invisible. They are embedded everywhere--in walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothing, jewelry, and bodies.
Then we can compute the standard deviation of the predictors' answer for that prediction. This gives an impression of how much disagreement there was between predictors; in this case, it was 0.84.
Perfect agreement would be a standard deviation of 0; maximum disagreement (half find "1", half find "5") would be a standard deviation of 2. Perfect spread - equal numbers of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s - would have a standard deviation of
√
2
≈
1.4.
Across the 105 predictions, the maximum standard deviation was 1.7, the minimum was 0 (perfect agreement), and the average was 0.97. So the predictors had a medium tendency to agree with each other.
Most agreement/falsest predictions
There was perfect agreement on five predictions; and on all of these, the agreed prediction was always "5": "False".
These predictions were:
51: "Phone" calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses.
55: [...] Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.
59: The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing.
62: [...] These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions with other human partners or simulated partners.
63: [...] In fact, it is often the preferred mode of interaction, even when a human partner is nearby, due to its ability to enhance both experience and safety.
As you can see, Kurzweil suffered a lot from his VR predictions. This seems a perennial thing: Hollywood is always convinced that mass 3D is just around the corner; technologists are convinced that VR is...
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