I think an important assumption underlying this is that the goal of the predictor is to be as accurate as possible. In a number of cases that's probably not true. Other goals for making (public) predictions:
- influencing investor or consumer confidence. Even if you don't have high confidence in what you're saying in the long term, it may be necessary in the near term to make statements that project confidence
- building a brand as a thought-leader, futurist, whatever. In part this depends on saying something interesting that people will want to read or hear about. People can enjoy this kind of prediction without believing it. A book review for Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near said "exhilarating speculation is great fun to read, but needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt." Buckminster Fuller was wrong about many things but people still enjoy his work because it's interesting.
- influencing policy in your preferred direction. No one can predict the number of severe zoonotic diseases that will have epidemics in the next 30 years, but some experts think they'll happen more frequently as the climate crisis progresses. We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Dan knows people bullshit, but it would be very weird to say "well, I guess I can't criticize the bullshit" just because someone else doesn't care about the truth.
To your point about people enjoying the work, they're still allowed to. Anyone can read what Dan wrote, and say "I enjoy this work despite the fact that (almost) none of it is true." I do this with Marvel movies, for instance. I do suspect that many readers did not realize how phenomenally bad Kurzweil's projections are, and would be disappointed by realizing that they are.
I also think there's a key point being missed. That is: being a futurist with high accuracy is useless if your predictions were already obvious.
I can score a 100% accuracy rate by predicting things that everyone knows are going to happen (humans will still exist in 2025, the sun will rise in 2050, etc.). A futurist is not useful when they are merely accurate, but when they are accurate about events that no one else expected.
It is inappropriate to compare someone like Kurzweil to Caplan. Caplan is just trying to be correct. Kurzweil is trying to make predictions about black-swan events -- the things people don't see coming. These are different ballgames, and the ballgame of predicting unexpected events is inherently more difficult.
> We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers.
Frustrating, but true. I was recently asked at work to stop adding statements on certainty, to be more concise. I suppose they were in essence delegating the decision of whether something matters to me. That's in some ways a reasonable request, because if I make a nuanced presentation, the audience doesn't have the education/knowledge to evaluate the nuances.
I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback.
Nobody needs to be reminded that people who make public predictions might want to deceive investors or customers, to be famous and make money, or to deceive voters or legislators into pursuing their favored policies. People need to be reminded that their current psychics (and pundits for that matter) have a long history of only getting the things right that everybody got right, and even getting a few of those wrong for a bit of contrarian attention.
> I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback.
No, my assumption is that the author is interested in understanding what contributes to good vs bad predictions, and how credible long range predictions are.
The author points out factors such as whether the predictor appears to learn from past prediction errors, whether they have a deep expertise in the area they're making a prediction about, whether they depend on extrapolating exponential trends etc. I am guessing that "Do they sell a lot of popular press books?" and "Do they receive performance based compensation from an organization invested in the domain under discussion?" are at least as important explanatory factors as the ones the author explicitly discusses.
In fairness, we've still got six or seven years to figure out feeding ourselves with nano bots, perfect our understanding of the human brain via scanning technology and release general AI that runs on commodity hardware. Some impressively wide misses in the 2010s though...
That image of metaverse has become iconic and is used as a very powerful tool of telling the story of how metaverse is failing and I wonder if Zuckerberg will ever be able to fix the damage. What He was thinking?
TBH, I never tried VR and when I intended to try VR as I hear good things about Half Life: Alyx I was not able to find a VR centre close to me that has not failed yet. The few I found, all gone.
I also have been reading from VR advocates about how it can actually be nice for working because you can have very large view field, as if using multiple large monitors in a distraction-free environment.
However for me VR has become this picture of Zuk and I bet I'm not alone because it is so iconic and icons assume the functions of the actual thing in the absence of it. Maybe they shouldn't have been promoting Metaverse to people who don't have the equipment and can't give it a fair go.
> I never tried VR and when I intended to try VR as I hear good things about Half Life: Alyx
Think of VR as a really good arcade on-rails shooter game and that's the gist of Half Life Alyx. It's a good game. But it also left me feeling very disappointed.
* You won't move much. You'll peek in and out of cover, which is fun, but you won't actually "move" around all that much for most encounters. People really like ducking in and out of cover to shoot at things, and again, that is genuinely fun.
* Some enemies break this mold and require you to move; doing extremely telegraphed attacks that pretty much just require you to move to anywhere that isn't exactly where you're standing at that moment. Specifically just enough that you need to use the controller inputs to move rather than stepping physically. If you stop to think about why the game is designed this way, it's because people are bad at moving irl, and this is about all they can handle.
* In general all enemies have this feel of an on rails shooter though, and you have no way to interact with them besides throwing grenades and shooting. You can't melee and a lot of enemies stand just a little too far to seem realistic so that they don't do weird overlaps with your camera.
* There's some physical interaction stuff that is good. Stuff that in other games would have been "Press X to do Y" is now a physical machine you need to move around with your hands, especially reloading. But it's also very limited because most of the game is a static mesh that you can't really do anything with.
So... yeah, I enjoyed it but it made me pessimistic for the future. I think they worked hard to deal with VR's limitations but they are same damn high walls.
I haven’t played Alyx, but I think you should try Boneworks. It has not just standard melee weapons, but also the ability to grab enemies with your hands and sort of grapple with them, based on a physics simulation. And it has other aspects that emphasize physicality. Some walls you can climb hand over hand; others you can’t, but if you stack up objects you can get up them anyway.
The downside of allowing these interactions is that they feel very unreal and “physics sim”-ish, almost dreamlike due to weightlessness. For a game with a serious story, it might be immersion-breaking. But I had an amazing time just experiencing it as its own thing.
Boneworks is a very different approach, and also very inventive on the devs part, but I think it falls pretty flat too.
You can physically hit enemies but it's a very limited system. If you play with it for a bit you'll probably come to the conclusion that "fighting" is impractical and the best option is to hold forward movement and stab people with your arm outstretched. Because your input movement is wayyyy more maneuverable than your physical movement. Trying to two hand a large weapon is difficult because your hands don't lock to the object irl but they try to in game and you rarely get satisfying bonks with the sweet spot of a weapon. You can grapple enemies, but it's a stretch to say you're grappling. They simply become rag dolls that don't do anything once you grab them. You can also grab them with one hand and punch them with the other but it takes FOREVER.
And lastly, while I grinded through the nausea and didn't feel like puking by the end of it, it still was vaguely unpleasant to climb and jump. It's a good example of physical presence in video games. it'll be hard to do better than that but it still kind of sucks
> I also have been reading from VR advocates about how it can actually be nice for working because you can have very large view field, as if using multiple large monitors in a distraction-free environment.
They all forget to mention that you need to put a big goofy computer on your head
It's not indistinguishable, but VRchat has a pretty massive daily playerbase (20k on this weekday per steam), including some people that make a living making 3D art content (environments, character models), and to the dedicated, that is their reality.
To be indistinguishable, though, not quite there yet. Then again, the valve index is still visually nearly, if not the, top of the line, and 3 years old, and it sounds like valve, meta, apple, and some more smaller players are still working on a true next gen, where "gen" is something that feels wholly, indisputably superior to previous offerings. Vive is also still trying but also not doing anything revolutionary. We are however simultaneously on the brink of consumer-level extremely high fidelity, high speed, cable-matching wireless video, and being able to strap sufficient computer power into the headset itself, and no-extra-equipment, compromise-free tracking. VR is absolutely a guaranteed long term growth market
20k is massive for sustained players of an indie online-only game released around 6 years ago.
At the time of writing (the quietest period in the week for online gaming worldwide), it is currently 54th place in terms of people playing on steam right now.
None of the 53 games above it require/recommend a dedicated peripheral to play.
VR won't hit 1 million simultaneous users in anything until VR displays can render high quality text on a quad (think a screen or piece of paper) and/or provide haptic feedback.
VR is still held back by today's technology for the most interesting uses, but is still acceptable enough for a social space to thrive.
It’s more about install base and size of marketplace than technical abilities I think. The primary drivers of that is things like the quantity of quality software at an inexpensive price, fit and comfort, and price. For all the excellent advancements made on the technical side, basically the only funding for VR content comes from FB and hobbyists which limits adoption. There’s also secondary things around it not being usable for meaningful productivity (and even when it is, it doesn’t realize the dream of making you more productive).
It’s all early days but I think OP is very correct. 20k is comparatively impressive but absolutely shows how limited in scope a “runaway” success looks like. Think of it this way. Traditional console/PC games every year have several AAA titles that sell millions of copies each and have millions of people playing online. Compared with VR where Beat Saber is basically the #1 game for several years. That’s a massive marketplace to sell into with a long track record of winning formula (that’s why gameplay and business modes aren’t innovated on too much). That kind of stuff hasn’t happened for VR yet. Note that I’m not saying it won’t.
Also I wouldn’t look at Steam numbers here - Quest, which is the number 1 VR headset in the world, doesn’t make its analytics visible there [1]. VRChat is top 10 but Beat Saber is more popular I think. So the conclusion is that VRChat is the #1 VR game for PCVR which is a comparatively stagnant market and doesn’t speak to the broader ecosystem.
Just on the point about steam numbers and analytics, according to the August 2022 Steam Hardware Survey, the Oculus Quest 2 and the Oculus Rift S makes up 49.25% and 11.05% of the VR headsets used on Steam respectively.
Yes and I think that proves my point. The majority of quest 2 users are not using link. So if it’s half of pcvr, then the stream vr stats are skewed towards “typical” pcvr usage which distorts the true vr story which is dominated by mobile. It’s like looking at laptop software sales and making conclusions about the app market place ignoring that mobile dominates that space too.
I'm not entirely sure globally, but out of a few thousands hours of my own experience, somewhere around 85%. Keyboard/mouse users exist but VR users naturally inform them repeatedly that it's completely different and better with VR
They're not that bad. a lot of them fell short but are foreseeable in the not-too-distant future. Some things he predicted for later ar arguably here or almost here, eg this one for 2029:
Computers are now capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own and with no human help. By scanning the enormous content of the Internet, some computers "know" literally every single piece of public information (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every public statement, etc.) generated by human beings.
I don't know what the deletion of predictions means, but Wikipedia editors in general seem to dislike checklists.
Haven't you ever seen a movie set in the future? Holograms are all the rage. Holographic displays, holographic phone calls, holographic controls. It's holograms all the way down at some point in the future.
According to the article, Bryan Caplan has the best record of 100%.
But I was surprised to find that the article did not say much about the bets themselves, nor analyze in any great detail what exactly Caplan is doing. Indeed, it's not even possible based on the article AFAICT to check the 100% figure (23/23) independently.
What's interesting is how many of Caplan's bets favor a continuation of the status quo against an opponent believing in a more extreme outcome.
The open bets are also interesting. Consider this one:
> You pay me $x today. If any European country that was not Communist in 1988 has a civil war leading to 10,000 or more fatalities between today and December 31, 2045, I will immediately pay you $11x.” (initial terms, final terms here) 09/24/2015. Status: open.
That said, the language prevents me from figuring out which side Caplan bet on. This is a problem with many of the terms, but fortunately the winner is given as Caplan. Not so in this case.
Given Caplan's apparently conservative bent, I suspect he's "me".
Note that Caplan does have a handful of losing bets for which the deadline simply hasn't arrived yet. For example, he made an anti-global-warming bet that average temperatures wouldn't rise faster in the 2015-2030 span than they did over 2000-2015, which he has all but lost unless we plunge into an ice age tomorrow; it's just that the end of the bet isn't for another seven years.
He also appears to have lucked out a little with the "No major country will withdraw from the EU" bet. His deadline was Jan 1, 2020, but the UK withdrew on Jan 31, 2020.
The article does say that Caplan "Relies on: taking the "other side" of bad bets/predictions people make and mostly relying on making very conservative predictions." And later on in the article he covers the advantage (basically, a "tax on bullshit") and the limitation (probably won't learn about important future trends).
Years ago, when I lived in SF, a friend of mine invited me out after work on a Friday evening. Exhausted from the week prior, I declined. "Oh but it's a party at The Singularity House, in the south bay" my friend replied. "The Singularity" was something that smart people had mentioned to me during my time in SF, but I never understood what they were talking about. For whatever reason, that was enough of a novelty for me to change my mind and head to the party, to see if I could figure out what The Singularity was. I met my friend at the SF Caltrain station and we headed towards the "singularity house" in Atherton. It was the strangest party I've ever been to. It seemed like small groups of people who didn't know each other had gathered there, in all sorts of strange outfits and the lack of coherence was quite something. I remember someone dressed up as a victorian queen. Despite the massive mansion, the party was pretty lame. I made a few laps before deciding it wasn't for me and headed back to the city.
Whenever someone mentions the singularity, this is what I imagine.
Maybe it was a party that nobody could leave once they'd gotten fully into the party. Our intrepid reporter is just lucky that they didn't pass the event horizon of and getting into a conversation with a futurist.
Always have to appreciate Dan's trick of literally just measuring anything about a topic to cut through some of the bullshit surrounding it. Certainly this isn't a perfect measurement but it is at least something.
Finally, someone is calling BS on Kurzweil. Praising him, which is the sole source of his “credibility”, has been an in-group signaling in some circles.
I read The Age of Spiritual Machines quite a while back and it was obvious at the time that Kurzweil’s predictions were pretty far fetched, but they were also very far reaching, thought provoking, and sparked much internal (and external) debate within me. I am not someone who takes much part in tech communities outside of this one so I don’t know what circles you are referring to. But yeah: Kurzweil makes some predictions that don’t come true. It’s been a long time, and it is quite possible that I’m misremembering, or viewing through rose tinted glasses, so please take my follow up question at face value: So what? What’s the harm? If one thing stuck with me from that book, it is that deep gut-level social understanding of the tech we create lags far behind the creation of the tech itself. In a world of personalization algorithms and addiction under the guise of engagement, isn’t that lesson more relevant than ever?
Edit: I’m reading some of the criticisms of Kurzweil’s claims in the article. It is clear that he was wrong about growth rates in many areas and about life expectancy growing unbounded. Perhaps my skepticism kept me from taking these claims at face value at any point. Perhaps it is dangerous for someone to be making these claims to the public. I am not sure.
If you built your life so that your happiness rests on immortality via the Singularity, I think Kurzweil's predictions have done a fair amount of harm. You built your life on an illusion, and will figure out before the end that the promise isn't going to come true. That's tough to swallow. Worse, it distracts you from things that matter even though you die in the end.
Dunno, in the past few years there has been plenty of criticism towards his cult. For example, the author of a book called "Live Work Work Work Die" Corey Pein was making fun of it in 2018
A bunch of us have been snarking on Kurzeweil since the 80s. His bookreader for blind people was the last good thing he did I know of, that was before 1985.
This is... dense. And I think in some ways it's just giving credence to things we should just discard. For example,
>In 2001, he uses this method to plot a graph and then predicts unbounded life expectancy by 2011
and then Dan cites this sentence:
> In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year.
Like, let's lay aside the predictions. Between 1980 and 2000 US life expectancy increased by 3 years. So let's just shelve the question of the predictions, this person is clearly making shit up. Whoever is making this prediction is simply not getting even the most basic facts correct.
In some ways I think the approach of this article is backwards. You don't apply retrospective rigor to old predictions, you define a rigorous process for future predictions, because there's no way someone is going to luck into being rigorous, and I think most of the futurists are even aiming to be rigorous. A lot of futurists are essentially sci-fi writers. What they're doing is fundamentally entertainment rather than rigorous scientific method. So I don't see why you would set out to judge them by a rigorous scientific method.
In some ways I see a parallel between this and effective alturism - EAs often think other forms of charity are misguided, but there's no point judging non-EA giving by EA standards because people just fundamentally don't agree with the core ideas of EA.
But the "rigorous scientific process" for the regular science does contain the step of getting creative with the hypothesis space (sometimes quite wildly creative, think Einstein) and you are deemed either a crackpot or a genius depending on your communication skills and social status first (sci-fi writer allusion). The experimental results start to arrive often years after.
Futurist predictions for this century are really bad. Which is a problem. We don't know where we're trying to go, and thus can't get there.
The best futurism was probably at the 1939 World's Fair.[1] The General Motors vision for 1960 came to pass. Wide freeways! Endless suburbia! Big airports! Mission accomplished. By the 1964 World's Fair, futurism was kind of stuck. The GM exhibit had moon bases and undersea cities. Nope. The 1964 World's Fair mostly ended the era of futuristic world's fairs, although there were a few later attempts. Usually involving monorails.
The huge misses of futurism:
* Robots. Manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks.
* Atomic power. Works, but every two decades or so you lose a city-size area. Costs too much.
* Space. Costs too much to get there, not that useful to be there.
* Immortality. Not even close.
What we have now is dystopian futurism, about which too much has been said already.
What would be the modern equivalent to a prediction of wide freeways, endless suburbia, and big airports? That's just scaling up existing things.
I will predict we'll have more compute throughput and endless social media in 20 years. Not sure on what the next big public transit innovation will be.
I don't see why I'd use that particular metric of living standards. There's few places in the world where I think life on average isn't better now than it was 50 years ago, even if you ignore innovations like the internet.
It's also possible they're diseases of despair. Advanced economies are highly competitive, and if you are losing in that competition it's crushing, even if your standard of living is good in an absolute sense.
> It's simply not the case that most bugs or even, as a fraction of bugs, almost any bugs are due to programmers rewriting existing code to run on new CPUs. If you really squint, you can see things like Android devices having lots of security bugs due to the difficulty of updating Android and backporting changes to older hardware, but those kinds of bugs are both a small fraction of all bugs and not really what Dixon was talking about.
It's worth noting that Dixon's prediction was at the very tail end of the time when CPU portable was a major goal. In the late 90s, anyone compiling for Unixes might reasonably have to support a half-dozen major architectures. Nowadays, even including 32- and 64-bit as separate architectures, there's basically 4 architectures that matter (i386, x86-64, arm, aarch64) for most software. And since 1998, RISC-V and Itanium would have been the only notable new architectures.
This doesn't contradict what Dan says about Dixon being wrong, though.
I still wouldn't characterize writing portable code as constantly rewriting code for new CPUs, at least if you're doing it right. (There's a whole historical discussion to be had about how hard it was to write portable software back in the day and the causes of that.)
Kurzweil: "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. With the revolutions in genomics, proteomics, rational drug design, therapeutic cloning of our own organs and tissues, and related developments in bio-information sciences, we will be adding more than a year every year within ten years."
Dan Luu: "Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by more than one year per year (the last citation I saw on this was a 2016 prediction that we would have unbounded life expectancy by 2029), which is characteristic of many of Kurzweil's predictions."
(1) People don't genuinely want to be evaluated on their predictions. If they did, they would (a) make probabilistic predictions and (b) make well-defined predictions. Example "with 80% probability, there will be more than one million Americans over 100 years old in 2040."
(2) Prediction on long timelines is too hard. It's more useful to generate ideas about possibilities. With the small samples here, people are almost just as likely to be lucky as right.
We saw a microcosm of this early in the pandemic, where some groups got really excited about forecasting the number of cases. (1) I didn't see anybody quantitatively evaluate their own predictions and own up to how good or bad they were. (2) Everyone pretty quickly gave up even trying to make predictions over a month away. It was too hard. So it devolved into fitting short-term curves and then I think mostly they gave up forecasting altogether.
At least Vernor Vinge gave a date range for the singularity. Initially, he said he would be surprised if it happened before 2000 and after 2020. I think he's moved that goalpost forward a decade or two since.
Kurzweil just says 2045, because that's where his chart or accelerating returns tells him it will happen.
One of the example possibilities mentioned in one of his essays or interviews was, what if with some poorly-understood tweaks to neural network training, it started working much better at scale? At the time I thought he was really reaching with that one.
And if you make a well-defined prediction, you should be able to work backwards from it to smaller predictions over intervening years.
If, say, I were to predict that 40% of intercity travel would be via high speed rail in 2100 in California, I should be able to either argue why high speed rail would spring out of nowhere in 2099 or have a plausible story as to how it might grow.
Charlie Stross (scifi author and hn user @cstross) have made some good speeches about predicting the future and what errors futurist typically make. One of them is available in text form here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-...
Found the most useful question to ask people about the future is not what will change, but the things they don’t believe will change that currently impact the most people both today and in the future.
For example: all people will eventually die, both today and 50 years from; Earth’s climate will increasingly get warmer; etc.
By collecting enough of these types of predictions, future becomes much more clear than attempting to predict what will change.
In my opinion, with rare exceptions, trying to predict what will or will not change more 50 years out likely is a waste of time. For example, say you wanted to backup data for 1000 years, then it makes sense to think through the logistics. Climate change is also another good example. To me though, wondering if “cars” will still be around feels like a waste of time. As for not dying, not aware of any meaningful progress that would be of note; feel free to give a more detailed reasoning for why the future of death is increasingly uncertain.
I wish you could force two submissions to ride side by side. If I could do that I would pair this article with the one "death by hockey sticks"[1]. Great fun to read them back to back.
You could make a lot of money by taking "Rapture" literature and replacing a few words and publishing it as Singularity literature. And I suspect it fills a similar need/niche.
So much of it is "local exponential increase will continue forever" despite all the laws of nature screaming it won't.
The "local exponential increase will continue forever" is the normal bad forecasting bit. It's everything else about the Singularity belief system that looks like religious millennialism and fits the same niche:
projections based on the appeal of culturally significant stories rather than actual developments, the certainty the dramatic change will happen in the near future to people like them as a result of powerful forces called by people like them, the near future technology being sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, the insistence this is a path to immortality or terrible destruction but nothing more modest, even sometimes the insistence there's something profoundly immoral about not believing in it.
Kurzweil famously took/takes large numbers of vitamins / supplements / pills each day, in order to extend his life and health. I’d love to read a followup on that. Did it work? Were there any side-effects? How is he measuring whether it is working?
This is a great article. I have been annoyed for some time that no one points out Kurzweil's overoptimistic and almost never true predictions. My guess is that Kurzweil is simply predicting a singularity out of fear of death.
I thoroughly enjoy getting into conversations where someone says something along the lines of "science communicators are important." I enjoy it because of how laughably ridiculous it is, I like amusement and entertainment just like everyone else.
The only things these "science communicators" have done is parade their buffoonery around and turn science into a daytime TV marathon. They've created a generation or two of people who think they're informed because they passively watch TV shows with pretty renders in them, "nerds" who don't design or build anything, and an idea that you can be right all the time if you venerate the right people. They're grifters, they're novelty guests at parties, they don't actually understand anything or teach anyone anything.
Actual smart people who know what they're talking about don't take these people seriously. The day I listen to these guys is the day Neil DeGrasse Tyson draws me a picture depicting exactly how you write bug free code.
- influencing investor or consumer confidence. Even if you don't have high confidence in what you're saying in the long term, it may be necessary in the near term to make statements that project confidence
- building a brand as a thought-leader, futurist, whatever. In part this depends on saying something interesting that people will want to read or hear about. People can enjoy this kind of prediction without believing it. A book review for Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near said "exhilarating speculation is great fun to read, but needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt." Buckminster Fuller was wrong about many things but people still enjoy his work because it's interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Review...
- influencing policy in your preferred direction. No one can predict the number of severe zoonotic diseases that will have epidemics in the next 30 years, but some experts think they'll happen more frequently as the climate crisis progresses. We might all be better off if experts understate the uncertainty in their projections when they make their case to policy-makers.