After Forbes author Alex Knapp criticized futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil’s decade-old predictions for 2009, Kurzweil came back with his own analysis, claiming that of all the speculation in 1998’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, about 80 percent were proved correct or “essentially correct.” Even the predicted tech that’s far from ubiquitous — like self-driving cars — “were considered crazy and centuries away,” Kurzweil says. “Consider that in the late 1990s when I wrote these predictions there was no Wikipedia, no social networks, no blogs, very primitive search engines that few people used, no usable language tools, very primitive and expensive mobile phones, and so on. It is easy to forget what life was like even a decade or so ago.”
Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 were ‘unarguably accurate,’ he says
Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes a response to a criticism of predictions for 2009 that he originally made in a 1998 book.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes a response to a criticism of predictions for 2009 that he originally made in a 1998 book.
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Image Credit: Michael Lutch (Wikimedia)
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