{"id":21542,"date":"2016-02-02T15:48:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T23:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:13:12","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:13:12","slug":"why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time","title":{"rendered":"Why Ray Kurzweil\u2019s Predictions Are Right 86% of the Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That\u2019s great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so fascinating that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading thinkers when it comes to the future of technology, has had such a strong track record in making predictions about technology for nearly two decades. In fact, of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990\u2019s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be \u201cessentially correct\u201d (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate. So how does he do it?<\/p>\n

The fact is, Ray has a system and this system is called the Law of Accelerating Returns. In his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed<\/a>, Kurzweil points out that \u201cevery fundamental measure of information technology follows predictable and exponential trajectories.\u201d The most famous of these trajectories, of course, has been the price\/performance path of computing power over more than 100 years. Thanks to paradigms such as Moore\u2019s Law, which reduces computing power to a problem of how many transistors you can cram on a chip, anyone can intuitively understand why computers are getting exponentially faster and cheaper over time.<\/p>\n

The other famous exponential growth curve in our lifetime is the sheer amount of digital information available on the Internet. Kurzweil typically graphs this as \u201cbits per second transmitted on the Internet.\u201d That means the amount of information on the Internet is doubling approximately every 1.25 years. That\u2019s why \u201cBig Data\u201d is such a buzzword these days \u2014 there\u2019s a growing recognition that we\u2019re losing track of all the information we\u2019re putting up on the Internet, from Facebook status updates, to YouTube videos, to funny meme posts on Tumblr. In just a decade, we will have created more content than existed for thousands of years in humanity\u2019s prior experience.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That\u2019s great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so fascinating that Ray Kurzweil, one of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,418,1496,2018,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-internet","category-law","category-ray-kurzweil","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21542"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68626,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21542\/revisions\/68626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}