[HN Gopher] Futurist Prediction Accuracy
___________________________________________________________________
Futurist Prediction Accuracy
Author : telotortium
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-09-13 05:40 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| blastro wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Was this related to Singularity University? I think there's a
| similar house in Woodside these days.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| Was there something special about the house itself? Was it
| owned by someone special? Did your friend say why it was called
| that?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| laserlight wrote:
| 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.
| postsantum wrote:
| 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
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| avg_dev wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
| wmf wrote:
| 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.)
| yuan43 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Hopping through some links, I found this list:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARA...
|
| 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".
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| ACV001 wrote:
| Just looking at Kurzweil's predictions for 2020's, they are all
| off:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipe...
|
| Interestingly enough, in the latest version of this wikipedia
| page, all these "predictions" are removed.
| jjulius wrote:
| >By the later part of this decade, virtual reality will be so
| high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real
| reality.
|
| LOL, Zuck's metaverse would like a word...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| https://image-
| cdn.hypb.st/https%3A%2F%2Fhypebeast.com%2Fimag...
|
| I cannot tell which one is real, can you?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| 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
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 20k is massive for a restaurant, but not the internet.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of
| both people.
|
| I wonder what was up with this one.
| MintDice wrote:
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://vimeo.com/329901114
| pfdietz wrote:
| > What we have now is dystopian futurism
|
| Unless you live in that large part of the world where living
| standards having been rising quickly.
| rednerrus wrote:
| So everywhere in the world?
| postsantum wrote:
| You can use life expectancy as a proxy for the level of
| living standards. Spoiler: not everywhere
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner's work on forecasting yields
| interesting perspectives on predictions like these:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting%3A_The_Art_an...
| bo1024 wrote:
| As discussed in the article.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Kurzweil pushes the date this is expected to happen back by
| more than one year per year
|
| Ouch!
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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."
| zanecodes wrote:
| As I've heard it said: sigmoid functions look a lot like
| exponential functions, right up until they don't...
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| bo1024 wrote:
| (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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It is always wise to make your date after your estimated
| death but before your customers.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there supposed to be an implication of "if it doesn't
| happen by 2020 I don't think it will ever happen" in the
| Vinge prediction?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| True for most people. The exception to this rule is Bryan
| Caplan who is covered in this article.
| abeppu wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| xapata wrote:
| > 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.
| hyperpape wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-13 23:01 UTC)