[nfb-talk] Fw: [nesfa-open] Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

Tue Dec 15 16:06:45 UTC 2009

You're missing the point.  What would I have replace trains? Well, nothing. 
That's my point. Trains would be replaced with something  else if there was 
something better. Trains still exist because the technology to replace them 
doesn't exist. Same with cars, airplanes, incandescent light bulbs, 
telephones, kidney transplants, guide dogs, and a million other things I 
could name.

Take incandescent light bulbs for example. Edison invented light bulbs, 
what?, 130 years ago? Something like that. Now, slowly, they are being 
replaced by fluorescent bulbs. But it's not as if the technology has simply 
sped past the lowly incandescent light bulb. Selling people on fluorescent 
light bulbs is still really hard and I'm sure the vast majority of light 
bulbs sold in this world are incandescent. Lighting technology has not 
improved exponentially.

The vast majority of phone calls are still made on land line phones. Voice 
communication has not improved exponentially. The vast majority of travel is 
still done via methods that are at least 100 years old.  Speed of travel has 
not increased exponentially. There was a great technological break through 
in the 1930s that allowed building height to increase exponentially for a 
time. Then no additional breakthroughs followed and the  result is that the 
Empire State Building is still one of the tallest buildings in the world. 
The height of the tallest building in the world has not increased 
exponentially. Again, my point is that the central idea behind Ray 
Kurzweil's vision of the future, that technology increases exponentially 
simply isn't true. There are a couple of things that kind of follow that 
rule. But most things do not.

Kurzweil says, "An analysis of the history of technology shows that 
technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive 
linear' view." I think that's wrong. In fact, I'd say that an analysis  of 
the history of technology shows that technologies tend to bog down rather 
quickly.  It's neither exponential or linear. Really, what I would say is 
that there doesn't seem to be any pattern. I'd be hesitant to predict that 
computer technology will bog down the way travel speed or building height 
has.  But Kurzweil assumes that technological break throughs will keep 
coming and that that will allow computers to continue to increase in speed 
exponentially.  And that assumption simply isn't valid.

The transistor was an incredible technological break through. But soon we're 
going to run into the limits of what that technology can produce. Then we'll 
need another break through for Moore's law to continue to hold. And you 
can't just assume that the next break through will occur right on schedule.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Hingson" <info at michaelhingson.com>
To: "'NFB Talk Mailing List'" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] Fw: [nesfa-open] Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil,predicts 
how technology will change humanity by 2020

It all depends on society's priorities.  What would you have replace trains
and who is going to make it happen?  Information flow, on the other hand, is
a major commodity which has always been at the top of everyone's priority
list.  We are a species of immediate gratification.  Until we have
transporters and worp drive movement won't have the same priority as plane
old data transfer.

The Michael Hingson Group
"Speaking with Vision"
Michael Hingson, President
(415) 827-4084
info at michaelhingson.com
www.michaelhingson.com

for info on the new KNFB Reader Mobile, visit:
http://knfbreader.michaelhingson.com

-----Original Message-----
From: nfb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of John G. Heim
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 1:42 PM
To: NFB Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] Fw: [nesfa-open] Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil,
predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

One thing that has always bugged me about RayKurzweil's predictions is that
about the only thing that even comes close to meeting his criteria is
Moore's Law. There is this one thing that actually behaves the way his
predictions do and dozens of things that don't. Yet he acts like his ideas
are written in stone.

If technology advances in a exponential curve, why do we still have trains?
That's pretty much the same technology invented 150 years ago. Automobiles
are 100 years old. Land line telephones over 100. The Wright brothers would
be able to explain what keeps a Boeing 767 in the air. We're still
generating most of our power by the same old technologies that they used
seventy to eighty years ago, hydroelectric, coal, and oil.  There asn't been

an exponential increase in the technology behind vaccines., surgery, or even

drug treatments. Life  expectancy has not increased exponentially.

Kurzweil ignores all the technologies that don't follow Moore's Law and
focuses all of his attention on the one that does. Kursweil says
"technological change is exponential". No, some technological change is
exponential. Most of it is not. Quite a bit of it isn't even increasing
linearly.

From: "Ed Meskys" <edmeskys at roadrunner.com>
To: "blind-sf" <blind-sf at yahoogroups.com>
Cc: "nfb-talk" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 12:20 PM
Subject: [nfb-talk] Fw: [nesfa-open] Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil,predicts how

technology will change humanity by 2020

>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> t at nasw.org>
> To: "NESFA Open Mailing List" <nesfa-open at lists.nesfa.org>
> Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 8:32 AM
> Subject: Re: [nesfa-open] Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil,predicts how
> technology will change humanity by 2020
>
>
>> At 10:16 PM -0500 12/13/09, Mark L. Olson wrote:
>>>
>>>Most people are confident that we have another 10 years of Moore's Law
>>>(about a 30x improvement in price/performance) because we can see the
>>>technology that will get us there, and a lot more than that is certainly
>>>possible.  (It's also true that people have been saying that Moore's Law
>>>has
>>>only a decade left for the past 40 years.)
>>
>> The original formulation of Moore's law was the number of transistors per

>> unit area, and that improvement _has_ been slowing.
>>
>> The real sticky issue in computer-chip performance has become signal
>> transmission on and off the chip. Raw speed per processing node has
>> pretty well stalled out at several gigahertz, and chip developers have
>> instead put multiple cores on the chips. However, that doesn't translate
>> into raw speed because effective use of multiple processors requires
>> parallel processing -- massively parallel as the number of cores
>> increases -- and that requires developing new software, as you noted.
>>
>>>
>>>My guess is that about 1000x improvement is possible without radically
>>>new
>>>technology, but that will come only with great difficulty.  The biggest
>>>problem is that it will certainly require massive parallelism, and it's
>>>really hard to program so as to use massive parallelism.  OTOH, there's a
>>>limit to how fast we need Excel to be, and there are other things which
>>>we
>>>do poorly now (e.g., speech recognition and animation) which would
>>>benefit
>>>hugely from it.)
>>>
>>
>> I think we're at a point where microprocessor technology is going to
>> split into at least two distinct classes -- one for simple single-stream
>> processing (e.g., for word processing in PCs), the other for operations
>> that can be performed in massively parallel ways. The improvements in
>> single-stream processing are going to come from cutting the fat from
>> bloatware and shifting parallel processing out of the single stream.
>> There is some impressive and interesting ongoing work in massively
>> parallel supercomputing (e.g., the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los
>> Alamos), but that's aimed at a limited range of applications. The
>> interesting software challenges are in finding ways to use that
>> parallelism for things like speech recognition and animation.
>>
>> -- 
>> Jeff Hecht science & technology writer
>> _______________________________________________
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