Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, beating Donald Trump by a comfortable margin. As a rule, I don’t talk about partisan politics on this blog, but I think it’s OK to post some noteworthy failed predictions about the outcome:
‘America’s most accurate bellwether counties, regions that have a reputation for accurately picking the president, got the presidential election completely wrong.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55062413
The future of agriculture is farm robots that can monitor and care for every plant, in real time. Fewer pesticides will be needed if robots can mechanically kill animal and plant pests, and less fertilizer will need to be applied if robots can directly introduce smaller amounts to plants, in ways that will guarantee high absorption of it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54538849
Here’s an impressive video of Chinese army field tests of new UAVs. A multiple-launch rocket system can rapidly create a swarm of them, and the members of the swarm can communicate with each other and fly in formations. https://youtu.be/QamGaDNczJw
Many official and unofficial photos and videos of combat during the war were uploaded to the internet, and a group of volunteer military enthusiasts used them to count how many military vehicles each side lost. Basic takeaways: Armenia lost more, and the T-72 has weak armor. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html
The U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon is already a versatile plane, but might be getting upgrades allowing it to bomb land targets and launch long-range missiles. https://youtu.be/LkgEmY_85x4
A recent U.S. Army experiment showed that two-man tanks are a bad idea. The crewmen are overloaded with tasks, and their battlefield performance drops. Our current tanks have four-man crews, and Russian tanks have three-man crews (the human shell loader is replaced by a machine). There’s endless discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of those arrangements, with no resolution. It seems to balance out overall. To my knowledge, no army in the world has five-man tanks. https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/11/more-info-about-us-armys-optionally.html
Here’s some interesting information about the nature of color vision. Birds and reptiles can see more colors and have a greater variety of body pigmentations than mammals because the latter have had several million extra years to adapt to bright, sunny environments. Mammals only emerged from subterranean, and/or nocturnal lifestyles where color perception is not advantageous relatively recently. Genetic engineering could of course change this state of affairs very quickly. https://www.quora.com/There-are-green-reptiles-insects-fishes-amphibians-but-no-green-mammals-What-is-the-reason-for-this
This is probably the most credible, anti-nuclear power articles I’ve read. Switching to 100% fission power would probably require more uranium and other rare elements than we can economically mine from the ground and the oceans, and it might be shortsighted to exhaust all of our rare element sources now as we might find better uses for them in the distant future. Finding sites to build the new reactors would also be challenge since they need to be near bodies of water, and those areas are already crowded with people. The article is even skeptical of nuclear fusion, and brings up the problem of explosive tritium dust particles, which is new to me. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340212459124
From 2004: ‘A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
The “Grand Tack Hypothesis” says that Jupiter’s orbit has changed over the eons, and at one point, it was almost as close to the Sun as Mars. The gas giant’s powerful gravity ejected most of the asteroids in its path out of the Solar System, which was bad news for Mars since they would have otherwise collided with the planet and built up its size, perhaps to Earth-like proportions. Jupiter then drifted outward to its current, distant orbit. Had the Great Tack not happened, Mars would be a much bigger planet today, and much likelier to support life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis
This is the third entry in my series of blog posts that will analyze the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from his 1998 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. My previous entries on this subject can be found here:
“You can do virtually anything with anyone regardless of physical proximity. The technology to accomplish this is easy to use and ever present.”
PARTLY RIGHT
While new and improved technologies have made it vastly easier for people to virtually interact, and have even opened new avenues of communication (chiefly, video phone calls) since the book was published in 1998, the reality of 2019 falls short of what this prediction seems to broadly imply. As I’ll explain in detail throughout this blog entry, there are many types of interpersonal interaction that still can’t be duplicated virtually. However, the second part of the prediction seems right. Cell phone and internet networks are much better and have much greater geographic reach, meaning they could be fairly described as “ever present.” Likewise, smartphones, tablet computers, and other devices that people use to remotely interact with each other over those phone and internet networks are cheap, “easy to use and ever present.”
“‘Phone’ calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses.”
WRONG
As stated in previous installments of this analysis, the computerized glasses, goggles and contact lenses that Kurzweil predicted would be widespread by the end of 2019 failed to become so. Those devices would have contained the “direct-eye displays” that would have allowed users to see simulated 3D images of people and other things in their proximities. Not even 1% of 1% of phone calls in 2019 involved both parties seeing live, three-dimensional video footage of each other. I haven’t met one person who reported doing this, whereas I know many people who occasionally do 2D video calls using cameras and traditional screen displays.
Video calls have become routine thanks to better, cheaper computing devices and internet service, but neither party sees a 3D video feed. And, while this is mostly my anecdotal impression, voice-only phone calls are vastly more common in aggregate number and duration than video calls. (I couldn’t find good usage data to compare the two, but don’t see how it’s possible my conclusion could be wrong given the massive disparity I have consistently observed day after day.) People don’t always want their faces or their surroundings to be seen by people on the other end of a call, and the seemingly small extra amount of effort required to do a video call compared to a mere voice call is actually a larger barrier to the former than futurists 20 years ago probably thought it would be.
“Three-dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.”
MOSTLY WRONG
As I wrote in my Prometheus review, 3D holographic display technology falls far short of where Kurzweil predicted it would be by 2019. The machines are very expensive and uncommon, and their resolutions are coarse, with individual pixels and voxels being clearly visible.
Augmented reality glasses lack the fine resolution to display lifelike images of people, but some virtual reality goggles sort of can. First, let’s define what level of resolution a video display would need to look “lifelike” to a person with normal eyesight.
A depiction of a human eye’s horizontal field of view.
A human being’s field of vision is front-facing, flared-out “cone” with a 210 degree horizontal arc and a 150 degree vertical arc. This means, if you put a concave display in front of a person’s face that was big enough to fill those degrees of horizontal and vertical width, it would fill the person’s entire field of vision, and he would not be able to see the edges of the screen even if he moved his eyes around.
If this concave screen’s pixels were squares measuring one degree of length to a side, then the screen would look like a grid of 210 x 150 pixels. To a person with 20/20 vision, the images on such a screen would look very blocky, and much less detailed than how he normally sees. However, lab tests show that if we shrink the pixels to 1/60th that size, so the concave screen is a grid of 12,600 x 9,000 pixels, then the displayed images look no worse than what the person sees in the real world. Even a person with good eyesight can’t see the individual pixels or the thin lines that separate them, and the display quality is said to be “lifelike.”
The “Varjo VR-1” virtual reality goggles
No commercially available VR goggles have anything close to lifelike displays, either in terms of field of view or 60-pixels-per-degree resolutions. Only the “Varjo VR-1” googles come close to meeting the technical requirements laid out by the prediction: they have 60-pixels-per-degree resolutions, but only for the central portions of their display screens, where the user’s eyes are usually looking. The wide margins of the screens are much lower in resolution. If you did a video call, the other person filmed themselves using a very high-quality 4K camera, and you used Varjo VR-1 goggles to view the live footage while keeping your eyes focused on the middle of the screen, that person might look as lifelike as they would if they were physically present with you.
Problematically, a pair of Varjo VR-1’s is $6,000. Also, in 2019, it is very uncommon for people to use any brand of VR goggles for video calls. Another major problem is that the goggles are bulky and would block people on the other end of a video call from seeing the upper half of your own face. If both of your wore VR goggles in the hopes of simulating an in-person conversation, the intimacy would be lost because neither of you would be able to see most of the other person’s face.
VR technology simply hasn’t improved as fast as Kurzweil predicted. Trends suggest that goggles with truly lifelike displays won’t exist until 2025 – 2028, and they will be expensive, bulky devices that will need to be plugged into larger computing devices for power and data processing. The resolutions of AR glasses and 3D holograms are lagging even more.
“Routinely available communication technology includes high-quality speech-to-speech language translation for most common language pairs.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
In 2019, there were many speech-to-speech language translation apps on the market, for free or very low cost. The most popular was Google Translate, which had a very high user rating, had been downloaded by over 6 million people, and could do voice translations between 30+ languages.
The only part of the prediction that remains debatable is the claim that the technology would offer “high-quality” translations. Professional human translators produce more coherent and accurate translations than even the best apps, and it’s probably better to say that machines can do “fair-to-good-quality” language translation. Of course, it must be noted that the technology is expected to improve.
“Reading books, magazines, newspapers, and other web documents, listening to music, watching three-dimensional moving images (for example, television, movies), engaging in three-dimensional visual phone calls, entering virtual environments (by yourself, or with others who may be geographically remote), and various combinations of these activities are all done through the ever present communications Web and do not require any equipment, devices, or objects that are not worn or implanted.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Reading text is easily and commonly done off of smartphones and tablet computers. Smartphones and small MP3 players are also commonly used to store and play music. All of those devices are portable, can easily download text and songs wirelessly from the internet, and are often “worn” in pockets or carried around by hand while in use. Smartphones and tablets can also be used for two-way visual phone calls, but those involve two-dimensional moving images, and not three as the prediction specified.
As detailed previously, VR technology didn’t advance fast enough to allow people to have “three-dimensional” video calls with each other by 2019. However, the technology is good enough to generate immersive virtual environments where people can play games or do specialized types of work. Though the most powerful and advanced VR goggles must be tethered to desktop PCs for power and data, there are “standalone” goggles like the “Oculus Go” that provide a respectable experience and don’t need to be plugged in to anything else during operation (battery life is reportedly 2 – 3 hours).
“The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all the facets of the tactile sense, including the senses of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness…the ‘total touch’ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth.”
WRONG
Aside from a few, expensive prototypes, there are no body suits or “booths” that simulate touch sensations. The only kind of haptic technology in widespread use is video game control pads that can vibrate to crudely approximate the feeling of shooting a gun or being next to an explosion.
“These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions…”
WRONG
Though video phone technology has made remote doctor appointments more common, technology has not yet made it possible for doctors to remotely “touch” patients for physical exams. “Remote sex” is unsatisfying and basically nonexistent. Haptic devices (called “teledildonics” for those specifically designed for sexual uses) that allow people to remotely send and receive physical force to one another exist, but they are too expensive and technically limited to find use.
“Rapid economic expansion and prosperity has continued.”
PARTLY RIGHT
Assessing this prediction requires a consideration of the broader context in the book. In the chapter titled “2009,” which listed predictions that would be true by that year, Kurzweil wrote, “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity…” The prediction for 2019 says that phenomenon “has continued,” so it’s clear he meant that economic growth for the time period from 1998 – December 2008 would be roughly the same as the growth from January 2009 – December 2019. Was it?
U.S. real GDP growth rate (year-over-year)
The above chart shows the U.S. GDP growth rate. The economy continuously grew during the 1998 – 2019 timeframe, except for most of 2009, which was the nadir of the Great Recession.
OECD GDP growth rate from 1998 – 2019
Above is a chart I made using data for the OECD for the same time period. The post-Great Recession GDP growth rates are slightly lower than the pre-recession era’s, but growth is still happening.
Global GDP growth rate from 1998 – 2019
And this final chart shows global GDP growth over the same period.
Clearly, the prediction’s big miss was the Great Recession, but to be fair, nearly every economist in the world failed to foresee it–even in early 2008, many of them thought the economic downturn that was starting would be a run-of-the-mill recession that the world economy would easily bounce back from. The fact that something as bad as the Great Recession happened at all means the prediction is wrong in an important sense, as it implied that economic growth would be continuous, but it wasn’t since it went negative for most of 2009, in the worst downturn since the 1930s.
At the same time, Kurzweil was unwittingly prescient in picking January 1, 2009 as the boundary of his two time periods. As the graphs show, that creates a neat symmetry to his two timeframes, with the first being a period of growth ending with a major economic downturn and the second being the inverse.
While GDP growth was higher during the first timeframe, the difference is less dramatic than it looks once one remembers that much of what happened from 2003 – 2007 was “fake growth” fueled by widespread irresponsible lending and transactions involving concocted financial instruments that pumped up corporate balance sheets without creating anything of actual value. If we lower the heights of the line graphs for 2003 – 2007 so we only see “honest GDP growth,” then the two time periods do almost look like mirror images of each other. (Additionally, if we assume that adjustment happened because of the actions of wiser financial regulators who kept the lending bubbles and fake investments from coming into existence in the first place, then we can also assume that stopped the Great Recession from happening, in which case Kurzweil’s prediction would be 100% right.) Once we make that adjustment, then we see that economic growth for the time period from 1998 – December 2008 was roughly the same as the growth from January 2009 – December 2019.
“The vast majority of transactions include a simulated person, featuring a realistic animated personality and two-way voice communication with high-quality natural-language understanding.”
WRONG
“Simulated people” of this sort are used in almost no transactions. The majority of transactions are still done face-to-face, and between two humans only. While online transactions are getting more common, the nature of those transactions is much simpler than the prediction described: a buyer finds an item he wants on a retailer’s internet site, clicks a “Buy” button, and then inputs his address and method of payment (these data are often saved to the buyer’s computing device and are automatically uploaded to save time). It’s entirely text- and button-based, and is simpler, faster, and better than the inefficient-sounding interaction with a talking video simulacrum of a shopkeeper.
As with the failure of video calls to become more widespread, this development indicates that humans often prefer technology that is simple and fast to use over technology that is complex and more involving to use, even if the latter more closely approximates a traditional human-to-human interaction. The popularity of text messaging further supports this observation.
“Often, there is no human involved, as a human may have his or her automated personal assistant conduct transactions on his or her behalf with other automated personalities. In this case, the assistants skip the natural language and communicate directly by exchanging appropriate knowledge structures.”
MOSTLY WRONG
The only instances in which average people entrust their personal computing devices to automatically buy things on their behalf involve stock trading. Even small-time traders can use automated trading systems and customize them with “stops” that buy or sell preset quantities of specific stocks once the share price reaches prespecified levels. Those stock trades only involve computer programs “talking” to each other–one on behalf of the seller and the other on behalf of the buyer. Only a small minority of people actively trade stocks.
“Household robots for performing cleaning and other chores are now ubiquitous and reliable.”
PARTLY RIGHT
Small vacuum cleaner robots are affordable, reliable, clean carpets well, and are common in rich countries (though it still seems like fewer than 10% of U.S. households have one). Several companies make them, and highly rated models range in price from $150 – $250. Robot “mops,” which look nearly identical to their vacuum cleaning cousins, but use rotating pads and squirts of hot water to clean hard floors, also exist, but are more recent inventions and are far rarer. I’ve never seen one in use and don’t know anyone who owns one.
The iRobot Roomba 960 is a highly rated robot vacuum cleaner.
No other types of household robots exist in anything but token numbers, meaning the part of the prediction that says “and other chores” is wrong. Furthermore, it’s wrong to say that the household robots we do have in 2019 are “ubiquitous,” as that word means “existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : WIDESPREAD,” and vacuum and mop robots clearly are not any of those. Instead, they are “common,” meaning people are used to seeing them, even if they are not seen every day or even every month.
“Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads. While humans are still allowed to drive on local roads (although not on highways), the automated driving systems are always engaged and are ready to take control when necessary to prevent accidents.”
WRONG*
The “automated driving systems” were mentioned in the “2009” chapter of predictions, and are described there as being networks of stationary road sensors that monitor road conditions and traffic, and transmit instructions to car computers, allowing the vehicles to drive safely and efficiently without human help. These kinds of roadway sensor networks have not been installed anywhere in the world. Moreover, no public roads are closed to human-driven vehicles and only open to autonomous vehicles.
Newer cars come with many types of advanced safety features that are “always engaged,” such as blind spot sensors, driver attention monitors, forward-collision warning sensors, lane-departure warning systems, and pedestrian detection systems. However, having those devices isn’t mandatory, and they don’t override the human driver’s inputs–they merely warn the driver of problems. Automated emergency braking systems, which use front-facing cameras and radars to detect imminent collisions and apply the brakes if the human driver fails to do so, are the only safety systems that “are ready to take control when necessary to prevent accidents.” They are not common now, but will become mandatory in the U.S. starting in 2022.
*While the roadway sensor network wasn’t built as Kurzweil foresaw, it turns out it wasn’t necessary. By the end of 2019, self-driving car technology had reached impressive heights, with the most advanced vehicles being capable of of “Level 3” autonomy, meaning they could undertake long, complex road trips without problems or human assistance (however, out of an abundance of caution, the manufacturers of these cars built in features requiring the human drivers to clutch the steering wheels and to keep their eyes on the road while the autopilot modes were active). Moreover, this could be done without the help of any sensors emplaced along the highways. The GPS network has proven itself an accurate source of real-time location data for autonomous cars, obviating the need to build expensive new infrastructure paralleling the roads.
In other words, while Kurzweil got several important details wrong, the overall state of self-driving car technology in 2019 only fell a little short of what he expected.
“Efficient personal flying vehicles using microflaps have been demonstrated and are primarily computer controlled.”
UNCLEAR (but probably WRONG)
The vagueness of this prediction’s wording makes it impossible to evaluate. What does “efficient” refer to? Fuel consumption, speed with which the vehicle transports people, or some other quality? Regardless of the chosen metric, how well must it perform to be considered “efficient”? The personal flying vehicles are supposed to be efficient compared to what?
A man on a flying skateboard participated in France’s 2019 Bastille Day military parade. The device counts as a “personal flying vehicle,” but it is impractical and very dangerous to use. It can travel about five miles in 10 minutes on one full tank of fuel, and can take off and land almost anywhere. Is it “efficient”?
What is a “personal flying vehicle”? A flying car, which is capable of flight through the air and horizonal movement over roads, or a vehicle that is capable of flight only, like a small helicopter, autogyro, jetpack, or flying skateboard?
But even if we had answers to those questions, it wouldn’t matter much since “have been demonstrated” is an escape hatch allowing Kurzweil to claim at least some measure of correctness on this prediction since it allows the prediction to be true if just two prototypes of personal flying vehicles have been built and tested in a lab. “Are widespread” or “Are routinely used by at least 1% of the population” would have been meaningful statements that would have made it possible to assess the prediction’s accuracy. “Have been demonstrated” sets the bar so low that it’s almost impossible to be wrong.
Diagram showing what a “Gurney flap” / “microflap” is.
At least the prediction contains one, well-defined term: “microflaps.” These are small, skinny control surfaces found on some aircraft. They are fixed in one position, and in that configuration are commonly called “Gurney flaps,” but experiments have also been done with moveable microflaps. While useful for some types of aircraft, Gurney flaps are not essential, and moveable microflaps have not been incorporated into any mass-produced aircraft designs.
“There are very few transportation accidents.”
WRONG
Tens of millions of serious vehicle accidents happen in the world every year, and road accidents killed 1.35 million people worldwide in 2016, the last year for which good statistics are available. Globally, the per capita death rate from vehicle accidents has changed little since 2000, shortly after the book was published, and it has been the tenth most common cause of death for the 2000 – 2016 time period.
In the U.S., over 40,000 people died due to transportation accidents in 2017, the last year for which good statistics are available.
“People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.”
WRONG
As I noted in part 1 of this analysis, even the best “automated personalities” like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana are clearly machines and are not likeable or relatable to humans at any emotional level. Ironically, by 2019, one of the great socials ills in the Western world was the extent to which personal technologies have isolated people and made them unhappy, and it was coupled with a growing appreciation of how important regular interpersonal interaction was to human mental health.
Aaaaaand that’s it for now. I originally estimated this project to analyze all of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions could be spread out over three blog entries, but it has taken even more time and effort than I anticipated, and I need one more. Stay tuned, the fourth AND FINAL installment is coming soon!
Another 2018 survey commissioned by the telecom company Vonage found that “1 in 3 people live video chat at least once a week.” That means 2 in 3 people use the technology less often than that, perhaps not at all. The data from this and the previous source strongly suggest that voice-only calls were much more common than video calls, which strongly aligns with my everyday observations. https://www.vonage.com/resources/articles/video-chatterbox-nation-report-2018/
A person with 20/20 vision basically sees the world as a wraparound TV screen that is 12,600 pixels wide x 9,000 pixels high (total: 113.4 million pixels). VR goggles with resolutions that high will become available between 2025 and 2028, making “lifelike” virtual reality possible. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/02/perfectillusion.pdf
The “Oculus Go” is a VR headset that doesn’t need to be plugged into anything else for electricity or data processing. It’s a fully self-contained device. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/oculus-go-review/
