Humans have a long and abiding obsession with foretelling the future. It’s an obsession that has kept liars, shonks, charlatans and confidence tricksters in business for millennia. Whether it’s reading goat entrails or talking to ghosts, pretending to have special knowledge about the future has always been a big moneymaker.
In the 1990s, a new and even more shonky brand of huckster joined the circus: ‘futurologists’. They didn’t come more feted than Nerd Nostradamus Ray Kurzweil.
Now, Kurzweil is clearly a smart guy. As an engineer, he was involved in designing optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments.
As a seer, though? He was no better than your Aunt Marge reading tea leaves.
I know this because I own his (mainly) fatuous 1999 book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, which recently resurfaced in one of my reference book stacks.
I kept the book partly because I wanted the fun of checking, years later, that it was as fatuous as I’d first thought.
This is the long-standing modus operandi of bogus ‘seers’, be they Ray Kurzweil or John Edwards: make a bunch of confident claims and move on, banking that the marks will never actually keep tally of how often you’re wrong. For instance, James Underdown of the Independent Investigative Group (IIG) once kept a tally of John Edwards’ wrong guesses: in just one attempt, he made nearly 40 wrong guesses before scoring a hit.
Guess which his adoring audience remembered? Just as assiduously as they forgot that Edwards’ assistants spent the pre-show circulating in the audience, asking dozens of questions about deceased family members and so on.
Just as the climate prognosticators simply move on from their endlessly wrong predictions of doom, with none of their cult-followers ever taking notice.
Kurzweil’s nerdy acolytes are no better.
Let’s look at his paper-disappearing prophecies.
By 2009 Ray predicts that most reading would be done on displays. Keyboards would still be allowed to exist but most textual language would be created by SPEAKING INTO computers.
It got worse.
By 2019: according to Ray, paper books and documents will be rarely used or ‘accessed’. Wrong.
A further inexorable advance forecast by our man Ray for 2019 was that most learning would be “accomplished using intelligent software-based simulated teachers.”
He hadn’t predicted the brief hiatus of school attendance caused by the Covid pandemic but had assumed technology would be so brilliant and effective that we could discard human beings as teachers for ever.
If only.
There’s still plenty to come, though.
By 2029 on the timeline, we’re all learning by neural implants. That’s just four years away. Do you want a supercomputer directly implanted into your brain?
No. Me neither […]
Ray’s final page of predictions is about Spiritual Machines and printed food. God help us.
He first takes us to 2049, which is when ‘nanoprinted’ food will be in widespread use.
Why?
Because, “it has the correct nutritional composition and the same taste and texture of organically produced food, which means that the availability of food is no longer affected by limited resources, bad crop weather and spoilage.”
This already sounds as ridiculous as early pulp science fiction stories that had their toga-clad heroes taking their three-times-daily food pills. In the meantime, all those once-confident plant-based meat start-ups have collapsed for lack of interest.
If you’d been persuaded to invest in these boondoggles, you’re as bound for disappointment as Kurzweil’s ‘transhuman’ evangelists.
