His original prediction about 2029 (or say 2039 or whatever near term) doesn't seem impossible anymore. I'd rate the prediction as impressive - given that it was made way before the current AI boom.
Note also that Gibson semi-predicted 2035 [0] and Ghost in the Shell also predicted 2029 [1] (maybe basing their number off of Kurzweil, I don't know).
I think there are many ways to get at a concrete prediction of 2029, or thereabouts, by noticing a halving of cost for the same compute and/or storage every 1.5 to 3 years. This is a sort of generalized Moore's law or, maybe, just Wright's law [2]. Do this calculation to get 2.3Pb of storage, the estimated storage size of the human brain, for under $5k and you get within the range of 2030, give or take a decade.
$5k is my arbitrary cutoff price point as this puts it in the "home computer" category and is, in my opinion, the price point that set off the home computer revolution.
Go read the science a bit better maybe. Nobody's predicting the extinction of humanity or even sophisticated civilization through human-caused climate change in the next century or any remotely prediction-tolerant time span. This kind of nihilistic fatalism is not only disconnected from any scientific evidence or plausible scenarios, it also pushes away anyone on the fence for an assortment of reasons.
He does quite a lot of dates and some are pretty accurate. Computers winning chess he predicted one year later than it happened.
Turing test he predicted 2029 and while not very clearly defined I'd say that is happening about now.
Predicting those things are kind of easy if you have the background in the technology that he does. But the singularity? How can you compare that to computers winning chess?
I just looked at what he says in the new book and he has:
>Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity.
Seems kind of wacky to me. I've always believed in Moore's law type stuff but not
the nanobots which have been long hypothesised but pretty non existent.
Near came out in 2005 and Nearer in 2024 so if we assume a halving of new edition times we should have Nearerer in 2033 and the Nearererererererere... explosion by 2043.
