Looking back, he’s great at selling a future of possibility as long as you don’t track all the errors.
> Later in Kurzweil's article, he says:
> > "So what does the future hold? By 2019, we will largely overcome the major diseases that kill 95 percent of us in the developed world, and we will be dramatically slowing and reversing the dozen or so processes that underlie aging."
> [...] I really do expect to put cancer, heart disease, the major infections, and the degenerative disorders in their place. But do I expect to do it by 20-flipping-19?
It's hard to be optimistic when it's been those 13 years plus another 7 and somehow measles is back again, although I admit that's one isn't a pure technology-problem.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ray-kurzweil-s-fut...
If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions.
One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.
I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats.
And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.
I'd say that 7% accuracy is on the low side and 86% on the high side. Looking through the list I'd put it more at 50-60% personally. For me that still means that I'd much rather hear about what he has to say about the potential future than most other people.
It's very easy to say 'person X made a highly specific testable prediction, while respectable people said nothing like it would ever happen, and it only 90% happened, so person X was a fool unlike all the respectable people', but it's a trap. In reality Kurzweil was directionally correct about most things, overspecified the details, and had optimistic timelines in the way that everyone has optimistic timelines about everything.