elwoodblues

I just browsed through this; it's extremely interesting.

<a href="http://www.btexact.com/white_papers/downloads/WP106.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.btexact.com/white_papers/downloads/WP106.pdf</a>

Be sure to check out the 'Wildcards' section at the end of it.

Late_Cretaceous

It kind of reminds me of an old book that I like to keep around to remind me of the value of predictions of the future. "The People's Almanac Presents the Book of Predictions" (David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace) came out in 1981 and has predictions of furure life from dozens of visionaries, writers, "experts", psychics, etc. It includes hundreds of predictions, mostly on what life was supposed to be like from the early 80's until, well now - and the near future. Many of them involved the cold war, demographics, environmental issues, politics, wars, the energy crisis or flying cars and such. I recently read through the book and found one or two - out of hundreds - predictions that acutally panned out. With a batting average of less then one percent, I don't put much stock in any predictions of any kind.

elwoodblues

I'd agree with you, except that this guy put out his first predictions in 1991, and has something like an 85% success rate. That's not too bad.

Francois Tremblay

Elwoodblues, what are you talking about ? 85% success rate ? How stupid do you think we are, bub ?


For 2000 :
Civil nuclear war - wrong
Global economic collapse - wrong
Global civil war - wrong
Space exploration creates superbug - wrong
Civil War in former USSR goes nuclear - wrong
Collapse of world fisheries - wrong
Computer or OS maker blackmails country or world - wrong
End of intergenerational solidarity - cannot be measured/too vague
Jet streams change location permanently - don't know about that one
International financial collapse - wrong
Large-scale disruption of national electrical supply - wrong
Major break in Alaskan pipeline - wrong
Major chaos in Africa - duh
Nuclear terrorist attack - wrong
Rise of an american dictator - duh
Social breakdown in US or Europe - either a duh or an unmeasurable, depending on the meaning
Stock market crashes - too vague (either a wrong or a duh)
And in 2002 - human cloning perfected... so far, wrong.


So that's 11 wrong, 3 duhs and 1 unmeasurable. No prediction right on 15 for the year 2000. A simple look at those before shows the same - there was no collapse of the UN in 1950, no global nuclear war in 1960, no superbug in 1980, AIDS did not mutate and become airborne in 1990...

BTexact is obviously a stupid company to trust a book with predictions as inane as these. Their excuse that they only note the date when it becomes feasible is a cop-out, since most of these events are either punctual or simply wrong (i.e. they are already feasible).
Not only that, but the article is from 2001 - they didn't retract these predictions even after all these have been shown wrong ! Now that's what I call gullibility.

[ February 17, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Kopji

Interesting list.

A Question on the 85% correct would be how far in advance that rate applied. since the list is constantly adjusted, they could have a 0% rate at five years, but almost 100% as it approached. Just a Q.

I AM looking forward to the e-mailed orgasm in 2010. Gonna hold them to that one...

...a little surprised by the sluggish pace of change in security & teleconferencing technology, 9-11 has resulted in huge increases in business costs, much more focus than before.

There is a slope of a volcano in the Azores that could drop into the Atlantic, causing vast destruction on the East coast and Europe due to tidal wave. Not worth mentioning?

"Coming of the messiah"? Well, that would skew things a bit...

Even a partial wetware interface to the mind would shorten all timelines.

elwoodblues

The 85% accuracy is in regards to the list compiled in 1991 (more limited in scope and depth than the one linked above). Slashdot reported it as 85% accurate. The list we're looking at now is much more extensive, and much ballsier.

As for the examples of bad predictions listed by Franc28, all (or almost all) of them were under the last, 'wildcard' section, which expressly says, "that could happen anytime", and refers to the date as "earliest possible occurence". They're the kind of events that have the potential to happen after a certain date (which he gives), but whose actual occurence would be impossible to predict. Check out the other sections if you want a truly representative look at his predictions, instead of just the last section.

By and large, I'll stand by this thing. Some of the predictions are pretty freakish, but the ones he makes about sectors I know about seem to be fairly reasonable.

Christopher Lord

I think he aims a bit high with the AI stuff though. Currently we are just barely scratching mammal-like intelligence. An AI getting a PhD within 20 years seems a bit quick.

If computing keeps scaling like it has, we may have the complexity of a brain by then. But I think the software side of the problem is insurmountable as an engeneering challenge. Perhaps if we taught it like a child it would be doable, but then we need a communication language abstract enough for this. Its upside down from the way software is made today.

Programmers just dont think like this. We write very explicit non-abstract things, and then use these to move up towards total abstraction. I think a new field is required in order to generate the software for such a machine, and I dont think there is even a forerunner for such a field right now.

If I had to pick one, it would be the only one that removes humans altogether: Evolutionary computing. If AI came about, I expect it to be through a GA trained by parents.

Francois Tremblay

You claimed a 85% success rate and asked us to specifically check the Wildcard section, so I took the Wildcard section. I have specified, if you had read my reply, that most of these events are punctual and already possible, and therefore the excuse given is meaningless. For example, a stock market crash could have happened before 2000, so the claim that stock market crashes can only happen from 2000 onwards, and that one would happen sometime beyond 2000, is not only dumb (as stock market crashes are rather common occurances, depending on what degree a "crash" is meant to designate) but meaningless.

Furthermore, it is also very clearly specified that only the Wildcard section is not from them. I have never doubted their capacity to predict technology - I'm sure one can have an idea of future technology (but that is not really unusual or paranormal, more of a capacity to analyse scientific and technological patterns). The point was that virtually all their predictions taken from the man you claimed was "not too bad", failed.

Since all this information was already in the introduction of that article and in my initial post, your little sidestepping is amusing but meaningless. It displays little more than a "true believer" mentality.

Automaton

This dude has been watching too many movies.

theyeti

In the future, I predict that there will be more of everything, and less of nothing.