AUSTIN, Texas - Ray Kurzweil has long been known for his hyperbolic, optimistic predictions about technology. Will artificial intelligence surpass human intelligence? Of course. Can they perform real-time native language processing? Why not? How about biomechanically extending human lifetimes by several centuries? Just hold on a few more years!
As you would expect, this kind of optimism draws a lot of fire from more pessimistic, perhaps more realistic, critics. On Monday at SXSW, Kurzweil took on the skeptics with an array of historical charts, future forecasts, and the simple belief that "you can start world-changing revolution with just the power of your ideas and everyday tools."
The cornerstone to many of Kurzweil's predictions is the Law of Accelerating Returns, a phrase he coined in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. The law states that certain kinds of progress are exponential, not linear, resulting in a profound acceleration of said progress. Think of it as Moore's Law for everything.
The change is apparent in the mobile space. "Every field is being empowered by these increasingly inexpensive, but powerful tools," Kurzweil said. "Twenty years ago, if you took out a mobile phone in a movie, it was a sign that you were a Mexican drug lord. Now there are six billion phones and a billion smartphones on the planet."
Likewise, Kurzweil believes we routinely underestimate the capacity of our digital creations. He said Monday that people misunderstand how an Artificial Intelligence machine like IBM's Watson processes information. Watson, he noted, is not just accessing information that was programmed into it. Rather it's accessing a hierarchical knowledge base that it assembled itself by processing more than 200 million pages of information and applying a statistical understand of language to communicate it.
"If using statistical understanding of language isn't [actual] understanding," the futurist said, "then humans aren't capable of understanding, because that is exactly what we do."
Kurzweil showed slide after slide of remarkably smooth exponential growth curves in various metrics and technologies—GDP, processing power, data usage, etc. —all pointing towards the seeming validity of the Law of Accelerating Returns.
The next frontier will be health, he said. Now that the genome has been sequenced, that too is a digital technology, Kurzweil stressed, and it will also benefit from exponential progress. Immortality? Maybe not right now, but Kurzweil thinks baby boomers like him might still have a shot at it. "If you can hang in there, we may get to experience a remarkable century ahead."
As adamant as Kurzweil is in his beliefs, he admits he hasn't been right all of the time. "I have been right 86 percent of the time," he said, naming a rather precise figure for such things, "but I was pretty hard on myself. For example, I didn't give myself credit for self-driving cars. The technology is here, but it isn't mainstream yet."
Even so, a B+ isn't bad.
For more from SXSW, see the slideshow below.