Future predictions from Ray Kurzweil Options

[impala454]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/...xprod=permalink
(if that link no worky, try this one: http://blogs.chron.com/boldlygo/archives/2...fiction_2.html)

Ray Kurzweil is almost spooky.

Here is an example:

Two decades ago he predicted that "early in the 21st century" blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year -- Deep Blue's chess victory came in 1997.)

In the meantime, he is predicting the following:
* A Drug within 10 years that will let you eat whatever you want without gaining weight
* Solar will be cost competitive with fossil fuels in five years, and within 20 years all energy will come from clean sources
* In another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you're aging.

really interesting one here too:

Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

We will sure live in some interesting times if these predictions are anywhere near truth.