I predicted the graph would be similar; and I was indeed much too optimistic. In fact, I was so wrong it reminded me of this exact issue, where your predictive ability becomes more and more impossibly difficult every decade or so off you go. It may also be getting even more difficult given our progress as a large unit of populations, but the underlying humanistic predictions may still well be possible, since that variable never quite leaves us.
If anyone has read 'Where To?' by Robert Heinlein, he makes predictions in 1950 and then updated his predictions in 1965 and 1980. Here is an excerpt on an alternative site since I don't have a direct link to the book itself, but if one is interested in the predictive ability of a well-educated individual, it is a very intriguing read, and archiving perspectives lets us understand just how absurd one idea could be, and yet how much further than it we got in a much shorter time frame than assumed. It focuses on technology; and the potential of certain science fiction possibilities, some of which were undershot, but most overshot. On average, he was almost entirely wrong, but only by some degrees of relevancy. Here is the excerpt of the book, and since it only extends to 1980, you can insert your own realizations of how the predictions went for 2000, and now 2020. There are many optimistic predictions made, and a few pessimistic ones. Being an aeronautical engineer and author, Heinlein possibly saw too much potential in our ability to progress that science; the same flaw would probably be present in any predictions made, since we know most well our favored subjects, and want to believe in their potentials.
I recall Alan Watts made some very interesting comments that essentially predicted a lot of our current access to phones, internet, information, etc. It isn't difficult to imagine how far we may come or how easy it may be when progress is not impeded. What is likely absurdly difficult to predict is how Google loading in four seconds instead of two can make someone upset to the point they may seethe or clench their fists. And yet, I have done that more than once, or seen that small red x icon, and then gotten similarly upset in private. The entire world is available to me, and two seconds or so of inconvenience, or possibly a modem reset, being an antagonizing factor is only context-driven. At what point does the time saving become unnoticeable; perhaps the exponential growth of a factor of our lives shouldn't be considered, or the understanding and availability of it, but the brand new frustrations and reasons for emotion they bring. Roadrage is a common example, and that comes from the novel nature of driving wearing off from monotony. It was great to drive the first few weeks and the freedom was liberating, until that freedom was stripped because I'm sitting on the I-5 and no one is dying, it's just 5PM and everyone is going home.
An optimistic prediction would be made to 'ease' that frustration- flying cars, better infrastructure, etc- but what about the new frustrations of those predictions? Having to deal with the FAA instead of the police every time you want to go eat? The city becoming sprawling and difficult to navigate, but very streamlined and without 'stops', or even simply every trip becoming much longer as the concept of not slowing down is pushed? Although contradictory, going faster when you're taking a longer route is not always favorable, but to an impatient crowd, it may solve the more pressing issue: no one will be able to get out of the car to yell at the guy behind them!
EDIT: Mean and standard deviation of individual predictions can be found here.
Thanks to all my brave assessors, I now have the data about Kurzweil's 1999 predictions about 2019.
This was a follow up to a previous assessment about his predictions about 2009, which showed a mixed bag. Roughly evenly divided between right and wrong, which I found pretty good for ten-year predictions:
So, did more time allow for trends to overcome noise or more ways to go wrong? Pause for a moment to calibrate your expectations.
Methods and thanks
So, for the 2019 predictions, I divided them into 105 separate statements, did a call for volunteers, with instructions here; the main relevant point being that I wanted their assessment for 2019, not for the (possibly transient) current situation. I got 46 volunteers with valid email addresses, of which 34 returned their predictions. So many thanks, in reverse alphabetical order, to Zvi Mowshowitz, Zhengdong Wang, Yann Riviere, Uriel Fiori, orthonormal, Nuño Sempere, Nathan Armishaw, Koen Holtman, Keller Scholl, Jaime Sevilla, Gareth McCaughan, Eli Rose and Dillon Plunkett, Daniel Kokotajlo, Anna Gardiner... and others who have chosen to remain anonymous.
The results
Enough background; what did the assessors find? Well, of the 34 assessors, 24 went the whole hog and did all 105 predictions; on average, 91 predictions were assessed by each person, a total of 3078 individual assessments[1].
So, did more time allow for more perspective or more ways to go wrong? Well, Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong:
Interesting details
The (anonymised) data can be found here[2], and I encourage people to download and assess it themselves. But some interesting results stood out to me:
Predictor agreement
Taking a single prediction, for instance the first one:
Then we can compute the standard deviation of the predictors' answer for that prediction. This gives an impression of how much disagreement there was between predictors; in this case, it was 0.84.
Perfect agreement would be a standard deviation of 0; maximum disagreement (half find "1", half find "5") would be a standard deviation of 2. Perfect spread - equal numbers of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s - would have a standard deviation of √2≈ 1.4.
Across the 105 predictions, the maximum standard deviation was 1.7, the minimum was 0 (perfect agreement), and the average was 0.97. So the predictors had a medium tendency to agree with each other.
Most agreement/falsest predictions
There was perfect agreement on five predictions; and on all of these, the agreed prediction was always "5": "False".
These predictions were:
As you can see, Kurzweil suffered a lot from his VR predictions. This seems a perennial thing: Hollywood is always convinced that mass 3D is just around the corner; technologists are convinced that VR is imminent.
Most accurate prediction:
With a mean score of 1.3, the prediction deemed most accurate was:
Now this might seem a trivial prediction, especially in retrospect, but I want to defend Kurzweil here - it was not at all certain in 1999, with many utopian changes foreseen and expected, that this would still be an issue.
The next prediction deemed most accurate (mean of 1.4), is:
This is truly non-trivial for 1999, and I do give Kurzweil credit for that.
Least agreement
With a standard deviation of 1.7, the predictors disagreed the most on this prediction:
This may have to do with different judgement over the extent of "everywhere" and "rarely an issue", or over who might or might not find this to be an issue.
The next prediction with the most disagreement (st dev 1.6) is:
It's possible that "fully" was a problem here, but I see this prediction as being just false.
Most "Cannot Decide"
This prediction had more than 46% of predictors choosing "Cannot Decide":
Maybe the ambiguity in "fully recognized" made this hard to assess. Or maybe, as suggested in the comments, because this doesn't look much like a "prediction", but an obviously true statement?
A question of timeline?
It's been suggested that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 are mostly correct in 2019. If this is the case - Kurzweil gets the facts right, but the timeline wrong - it would be interesting to revisit these predictions in 2029 (if he is a decade optimistic) and 2039 (if he expected things to go twice as fast). Though many of his predictions seem to be of the type "once true, always true", so his score should rise with time, assuming continuing technological advance and no disasters.
In conclusion
Again, thanks to all the volunteers who assessed these predictions and thanks to Kurzweil who, unlike most prognosticators, had the guts and the courtesy to write down his predictions and give them a date.
I strongly suspect that most people's 1999 predictions about 2019 would have been a lot worse.
Five assessments of the 3078 returned question marks; I replaced these with "3" ("Cannot Decide"). Four assessors of the 34 left gaps in their predictions, instead of working through the randomly ordered predictions; to two significant figures, excluding these four didn't change anything, so I included them all. ↩︎
Each column is an individual predictor, each row an individual prediction. ↩︎