[erichsu]

First, my compliments to any prophet who goes back to actually audit his predictions.

Having said that, I think Ray is grading himself on a pretty generous curve. Many predictions of the form "X will be Y" are counted as correct if somewhere in the world at some cost there is technology available allowing X to be Y.

As a neutral reader, those predictions sure sound like they are supposedly to be widespread rather than merely existing.

[jhuni]

If you are an expert in world jugglery you can even make Astrology seem true.

The trick is to use that fact that English words aren't clearly defined. That way in the future you can clarify what you meant :)

For example, Kurzweil said we would have a 20 petaflops super computer by 2009. Right now the fastest super computer is Tianhe-1 and it is capable of 2.5 petaflops. And to that Kurzweil responded that he considers Google to be a giant supercomputer, thanks for telling us after the fact what you meant by super-computer =/

[Devilboy]

At worst he's only out by about 2 years with that one. That's pretty damn close.

[alanh]

Right. Examples:

> PREDICTION: Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings and other body ornaments

> ACCURACY: Correct

> PREDICTION: The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) dictation software, but keyboards are still used. CSR is very accurate, far more so than the human transcriptionists who were used up until a few years ago.

> ACCURACY: Partially correct

[jrockway]

Mostly depends on what a personal computer is:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9266

I could imagine a lillypad earring :)

[nostromo]

Page 38 seems to take the opposite view:

PREDICTION: Keyboards still exist, but most textual language is created by speaking. ACCURACY: Wrong

[Devilboy]

That may be, but I don't know of anyone else making these kind of predictions with Ray's accuracy.

[nextparadigms]

That's true. Of course he won't be spot on 100% of the time for 10 year predictions, but he's certainly better at it than anyone else.