Call for volunteers: assessing Kurzweil, 2019

post by Stuart_Armstrong · 2020-04-02T12:07:57.246Z · LW · GW · 21 comments

Contents

21 comments

EDIT: To help assessing, go here [LW · GW]. Cheers!

Many years ago, I helped organise an assessment of Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 [LW · GW], in his 1999 book "The Age of Spiritual Machines". The results were mixed - I feel he had a decent track record, but it was much worse than his own self-evaluation:

Following Gwern's suggestion [LW(p) · GW(p)], let's do the same for his 2019 predictions.

Since many people have extra time on their hands, for some odd reason, I'm asking for volunteers to do this assessment. You'll be getting a certain number of predictions (how many is up to you) and giving an assessment of their correctness on a five point scale of "True", "Weakly True", "Cannot Decide", "Weakly False", and "False".

So, add a comment here if you'd like to volunteer for this assessment, or know a person/group who might want to.

Cheers!

EDIT: I've now split Kurzweil's 2019 predictions into 105 separate individual predictions.

21 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by brunoparga · 2020-04-01T20:03:32.299Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Gwern has posted several of Kurzweil's predictions on Predictionbook and I have marked many of them as either right or wrong. In some cases I included comments on the bits of research I did.

comment by Chris Cooper (chris-cooper-1) · 2020-04-02T10:21:19.066Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm guessing you want respondents to put in serious research - you're not looking for people's unreflective attitudes - sorry, intuitions?

Replies from: Stuart_Armstrong
comment by Stuart_Armstrong · 2020-04-08T14:30:14.811Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm looking for people's intuitions on the meaning of the predictions (what was Kurzweil saying?). For most predictions, the research needed beyond that is small.

comment by Daniel Kokotajlo (daniel-kokotajlo) · 2020-04-01T13:28:02.156Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd be happy to volunteer a bit. I don't have much time, but this sounds fun, so maybe I could do a few.

Replies from: Stuart_Armstrong
comment by jmh · 2020-04-02T14:54:47.679Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Time I have. Would also be willing to participate.

Replies from: Stuart_Armstrong
comment by Orual · 2020-04-01T20:55:08.031Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've got time. I'm happy to validate predictions. Give me as many as you want.

Replies from: Stuart_Armstrong
comment by Jsevillamol · 2020-04-01T14:25:40.684Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Sure sign me up, happy to do up to 10 for now, plausibly more later depending on how hard it turns out to be

Replies from: Stuart_Armstrong