089: Discussion of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 Predictions

We're back! In this return episode we're looking back at the prediction made for this year, 2019, twenty years ago in Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. This list was impressively specific and bold, and as we show not all of the predictions panned out. But is Kurzweil just a bit optimistic, maybe by ten years or so, or is he fundamentally wrong? We take a pretty unscientific look at how each of his predictions fared, then give our own gut assessments of how the future's coming along.

Om Podcasten

Enter a simulated universe where software beings engage in classic human struggles for belonging, status, and attention, and old certainties like death and gravity are just settings to be negotiated. You can be the god of your own private world, but if find yourself feeling lonely, you might be tempted to give away some of your precious control. This podcast will take you behind the scenes with comic book authors and veteran podcasters Jon Perry (@perryjon) and Ted Kupper (@tedkupper) as they write and develop a science fiction graphic novel called Constellation, set in a metaverse unlike any you’ve seen before: neither a utopia nor a dystopia, neither real nor virtual, it is a simulation where everyone knows they are being simulated and no one much cares, where there’s no hope of leaving and no reason to, just an endless supply of human-designed worlds to create and explore.