The history of Acceleration/Singularity predictions

From: Joshua Fox (joshua@joshuafox.com)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2006 - 10:01:32 MST


Singularity work requires us to look at future trends, such as
accelerating increase in raw computer power towards human levels. But we
cannot judge the accuracy of our predictive techniques except by
waiting. One approach is to look at predictions from the past and see if
those predictive techniques were successful. Kurzweil tells us of the
success of his predictions from 10 or 20 years ago, but I'd like to see
more of this sort of retrospective.

Can anyone point to me a webpage collecting predictions from decades ago
about the general direction of technology ? I'm not interested in
soundbite predictions, but rather in an overview of deeper long-term
thinking of the past, like the original Moore's Law article or /The Year
2000/ by Kahn and Wiener. Preferably this overview would not just
present the old predictions, but also analyze the accuracy of the
prediction techniques used.

Joshua



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