I can’t say that I am good at predicting the future. Then again, I don’t try to make a living off of it. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who regular talks about how great technology will be in the 2020s by extrapolating trends like Moore’s Law (and, in fact, accelerating them). Will his predictions come true? Actually, we can make a prediction about that based in his past performance.
Here he is, in a 2005 TED talk:
“By 2010 computers will disappear. They’ll be so small, they’ll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We’ll be interacting with virtual personalities.”
I don’t know about you, but my computer has yet to disappear. And thankfully, I still interact with non-virtual personalities.
He was way off making a prediction five years into the future. I suspect he will only be further off in his further out predictions. Still, I bet if you ask Ray Kurzweil he’ll tell you he was dead on with this prediction. He always does:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/21/ray-kurzweil-defends-his-2009-predictions/
I think Kurzwell’s main point is that computers are evolving according to Moore’s Law, whereas human brains are evolving much more slowly, if at all. He’s off in his timing, and will be more so if Chris’s predictions about the end of Moore’s Law come to pass.
I doubt whether Arthur C Clarke predicted that by 2012 NASA would be unable to put a human into Earth Orbit, and that humanity would be relying on windmills and solar panels for our future energy needs.
So politics, economics and culture tend to throw off predictions based on technology alone. Which brings us back to EUV and 450mm 🙂