On January 1 st , , I made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1 st , As part of self certifying the seriousness of my predictions I promised to review them, as made on January 1 st , , every following January 1 st for 32 years, the span of the predictions, to see how accurate they were.
This is my fifth annual review and self appraisal, following those of , , , and I am over a seventh of the way there!
Sometimes I throw in a new side prediction in these review notes. I made my predictions because at the time, just like now, I saw an immense amount of hype about these three topics, and the general press and public drawing conclusions about all sorts of things they feared e. My predictions, with dates attached to them, were meant to slow down those expectations, and inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance. I was accused of being a pessimist, but I viewed what I was saying as being a realist.
In the last couple of years I have started to think that I too, reacted to all the hype, and was overly optimistic in some of my predictions.
My current belief is that things will go, overall, even slower than I thought five years ago. That is not to say that there has not been great progress in all three fields, but it has not been as overwhelmingly inevitable as the tech zeitgeist thought on January 1 st , As I said in , I am not going to edit my original post, linked above, at all, even though I see there are a few typos still lurking in it.
