Sunday, September 13, 2009

Book Update

A while back I shared that I had started a new book. If you know me at all you will also know that I often take a long time to finish books when I start reading them.

Recently I have tried to become a little more intentional in reading more regularly. This means I have done a lot more reading recently, especially in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil.

The chapter I read this morning was all about Kurzweil's technology predictions for the year 2009 that he wrote in 1998 (the book was published in 1999). I found it very interesting to see what a very intelligent futurist thought about what our time would be like. In a lot of respects he was right, and in a lot of respects he was wrong. The biggest aspect that has not come true like he imagined is speech to text applications. His idea was that keyboards would be rarely used and even found on computers and that speech to text synthesis would be the primary means of "writing" on a computer. I'm still using a keyboard for almost all my communication on the keyboard, how about you?

Some other predictions of note, computers would be prevalent throughout the home and clothing. Most people would carry around lightweight computers without keyboards (iPhones/Touch based smartphones anyone?). Cancer and other diseases would no longer be a leading cause of death due to bioengineering etc.

The next chapter is predictions for 2019. That should also be interesting.

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