Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

AndrewKemendo

If you really want your mind blown look at how accurate Ray Kurzweil was from his 1999 book Age of Spiritual Machines The most striking thing is that almost all of his missed predictions were missed not because the technology was not available, but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology

stephen_cagle

By my own, completely arbitrary split of this into 16 predictions, I would say that this hits on maybe 8 of 16 if we are being a bit generous. Which is good, but certainly not "Inevitable" (the title of the book). With that said, maybe he meant inevitable as N approaches infinity... So there's still time! Aside: I think the biggest interesting prediction he had was that AI would obey a user driven network effect. It seems like a very clean prediction, and yet it has failed to materialize? I wonder if this has more to do with just how scrape-able the whole internet was or with distilation or what? There is certainly an advantage to having good user data, but it seems like it is largely something that can be worked around (by hook or crook)?

cousinbryce

Google’s main product was and continues to be ads

at1as

In addition to writing about current (and future) technology, Kevin Kelly also put together Vanishing Asia, a photo book documenting disappearing communities and traditions across Asia Possibly the best photography book I've come across. It's out of print, but I managed to snag a copy on eBay last year

froobius

these are good / accurate, but what's the error-rate? assuming these have been cherry picked, and he made more predictions

royal__

Another prediction I remember from this book was that AI would be supplied much like electricity as a kind of utility into many different appliances. This is basically how it has turned out with tokens and APIs.

nialv7

OK, but which ones of his predictions did NOT come true? We don’t want survivorship bias do we?

esafak

All right, let's see his 2026 predictions for the next ten.

rossdavidh

I would say that KK's "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains" has turned out closer to the truth than "The Bitter Lesson" has. LLM's do not drive cars, or vice versa. Stockfish still beats the newest, largest LLM at chess. Etc. Most of the truly productive "AI" is customized for a specific purpose, or class of purposes anyway.

latkin

I'd score it as 3 out of 5. > "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." Nah. Not by any common-sense measure at least. i.e. not if you ask a person on the street "what is Google's main product?", not if you look at where their revenue comes from. Perhaps if you look at where their staffing/spending/attention is going, but I don't think it's fair to say AI is their "main product" yet. (disclaimer: I work there, not directly on AI) > "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" Directionally, yes. The number is too low, though, at least for now. As someone not even super closely following everything, I can rattle off more than 2 or 3. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, DeepSeek + other Chinese players... Probably in the eyes of the public it really is just 2 or 3 (ChatGPT + something from work, perhaps). > "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" Yeah. > "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains" Feels underspecified... I'd say this is a miss. "most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by nonhuman-like programs" Most by what measure? Most invocations/day? Most users? Most economic output? Most public awareness? "AI" or "ML" in one form or another is ubiquitous and indeed if you were to make a giant list of "AI" or "ML" applications it would probably be dominated by hyper-specialized non-human examples, e.g. the image processing in your phone's camera, your Spotify recommendation algo, image recognition on factory floors. But in the public consciousness, the term "AI" means know-everything, do-everything human-like chat/assistant systems. > "in conversational tones, any question at all" Yeah.

gwern

> Amid all this activity, a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The only important prediction Kelly made was a complete rejection of the Singularity. It is also probably the prediction that sentiment has changed on the most in the direction away from Kelly, since 2016. After a decade of evidence and updating, far more people believe in that view of our AI future now than they did then. (His 2017 https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/ hasn't aged well either.)

so-cal-schemer

For AI predictions from some of the world's foremost experts 25 years ago, see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039614 (Douglas Hofstdter, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, Hans Moravec, John Holland, Kevin Kelly, Frank Drake, Ralph Merkle, John Koza)

firemelt

hard to believe, if larry page said google is ai product and search is just the subset of it. then why there a legendsry rumor that said, google exec hide chatbot because they afraid their search business would going bad

d-us-vb

> Not even Kelly foresaw the Bitter Lesson Except that he most certainly did! The bitter lesson isn't about LLMs vs specialized neural networks! It's about manually programmed expert systems vs machine learning. Alpha Go Zero isn't very good at anything but playing Go. It's a highly specialized brain only for that singular task. LLMs remain a problematic technology (both in terms of reliability and privacy) for a lot of domains and my own prediction is that smaller models that are much more reliable for a specific domain will become common after the utility of AI is known by way of LLMs, but the reliability or cost of running them makes it unsustainable.

zelcon

People in the 1950s also perfectly predicted AI in its current form. It wasn’t entirely hard to see coming.