Predictions are cheap and easy; verification is hard, essential, and rare. For things like AI, we seem to be restricted to nothing but expert predictions - but expert predictions on AI are not very good, either in theory or in practice. If we are some experts who stand out, we would really want to identify them - and there is nothing better than a track record for identifying true experts.

So we're asking for help to verify the predictions of one of the most prominent futurists of this century: Ray Kurzweil, from his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines". By examining his predictions for times that have already come and gone, we'll be able to more appropriately weight his predictions for times still to come. By taking part, by lending your time to this, you will be directly helping us understand and predict the future, and will get showered in gratitude and kudos and maybe even karma.

I've already made an attempt at this (if you are interested in taking part in this project, avoid clicking on that link for now!). But you cannot trust a single person's opinions, and that was from a small (albeit random) sample of the predictions. For this project, I've transcribed his predictions into 172 separate (short) statements, and any volunteers would be presented with a random selection among these. The volunteers would then do some Google research (or other) to establish whether the prediction had come to pass, and then indicate their verdict. More details on what exactly will be measured, and how to interpret ambiguous statements, will be given to the volunteers once the project starts.

If you are interested, please let me know at stuart.armstrong@philosophy.ox.ac.uk (or in the comment thread here), indicating how many of the 172 questions you would like to attempt. The exercise will probably happen in late November or early December.

This will be done unblinded, because Kurzweil's predictions are so well known that it would be infeasible to find large numbers of people who are technologically aware but ignorant of them. Please avoid sharing your verdicts with others; it is entirely your own individual assessment that we are interested in having.