Within a couple of decades of 2001, the computational power to emulate the human brain will be available.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Prediction: Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?
What would count as true or false
Judge at the end of 2021. The benchmark is the brain-emulation computing requirement stated in Kurzweil's own 2001 essay (on the order of 10^16 calculations per second). If the essay gives no figure, use the commonly cited functional-emulation estimate of about 10^16 operations per second. True: by 31 Dec 2021 at least one existing computer system (for example a TOP500 supercomputer) had documented sustained performance at or above that requirement. Mostly true: the requirement was met by 2021 but only on a slightly different measure (for example peak rather than sustained performance) or within about 10% of it. Mostly false: the requirement was met only after 2021, or only against a lower or narrower estimate than the one the claim relies on. False: the evidence shows no system reached the stated requirement by the end of 2021.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 TOP500 List - November 2021 TOP500 · November 2021
“| 1 | Supercomputer Fugaku - Supercomputer Fugaku, A64FX 48C 2.2GHz, Tofu interconnect D, Fujitsu RIKEN Center for Computational Science Japan | 7,630,848 | 442.01 | 537.21 | 29,899 |”
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E2 November 2021 TOP500 · November 2021
“Its HPL benchmark score is 442 Pflop/s, which exceeded the performance of Summit at No. 2 by 3x.”
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E3 The Singularity Is Near - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 30 June 2004
“Kurzweil looks at several different estimates of how much computational capacity is in the brain and settles on 1016 calculations per second and 1013 bits of memory.”
Reasoning
The benchmark is about 10^16 calculations per second, which E3 reports as Kurzweil's own figure and which the criteria also set as the fallback. The November 2021 TOP500 list (E2) reports Fugaku's HPL benchmark score as 442 Pflop/s, about 4.4×10^17 operations per second. Fugaku's HPL benchmark score of 442 Pflop/s on the November 2021 list [E2] is well above the requirement of about 10^16 calculations per second, before the end of 2021. E1's table row is unlabelled, so the verdict relies on E2's labelled figure.
Cite this claim
Ray Kurzweil, “Within a couple of decades of 2001, the computational power to emulate the human brain will be available.” (said January 2001). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_cc6d33ab260b, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_cc6d33ab260b
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More prediction claims by Ray Kurzweil
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Mostly false
“We're going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves.”
Kurzweil predicted that humans will gradually merge with technology and enhance themselves.
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Mostly false
“In line with my earlier predictions, supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by around 2020.”
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Mostly false
“This is where combining AI with biotechnology is headed, and within several years all vaccine and medication development could be done this way.”
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Resolved true
“Ten or 15 years from now we’ll go to the third dimension.”
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Mostly false
“Computers will be able to read on their own, understanding and modeling what they have read, by the second decade of the twenty-first century.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.