Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism

IEEE Spectrum: Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism: "Don't panic if you look for your computer today and can't find it. We have it on the authority of technology maven Ray Kurzweil that this year computers will have vanished because of miniaturization. As he said at the TED conference in February 2005:

By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.

If you have a different impression of the world today, Kurzweil would want you to know that he is technically correct. If the rest of the world fails to think that's enough, the rest of the world is wrong.

Of course, Kurzweil did not mean to say that all computers would actually disappear. Rather, embedded microprocessors would allow many of the functions once uniquely served by computers to disseminate to phones, tablet computers, and even cars, clothes, and key chains. And in that sense, 2010 might indeed be seen as a ringing vindication of Kurzweil's prophecy, because smartphones and iPads are everywhere."