Category: Quiet Breakouts
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Twelve Kurzweil predictions about brain prosthetics, tested against the patents granted last quarter and the papers in NEJM from last October.
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Kurzweil predicted diamondoid organs by the 2030s. What shipped is peptide drugs, living cells, and a titanium impeller on a magnetic field.
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Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 medical predictions mostly reached their destinations — but almost never by the roads he named.
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Twelve 2005 predictions on cell therapy, gene therapy, anti-amyloid vaccines, and diamondoid nanobots scored against 2026 clinical trials, patent filings, and approvals.
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Twenty years after The Singularity Is Near, 3D NAND is everywhere, Nantero still hasn’t shipped, and the mesh lost to the cloud.
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Kurzweil’s curve kept bending. Almost none of the specific mechanisms he nominated to keep it bending actually arrived.
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219 US patents for devices that read biomarkers from sweat — a category that barely existed before 2010. Half were granted in the last five years.
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In 2024, the USPTO granted 21 patents for materials engineered to radiate heat through Earth’s atmosphere and into the vacuum of space. The technique requires zero electricity. The trick that made it work came from telecom.
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Kurzweil bet on rotaxanes, nanotubes, and self-assembling polymers to carry computing past silicon. Twenty years later, only spintronics made it to market — and the brain got matched anyway.