One way to gauge how reliable people's judgements are: have multiple people rate each Kurzweil prediction and see how well their ratings agree. So far LWers have committed to checking at least 200 predictions, so if everyone pulls through you'll be able to get multiple ratings of at least 28 questions. Those multiple ratings could then be cross-checked for each question.
(I won't volunteer to rate any statements myself because (1) I'm lazy; (2) I already have a mildly negative view of Kurzweil's predictive ability, which might make me biased; and (3) I read your earlier post and re-rated the 10 Age of Spiritual Machines predictions in that post myself, so I've already been primed in that respect.)
One way to gauge how reliable people's judgements are: have multiple people rate each Kurzweil prediction and see how well their ratings agree.
This is a good idea. It's standard operating procedure (for measures which require a rater's judgment) to have 2 raters for at least some of the items, and to report the agreement rate on those items ("inter-rater reliability"). Be sure to vary which raters are overlapping; for example, don't give gwern and bsterrett the same 10 predictions (instead have maybe one prediction that they both rate, and o...
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.