Ray Kurzweil

Conventional silicon computers will reach about 20 million billion operations per second (a high estimate of human-brain capacity) before 2020.

“achieving even a conservatively high estimate of the information processing capacity of the human brain … will be achieved by conventional silicon circuits prior to 2020.”

Said on

9 April 2002 · Kurzweil's argument in Long Bet #1 against Mitch Kapor (2002); the omitted words give the estimate as about 20 million billion operations per second.

Source

Long Bet #1: By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test · Long Now Foundation (Long Bets)

Should come true

2019

How sure they sounded

it should be pointed out

Categories

Technology

Importance

3 of 5 · A computing-industry milestone in raw hardware capacity.

Outcome

Accurate Happened 17 June 2013.

China's Tianhe-2, built on conventional silicon, topped the June 2013 TOP500 list at about 33.86 petaflop/s Rmax. That beats the roughly 20 petaflops (20 million billion ops/s) estimate well before 2020.

Evidence:

• https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2013/06/