After Forbes author Alex Knapp criticized futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil's decade-old predictions for 2009, Kurzweil came back with his own analysis, claiming that of all the speculation in 1998's The Age of Spiritual Machines, about 80 percent were proved correct or "essentially correct." Even the predicted tech that's far from ubiquitous — like self-driving cars — "were considered crazy and centuries away," Kurzweil says. "Consider that in the late 1990s when I wrote these predictions there was no Wikipedia, no social networks, no blogs, very primitive search engines that few people used, no usable language tools, very primitive and expensive mobile phones, and so on. It is easy to forget what life was like even a decade or so ago."

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