MemeMachineGo!

The Long Bets Foundation lets prophets put their money where their mouths are. Some bets on record:

• A computer - or "machine intelligence" - will pass the Turing Test by 2029. ($20,000)
• In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.($2000)
• By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.($2000)

Regarding the above: In the early '90's, a guy horndogged a female bot on a MUD for two weeks without buying the clue. Arguably, it's already been done. With a team of competent judges... no, I don't think so. Maybe computers will be "as smart as" humans in 2029, but they'll be alien intelligences, and I don't think either they or we will have sufficiently cracked the code of the mind as to simulate humanity. The second I find likely if Google continues to weight its rankings in terms of number of links as it does today. If that changes, who knows. For the last, I think print-on-demand will be that pervasive. But I think it's more likely in 2010 that early-adopters will be printing their own at home, and everyone else will still be having them shipped, a prediction that's bad news for bookstores if correct.

(Via BoingBoing)