Have you ever wanted to go on record with a prediction? Would you like put money (that goes to charity) on your prediction? The Long Bets Foundation lets you do just that. It is a (partial) spin-off of The Long Now Foundation where you can register and make long-term predictions (up to thousands of years, I believe.) The money bet and challenged goes to charity; all you get if you are right is credit and the choice of charity. An example prediction in the text analysis arena is:
Gregory W. Webster predicts: “That by 2020 a wearable device will be available that will use voice recognition capability and high-volume storage to monitor and index conversations you have or conversations which occur in your vicinity for later searching as supplemental memory.” (Prediction 16)
Some of the other predictions of interest to humanists are: 177 about print on demand, 179 about reading on digital devices, and 295 about a second renaissance.
The Long Bet has some interesting people making predictions and bets (a prediction becomes a bet when formally challenged) including Ray Kurzweil betting against Mitch Kapor that “By 2029 no computer – or “machine intelligence” – will have passed the Turing Test.” (Bet 1)
Just to make life interesting there is a prediction 137 that “The Long Bets Foundation will no longer exist in 2104.” 63% of the voters seem to agree!