Yeah. One of the notable subcategories of failed predictions, which, in the interest of brevity, I didn’t really discuss at much length, are the number of things which Kurzweil predicts which actually are now feasible or already implemented, and which have in some sense broken through — but as permanent niche products, which remain popular with a select class of people for a select few applications, and which pose no foreseeable threat of displacing anything or taking over the world like Kurzweil imagined they would. Reliable speech-to-text software is another example — you can pick up Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple hundred dollars and it’s good enough that a number of professional writers use it to do more or less all their writing. It’s just that all of them happen to have carpal tunnel syndrome or severe motor disabilities. Just about everyone else still uses a keyboard, even on devices like iPhones that don’t even have a physical keyboard (but do have a physical microphone, which could have been used for speech-recognition if anyone cared enough to insist on it).

It’s not that these technologies aren’t available, or even that they are priced out of most people’s reach; it’s just that people have the technology now but most of us don’t have much of a use for it as of yet. And there are, of course, drawbacks and trade-offs involved (you may love the idea of dictating your latest memo; but do you really want to hear all of your coworkers dictating theirs at the same time?), which futurists characteristically fail to take any account of.

Jesse,

Thank you for calling attention to this.

For what it’s worth, a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center was instrumental in finally getting Columbia shuttered, and the report that you’re quoting from is hosted on the SPLC’s website, but the report itself wasn’t prepared by the SPLC. It was prepared by investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice, who were investigating as part of an earlier DOJ lawsuit over the treatment of child prisoners. Of course, I’d be the last person to say that being produced by federal prosecutors makes it more reliable, but in any case, that’s the provenance.

Jennifer,

Charges? Hell, none of them will even be fired. The state government’s current plan is to shut down Columbia and let all the former employees who turned it into such a hellhole torture camp transfer and metastasize throughout the rest of the Mississippi prison system.

J sub D:

I initially expected something similar from this article. Fortunately it was just physical and emotional abuse, not sexual.

Unfortunately the Department of Justice’s report isn’t the only story out of Columbia. Besides the sexual humiliation involved in guards forcing teenaged children to strip naked before they are locked in the “dark room,” and reports by girls at Columbia of a peeping-tom prison guard (both reported in the DOJ’s report), there’s also been at least one federal lawsuit filed over a male prison guard’s repeated rape of a 14 year old girl imprisoned at Columbia.