Long Bets

Is a website where people as diverse as Gordon Bell, Ted Danson and Freeman Dyson have placed bets on long term societal and technological possibilities. E.g., Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have each plonked down $10,000 on oppposite sides of whether a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. For $50 anyone can put lay out a prediction and then others can place a bet against them. It is a little reminiscent of the Policy Analysis Market experiment at DARPA that got squelched this summer after hitting the press with stories about how people would buy and sell futures on political and terrorist events. The idea was that the collective intelligence of the market would make accurate predictions. And on the Long Bet web site it certainly looks like the predictions made by people who’ve had to pay $50 to place it on the web site are much more well thought out than the commentaries on them that people can post for free…