When Man and Machine Merge

An excerpt from the Ray Kurzweil article in Rolling Stone magazine:

entire article: http://www.seventhswami.com/misc/KURZWEIL_IN_ROLLING_STONE.pdf

For his contributions to artificial intelligence, Kurzweil has been enshrined in the Inventors Hall of Fame and has received White House honors from three presidents – including the highest prize in his field, the National Medal of Technology. But nothing he has done in the past has shaken the scientific community as profoundly as his latest prediction. In our lifetime, Kurzweil believes, machines will not only surpass humans in intelligence – they will irrevocably alter what it means to be human.

Kurzweil had already been forecasting technology for years. It’s an essential part of any inventor’s trade, because he has to know what technology will be on the market by the time his product is released. To calculate what’s ahead, Kurzweil extrapolates from historical data. By charting microprocessor clock speeds since 1975, for example, he found they were doubling every three years. “It’s like skeet-shooting,” he says. “Things are moving very quickly.”

Kurzweil proved himself an astonishingly good shot – so good, in fact, that he began to make sweeping predictions about politics and society. During the 1980s, he correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union due to decentralized technologies, the rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of wireless networks. He announced that a computer would be a world chess champion by 1998 – a reality that occurred in May 1992 when Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov. “There’s something inexorable about these progressions,” Kurzweil says. “We really can predict – not exactly what’s going to happen, but the power of these technologies.” Then one day, as he was plotting the time between innovations from the wheel to the World Wide Web, Kurzweil made a discovery: Technological change is accelerating at a far more rapid pace than we understand. At the current rate, he wrote, “We wont experience 1oo years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.” The rapidly decreasing cost of technology, he predicted, coupled with the exponentially increasing power of computers, will lead inevitably to a single moment: The Singularity.

The takeoff starts with computers embedding themselves – from GPS systems to iPhones – into the fabric of our lives. Then, 10 years from now, computing power will finally catch up with our brains. For $1,ooo, you’ll be able to store as much memory on a chip as you can in your head. By 2O3O, artificial intelligence will make computerized voices on telephone help lines as realistic sounding as any human’s (think HAL from 2O01). Virtual realities – projected directly onto your retinas – will become indistinguishable from your own. Kurzweil compares this leap to when humans learned how to fly. “Once we figured out the secret to flight – the subtle scientific principles – we created the world of aviation,” he says. “Once we can build and create intelligence that doesn’t have the limitations of our brain, there’s nothing it can’t do.”

But the even trippier stuff happens in the 2030s, when nanobots – microscopic machines built from molecular components – start to infiltrate your everyday life. “Nanobots in our physical bodies will destroy pathogens, remove debris, repair DNA and reverse aging,” Kurzweii predicts. “We will be able to redesign all the systems in our bodies and brains to be far more capable and durable.” By scanning the contents of your brain, nanobots will be able to transfer everything you know, everything you have ever experienced, into a robot or a virtual reality
program. If something happens to your physical body, no problem. Your mind will live on – forever.

But as computer intelligence surpasses that of humans, machines will also make smarter and smarter versions of themselves – without any help from us. After 2045, Kurzweil predicts, nanobots will replicate and spread throughout the tiniest recesses of matter, transforming the host – say, a tree or a stone – into a computational device. He calls this intelligence-infested matter “computronium, which is matter and energy organized at optimum level for computation. Using nanotechnology, we’re going to turn a rock into a computer.” As the nanobots spread computer intelligence beyond our planet, the universe itself will awaken as if a giant switch is finally being turned on. “The universe is not conscious – yet,” Kurzweil has written. “But it will be.”

Tags: 2012, computers, nanotechnology, science, singularity

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 Uncategorized

2 Comments to When Man and Machine Merge

I love it, I’ve been reading about nanotech and nanobots since I was 13 (you gotta love OMNI). I’m seriously really looking forward to computronium crawling across my body and expanding throughout the universe!