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How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 11 of 15

Early in the next decade, images will be written directly to your retina from your eyeglasses, so you won't have to carry around Kurzweil Quote displays. It will create high-resolution, full-immersion, virtual reality environments. I actually have an early version of a virtual-reality three-dimensional technology: Teleportec. I give about a third of my presentations using that. It looks as though I am there in three dimensions; you can see the local background behind me as I move around. It is fairly elaborate, but early in the next decade, this will be fairly routine types of technology.

It is really when we go to the end of the third decade of this century that we will have enough turns of the technology doubling screw that these technologies will be very profound because of the double-exponential growth of computation, communication, and our understanding of biology. As powerful as they are today, these technologies will be a billion times more capable by the end of 2020s. We will have completed the reverse-engineering of the human brain. We will have models and simulations that express the power of human intelligence that will add to the AI tool kit.

We already have hundreds of applications of narrow AI, programs that perform functions at human levels that used to require human intelligence. Every time you send an e-mail or place a cell phone call, intelligent algorithms route the information. If you get an electrocardiogram, it comes back with an automated diagnosis. Computers are flying and landing airplanes, guiding intelligent weapons, and are responsible for billions of dollars of daily investments in the stock market. We will gain the knowledge of the full range of human intelligence. The power of human intelligence is reflected in our pattern-recognition capabilities, which is still a unique advantage of human intelligence.

We will combine the powers of human pattern recognition with the natural advantages of machine intelligence, which are speed and repeatability. Machines can remember billions of things; we humans are hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. Machines can share their knowledge at electronic speeds. Humans are limited to the bandwidth of language, which is a millions times slower.

In my view, this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines. We are getting closer to technology and ultimately, we will merge with it. The killer app of nanotechnology is nanobots, which will be in the environment producing inexpensive energy, cleaning up the results of 19th century industrial era environmental degradation, and most importantly, going inside our bodies and brains.

My other current book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever talks about three bridges to radical life extension. Bridge one is applying today's knowledge aggressively so that us baby boomers can be in good shape when we have the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution. At that point, we will master the information processes underlying biology. That in turn will be a bridge to the full blossoming of the nanotechnology revolution, where we can send nanobots inside our bodies and brains to keep us healthy, to reverse DNA errors, to remove debris, and to destroy pathogens and cancer cells. The nanobots will also go inside our brains to provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and, most importantly, to extend human intelligence.

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