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2010: Computers disappear

• Images written directly to our retinas
• Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times
• Electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
• Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
• Augmented real reality
• Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface

2029: An intimate merger

• $1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the human brain
• Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
• Computers pass the Turing test
• Nonbiological intelligence combines
• the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence, with
• the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence
• Nonbiological will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed

Nanobots provide…

• Neural implants that are:
• Noninvasive, surgery-free
• Distributed to millions or billions of points in the brain
• Full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses
• You can be someone else
• "Experience Beamers"
• Expansion of human intelligence
• Multiply our 100 trillion connections many fold
• Intimate connection to diverse forms of nonbiological intelligence

The Challenge from Malthus: "Exponential trends eventually run out of resources"

However...

• The resources needed for computation and communication are close to zero.
• Based on current understanding, there are sufficient resources on Earth for these trends to continue through the 21st Century:
• During which time nonbiological intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful than biological human intelligence
• Beyond that: yet lower thresholds, and expansion beyond Earth
• Specific Paradigms do hit limits
• e.g., the flat IC's of Moore's Law will hit atomic limits within 15 years
• But then yield to other paradigms
• Moore's Law is the fifth paradigm, not the first, to provide exponential growth for computing
• The Sixth paradigm will be 3D molecular computing
• The brain achieves its power because it computes in 3 dimensions despite an extremely bulky and slow information processing method (10 million times slower than today's electronic circuits)
• Even Moore's Law by itself will be sufficient to exceed human intelligence

The Challenge from Software: "We're making exponential gains in hardware, but not software"

• Software Price-Performance Has Also Improved at an Exponential Rate
  
  Example: Automatic Speech Recognition Software:

• There has been increased productivity from new languages, class libraries, software development tools:
• Doubling time is about 6 years
• Software complexity required to emulate the human brain is manageable:
• Compressed genome data that describes the human brain is 12 million bytes
• 6 billion bits X compression factor of 30 X 50% devoted to the brain
• We have a specific game plan to reverse engineer the human brain
• Knowledge of the human brain at all levels is growing exponentially
• We will not program human-level intelligence link by link (e.g., the expert system "cyc")
• But rather as an elaborate architecture of parallel self-organizing systems
• Educating such a system will be the hardest part of the software task

The Challenge from Ethics

• There is far less ethical resistance to the development of nonbiological intelligence (including intimate connection with our bodies and brains) than to biological tinkering
• In any event, ethical concerns end up as stones in a stream: the economic and moral imperatives are too strong
• There ultimately will be grave dangers, but the biological downsides are more apparent today