Business Insider | Here’s what futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks life will be like in the next 20 years

November 18, 2012

Business Insider — November 18, 2012 | Megan Rose Dickey

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

With companies like Google creating self-driving cars and augmented-reality glasses, futurist Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are starting to sound much more realistic.

Kurzweil, cofounder of Singularity University, became famous for creating the first text-to-speech software. Forbes called him “the ultimate thinking machine.”

With technology advancing at an increasingly rapid rate, and researchers making serious headway into discovering the mysteries of the brain, it seems as if we’ll all be reconstituted as a computer someday.

Here’s a summary of what our future will be like, Kurzweil said in a speech at the Demo conference in Silicon Valley this past week:

  • Our brains will extend to the cloud, which will allow us to learn new things at any age.
  • We will be able to selectively erase pieces of our memory.
  • We’ll be in augmented reality at all times.
  • Around the 2030s, tiny “nanobots” able to repair and preserve our organs will keep us healthier and smarter.
  • Society will reach a state of “technological singularity” in 2045 where technology enables superhuman machine intelligences to emerge and people and machines become deeply integrated.