Technology in the 21st Century: an Imminent Intimate Merger
May 14, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
At the Foresight Institute “Exploring the Edges” Senior Associate Gathering, April 27, 2002, Ray Kurzweil presented the case of the emergence of biological and machine intelligence, answering the three major challenges: limited resources, inadequate software, and ethical concerns. Here are the presentation slides and audio.
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
Nanobots provideā¦
- Neural implants that are:
- Noninvasive, surgery-free
- Distributed to millions or billions of points in the brain
- You can be someone else
- “Experience Beamers”
- 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
- 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)
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:
1985 | 1995 | 2000 | |
Price | $5,000 | $500 | $50 |
Vocabulary Size (# of words) | 1,000 | 10,000 | 100,000 |
Continuous Speech? | No | No | Yes |
User Training Required (Minutes) | 180 | 60 | 5 |
Accuracy | Poor | Fair | Good |
- There has been increased productivity from new languages, class libraries, software development tools:
- Doubling time is about 6 years
- Compressed genome data that describes the human brain is 12 million bytes
- Knowledge of the human brain at all levels is growing exponentially
- 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