Futurist Ray Kurzweil optimistically predicts much longer life expectancies, cures for cancer and heart disease, flying cars and robot butlers.
Humans will become capable of feats that now seem impossible for many of us, in our lifetime in large part due to expected advances in brain research, posits the inventor and author in his new book, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed," due out next month.
Key to his predictions, which he's also outlined in a series of other books including "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "The Singularity Is Near," is the law of accelerating returns. Kurzweil suggests the pace of information technology advances will grow at an exponential pace until sometime near the end of the century.
In his new book, he predicts technology will virtually grow the human neocortex the section of the brain responsible for thinking, language, and sensory perception by directly tying into electronic resources, including the Internet.
"In another 25 years, computers will be the size of blood cells, they'll be another billion times more powerful and we'll put them inside our bodies and brains," says Kurzweil, who is speaking at Toronto's Danforth Music Hall on Thursday.
"Nanobots, little robotic computerized devices, will keep us healthy from inside by augmenting our immune system, they'll go inside our brain, interact with our biological neurons, put our brains in the cloud, on the Internet, and we'll be able to actually have direct brain connection to artificial intelligence, which will incorporate a synthetic neocortex."
While some will undoubtedly write off Kurzweil's predictions as hokum, he has an impressive list of inventions to his name and a proven capacity for visionary thinking. He's credited with inventing the first flatbed scanner, multi-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer to mimic the sound of a grand piano among many other things.
While his track record of previous predictions has been debated he claims he's been on the mark or close the vast majority of the time, while critics suggest that's not really true he has made a number of prescient calls.
In "The Age of Spiritual Machines," which he says he wrote in the mid to late 1990s, back when nearly everyone used dial-up modems, he outlined his visions for 2009. He wrote about the widespread use of portable computers, mobile devices without keyboards, the adoption of digital music, movies and books, the implementation of facial recognition technology, and distance learning.
A transition toward a cyborg future in which society accepts becoming part human, part computer may seem beyond belief, but Kurzweil doesn't think so. He points to present-day medical treatments that already involve brain implants of electronic devices and argues similar procedures could become common among the healthy, too.
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil's new book predicts development of a super 'digital brain'
