Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil
Raymond "Ray" Kurzweilis an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionInventor
Date of Birth12 February 1948
CountryUnited States of America
[In] 2029, I think, computers will match and exceed human intelligence in the ways we're now superior, like being funny, where we still have an edge.
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.
Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.
In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.
We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.
As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening.
So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
The software programs that make our body run ... were evolved in very different times. We'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, 'Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to turn that program off.
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
We only have to capture 1/10,000th of the solar energy landing on earth to completely satisfy all our energy needs.
By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.
My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).
Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust.