In this interview with CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil says that one day, software and computers will reside inside us. He adds that by 2020, "we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots -- blood cell-size devices -- inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons." He also says that if we're not enhanced by machines, they will surpass us. But he doesn't think it will happen. According to him, machines and humans will merge. In the mean time, he's pursuing his anti-aging quest and takes about 250 supplements to his diet every day! With this regime, he says his biological age is 40 while he's 56 years old. By 2030, there will be very little difference between 30-year-old and 120-year-old people, says Kurzweil. He's certainly a bright person, but I'm not sure that I agree with someone taking daily such an amount of pills. Read more...
Here are some selected -- and biased -- excerpts of this long interview.
Q: [Ten years from now,] what will the IT department be doing?
A: It will be concerned with security, privacy and protection -- particularly protection against software pathogens. These are important issues today, but they're going to be the profound issues civilization struggles with in the future. Eventually, we're going to have software processes running close to our bodies and, ultimately, inside our bodies, in our brains, so detecting pathogens is going to be extremely important.
Q: What about people? What will we be like? What will we be doing?
A: Right now, there's a restricted architecture to the way our brains work. The brain uses electrochemical signaling for information processing, and that's a million times slower than electronic circuits. You can make only about 100 trillion connections in there. That may seem like a big number, but the way in which we store information is inefficient, so that a master of an area of knowledge can really remember only about 100,000 chunks of knowledge. If you use Google, you can already see the power of what machines can do. In the future, we will be able to expand the 100 trillion connections we have with new, virtual ones. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains, it will grow exponentially. As we get to the 2030s, human beings will have biological brains enhanced with more powerful nonbiological thought processes.
So the answer to your question is, if we remain unenhanced, if you just had machines developing on a distinct track, they would surpass humans. But that's not what's happening. We are merging.
As technology evolves, Kurzweil wants to expand his intelligence with the so-called available machine intelligence. And I totally agree with him in the following exchange.
Q: Aren't you smart enough now?
Absolutely not. Are you kidding? A major focus of my interest is in tracking technology trends, which requires me to get my intellectual arms around a lot of diverse fields. It's really an opposite activity to what a lot of scientists do, which is to become more and more narrow. So I'm a neophyte in just about every field I run across.
But then, when he's speaking about his anti-aging diet, I'm not really following him. Here is the last exchange between Kurzweil and the magazine.
Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?
Well, ultimately, there's going to be very little difference between a guy who's 120 and a guy who's 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we'll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It's not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we'll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.
I don't know about you, but the person able to persuade me to take 250 pills per day just to live ten years more is not born yet. What's your take?
Source: Art Jahnke, CIO Magazine, October 15, 2004 Issue
7:41:33 PM
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