October 5th, 2004
Kurzweil's Kurves map death of PCs, complete reverse-engineering of the brain, and Matrix-like virtual reality
I’ve spent the last few days digesting a presentation given at the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference by optical character recognition/speech recognition legend and National Inventors Hall of Famer Ray Kurzweil. Not looking at it. Just thinking about it. Kurzweil spent the better part of his presentation (download the PowerPoint slides here) showing logarithmic and linear plots of innovation in computers, storage, telecommunication, and biotechnology in a way that proved the inevitability of just about everything imaginable. Not only that, based on the very linear looking logorithmic plots, he predicted when certain paradigm-changing shifts would occur.
You’ve heard of the 30,000-foot view? This was like the 30,000-mile view. For example, computers, at least as we know them, will disappear. In their place, images will be written directly to our retinas. We’ll have high-bandwidth connections to the Internet at all times. The electronics will be so tiny that they’ll be embedded in the environment, our clothing, and our eyeglasses (oh, and they will all interoperate), and, more often than not (sales, support, information, research, etc.) we’ll be interacting with very real looking and behaving virtual personalities (think Microsoft Bob on the very best steroids). When will all that happen? According to Kurzweil’s Kurves, 2010. Yes, he said 2010. By 2029, Kurzweil predicted that $1,000 of computation will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain, which by then will have been fully reverse-engineered to the point that computers could probably replace brains.
Not that we want our brains replaced by computers. Well, then again, Kurzweil spoke of nanobots. Nanobots can be injected into our brains and solve the problems that are unthinkable to today’s surgeons. These nanobots will be like digital signal processors — able to download their instructions (software) wirelessly off the Internet. With the right software, such nanobots could fix our brains as well as our sense of reality. When I told my partner in crime about the idea, he asked the obvious: What happens if you download a virus?
