Tech Pioneer Kurzweil Sees Grand Digital Future
According to Kurzweil, the result will be the deepest possible connection between the computer realm and perception, the ultimate virtual reality that incorporates not only the five senses but also centers of the brain that express humor, ecstasy or other feelings.
Originally published June 29, 2000 at CNET. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 31, 2001.
NEW YORK--The PC may be dead, the dot-com economy collapsing and privacy threats proliferating, but there still are some unabashed techno-optimists in the world.
One such person is Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer who has started more than half a dozen companies specializing in synthesizing music or getting computers to read or understand speech. In a keynote address today at the PC Expo conference, Kurzweil predicted a future in which human brains will be teeming with robots that can augment intelligence and transport people into virtual reality realms or enable people to back up their own childhood memories.
Most people recognize technology is changing rapidly, but they fail to realize that the pace of that change is accelerating, Kurzweil said. An improvement that would take 20 years to develop at today's rate of innovation will take only 10 years to achieve in 2010. By 2020, it will take 5 years, he predicted.
Kurzweil's sci-fi views stand in contrast to some voices of pessimism worrying about how the electronic world enables government spying, companies intruding on privacy, and technological divides between rich and poor.
But Kurzweil should know better than some. His experience in artificial intelligence and its applications to tasks such as optical character recognition have given him industry respect, while investors and high-tech companies with newfound prominence pour billions into research efforts.
Complete article available at CNET
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