Technology in the 21st Century: an Imminent Intimate Merger

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by	Ray Kurzweil

At the Foresight Institute "Exploring the Edges" Senior Associate Gathering, April 27, 2002, Ray Kurzweil presented the case of the emergence of biological and machine intelligence, answering the three major challenges: limited resources, inadequate software, and ethical concerns. Here are the presentation slides and audio.

Audio Clip

2010: Computers disappear

Images written directly to our retinas
Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times
Electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
Augmented real reality
Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface

2029: An intimate merger

$1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the human brain
Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
Computers pass the Turing test
Nonbiological intelligence combines

the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence, with
the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence

Nonbiological will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed

Nanobots provide…

Neural implants that are:

Noninvasive, surgery-free
Distributed to millions or billions of points in the brain

Full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses

You can be someone else
"Experience Beamers"

Expansion of human intelligence

Multiply our 100 trillion connections many fold
Intimate connection to diverse forms of nonbiological intelligence

The Challenge from Malthus: "Exponential trends eventually run out of resources"

However...

The resources needed for computation and communication are close to zero.
Based on current understanding, there are sufficient resources on Earth for these trends to continue through the 21st Century:

During which time nonbiological intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful than biological human intelligence
Beyond that: yet lower thresholds, and expansion beyond Earth

Specific Paradigms do hit limits

e.g., the flat IC's of Moore's Law will hit atomic limits within 15 years
But then yield to other paradigms

Moore's Law is the fifth paradigm, not the first, to provide exponential growth for computing
The Sixth paradigm will be 3D molecular computing
The brain achieves its power because it computes in 3 dimensions despite an extremely bulky and slow information processing method (10 million times slower than today's electronic circuits)

Even Moore's Law by itself will be sufficient to exceed human intelligence

The Challenge from Software: "We're making exponential gains in hardware, but not software"

Software Price-Performance Has Also Improved at an Exponential Rate

Example: Automatic Speech Recognition Software:

	1985	1995	2000
Price	$5,000	$500	$50
Vocabulary Size (# of words)	1,000	10,000	100,000
Continuous Speech?	No	No	Yes
User Training Required (Minutes)	180	60	5
Accuracy	Poor	Fair	Good

There has been increased productivity from new languages, class libraries, software development tools:

Doubling time is about 6 years

Software complexity required to emulate the human brain is manageable:

Compressed genome data that describes the human brain is 12 million bytes

6 billion bits X compression factor of 30 X 50% devoted to the brain
We have a specific game plan to reverse engineer the human brain

Knowledge of the human brain at all levels is growing exponentially

We will not program human-level intelligence link by link (e.g., the expert system "cyc")

But rather as an elaborate architecture of parallel self-organizing systems
Educating such a system will be the hardest part of the software task

The Challenge from Ethics

There is far less ethical resistance to the development of nonbiological intelligence (including intimate connection with our bodies and brains) than to biological tinkering
In any event, ethical concerns end up as stones in a stream: the economic and moral imperatives are too strong
There ultimately will be grave dangers, but the biological downsides are more apparent today

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	Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/15/2002 7:09 AM by peter_ritter@email.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
Well, it looks like all these charts showing technological progress are growing exponentially. Could all this be just a rosy scenario? After all, with everything interconnected and interrelated, the chance of something ‘destructive’ spreading quickly is also much higher with the potential to lock the planet into a kind of dark age for a protracted period of time. The trouble is that the forces that are driving this incredibly fast paced technological progress inherently rely on open societies, free flow of information, and the cooperation of large numbers of brains each contributing knowledge from different specialisations. While the environment we interact with has become incredibly complex over the last two hundred years, we as humans haven’t become measurably more intelligent from the generations living two centuries ago, and so each one of us merely masters fragments of this knowledge, but no one person would really be capable today, of actually recreating from scratch the kind products we are so used to using, were they lost due to some unforeseen global catastrophe. Chaos theory has shown that a seemingly stable system can quickly degenerate into chaotic swings merely by adding more ‘stress’ to the system. Our global economy is an extremely sensitive fabric, and most of us just take its existence for granted. Fortunately for us, there haven’t been any catastrophic disruptions in recent memory, but the more we progress, the more likely such a scenario could become, and if it happens, we may potentially end up in a world of relic technology with no-one actually knowledgeable enough to actually operate say a nuclear power plant or do something useful with a left over microchip. I wonder it we can actually do something positive about this other than pray that nothing will happen (maybe a ‘bootstrap civilisation’ training course left in places where people would likely find it in case of disaster ?). I just know that my live temporarily changes quite dramatically on days when for some reason the running water is unavailable in my flat, or my car is in the shop and I actually can’t ‘just go somewhere’.


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/15/2002 10:37 AM by grantc4@hotmail.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
While the rate at which technology is increasing is growing exponentially, pollution and noise (the signal kind) are also growing exponentially. When the amount of noise on the Internet grows to a point where we can't find any information, I believe much of the exponential growth we've been talking about will slow down or cease. How will we know the data coming in to us will be valid enough to be useful? When we have to spend all of our time sorting the wheat from the chaff, when will we find time to think and work rather than just processing data? There are limits beyond which complexity turns to chaos and we seem to be rushing toward it.


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/15/2002 12:52 PM by wildwilber@msn.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
Grant What about DNA? 97% noise and 3% meaning and still nice things come of it. Maybe you think they are wrong about the reality of noise to signal in DNA? Or you think DNA just hasn’t reached the threshold of diminishing returns yet? Or maybe you do? Or maybe you think biology can truly do things we will not be able to? >”How will we know the data coming in to us will be valid enough to be useful? When we have to spend all of our time sorting the wheat from the chaff, when will we find time to think and work rather than just processing data?” I thought that’s what semi-intelligent personal automated information agents people are working to create now would help to address. You could have multiple differently designed agents organizing information into more manageable pieces for you 24/7 while you do other things. Productivity would then multiply instead of decline. I guess you think technology is growing rapidly but the specific technology of information processing is/will not. Interesting. Perhaps but… Seems to me when the problem gets big enough the solution will pay handsomely. Willie


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/31/2002 5:35 AM by machine@spiritual.net	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
One man has the answers to Kurzweil: Paul Virilio. The key terms: Information Polution and Speed Polution Info at: http://www.georgetown.edu/grad/CCT/tbase/virilio.html http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+virilio


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/31/2002 6:01 AM by tomaz@techemail.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
I am sick tired of those European intellectuals. Wrong answers on stupid question, they produce. I know some of that kind personally. The heavy gray spirit of Sartre & Co. is alive and well with them. What I see, is that they don't have a clue. - Thomas


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 05/31/2002 6:29 AM by erik@axiomresources.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
The rate of technological advancement is highly related to such concepts as "PEACE" and communication. I agree to a large extent with the first writer in that there could easily be brakes applied externaly to technological innovation. Everyone pretends it can't happen, but lets just imagine engineered Smallpox was released, negatively affecting 1/3 of the earths population. Or a nuke takes out a few big cities & innovation slows way down. Or here is a crazy one, a nuclear war between India & Pakistan. What happens then? consumer electronics become much less important. Faster car? nope. Maybe better surveillance & defensive technologies. Hopefully, the governement and/or some forward thinking business people will have set up technologial innovation bubbles. Perhaps a self contained city built into the earth with power, manufacturing, mining & fabs all self contained. These cities need to be thought of now. Universities might be good places to start, or old missile silos, or mines, or???? Furthermore we need to invest in world stability sothat progress can happen. Progress, at least in non military areas, occurs when there is peace. If there is less peace & more anarchy, the governments will have innovation (Think Dark Angel) So Ray, in order to maximize the chances of Technological innovation, invest in distributed government, plastic bubbles, antibiotic clothes, and small town technological urban planning. Or let the governement use tech for bombs & Shields. The Rosy scenarion is that even with terrorists, people CAN innovate and technology & society can grow, but only with some good planning. It will not just happen. Let's start planning now!


	Re: Rosy Scenario? posted on 06/04/2002 3:23 PM by peter_ritter@email.com	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
hi Eric I'm glad you agree with my first article. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of people realize just what danger we are in. I became even more acutely aware of this on September 11. It took just a few planes and the New York stock exchange and Amex were out of action – and they weren’t even hit directly. As bad as September 11 was – it would pale in comparison to the damage a small nuclear weapon would cause. If a nuclear blast occurred either in London city or Manhattan, and the currency markets or various other financial exchanges were disable, I very seriously doubt any backup plans could take over from a disaster of that scale in time. Without the ability to hedge properly their books of derivatives valued literally in the trillions for each of the larger banks, the world’s financial system would grind to a halt almost immediately – and since money makes the world go round, the impact on the overall economy would be incalculable. I work in financial technology myself, and I used to think that I was safe, since the stock market would ‘always’ be around, and that I would hence always have a way to make a living – but now, besides worrying about what the market does, I worry about it ‘being around’ in future as well! As bad as all of this sounds, I really think there is more of a chance that a nuclear event will happened within the next 2 decades than there is for it not to happen – a prospect that makes me very very sad. I think rather than spending hundreds of billions on missile defence, the money would be spent far more wisely in doing what you suggested – we need to break up our social and institutional landscape into more self contained and redundant units (which they already are in many cases) and make sure that our society’s overall structure becomes as fault tolerant as the packet switched internet protocols – where the network itself, even if a portion of it is entirely destroyed, can survives! Peter


	Re: Technology in the 21st Century: an Imminent Intimate Merger posted on 08/30/2004 6:52 AM by drvinodbds	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
Woh!its really amazing to know these details of fantastic improvement regarding mankind but am interested to know if it is really possible in near future to achieve the same growth?will there really be humans to maintain the scale?. It's imperative for me to mention that in near future nearly all humans will have the capacity to synthesis and produce whatever they want on their own and its really a question about our planet economy as each and every one will play a dual role as producer and consumer!!!! And what we have to do is nothing but keep our fingers crossed and look for a new planet.