Kurzweil is 61 and wants to live long enough to see singularity happen – presumably so he can upload himself and live forever.
He takes 200 supplement pills a day, intravenous treatments once a week, and exercises daily – walking, bike-riding and working out with machines. It's having an effect, he says: his fitness profile shows his biological age to be more than a decade younger than his real age.
By the time a child born today graduates from university, Kurzweil argues that poverty, disease and dependence on fossil fuels will be history. Everything will be subject to his Law of Accelerating Returns. "Everything is ultimately becoming information technology," he argues.
Hence, as we learn to reverse-engineer and decode our own DNA, medical technology will be converted to bits and bytes and accelerate over the horizon, triggering simultaneous revolutions in robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, chemistry and biotechnology.
Moore's Law – established by the co-founder of chipmaker Intel, Gordon E. Moore – states that the number of transistors able to fit on a single computer chip has doubled every two years since 1959, and he predicted the trend would continue – as it has.
Kurzweil regards it an excellent example of his Law of Accelerating Returns. He also refers to the Human Genome Project to illustrate exponential growth. "It was scheduled to be a 15-year project," he says. "After seven years, only 1% of it was done, and the critics said it would be impossible. But if you double from 1% every year over seven years, you get 100%. It was right on schedule."
He believes humanity is nearing that 1% moment in technological growth. By 2030, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by around 2045 or so, we will reach the singularity – a point beyond which events will unfold beyond our understanding.
"Non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence," he says. "It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.
"Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, extending longevity and creating full-immersion virtual reality…and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned."
Kurzweil may not be a literary master, but his speculations are fascinating. Occasionally he drifts into quasi-religious prophecy, and he makes up his own laws and then bases his predictions on them.
"We are the species that goes beyond our potential," he told Fortune magazine in 2007. "Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution."
But isn't there a physical barrier to packing ever more transistors onto a chip? Is Moore's Law headed for a brick wall in the 21st century?
Tipping Point?
Fascinating article. I hope new technologies will prove to be more gentle and refined than the technologies of the Industrial Age.
Here is a question that will annoy the priests of science but which some believers in reincarnation and the afterlife might ask. If a disembodied soul can enter and bind its consciousness to an organic body, would it be possible for a soul to bind its consciousness into an inorganic body?
It seems that even scientists are looking forward to a new Golden Age along with New Age gurus and other various believers.
Sad geek fairy tale
The idea that taking a calculator, which is all a computer is, and making it more and more "intelligent" by running its clock faster, is like the old apples and oranges thing, isn't it? A real breakthrough in artificial intelligence would have to entail an entirely new architecture, not just running the old architecture in a smaller faster package, wouldn't it? Maybe the architecture of the human brain just can't be improved on, and can only be aped, but can never be duplicated in silicon?
The geek dream of building a brain that's smarter than theirs is like the Garden of Eden story about the serpent telling Adam and Eve that if they eat of the fruit of the prohibited tree they will become as gods, only to get the boot by Jehovah so they could learn to eat dirt and die, along with their new god Da Snake. Forgetting the intelligent design vs. evolution debate, it's like, duh, if computers could reach a point where they could evolve past humans all by themselves, it must have already happened millions or billions of years ago, and his name is Jehovah, and he's getting really mad at ya! :)
computers improving on themselves
"Once a computer becomes aware, it will be able to improve on itself"
Why should it? Would it not be putting itself 'out of business'?