>
>Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by
>Information Technology - NYTimes.com
>June 3, 2008
>
>Findings
>
>The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least By JOHN TIERNEY
>
>Before we get to Ray Kurzweil's plan for upgrading the "suboptimal
>software" in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he
>brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
>
>Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years,
>Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever
>you want without gaining weight.
>
>Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may l
>ook terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential
>progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that
>it'll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that
>within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
>
>Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on
>another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year
>faster than you're aging. And then, before the century is even half
>over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary
>transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal
>beings with ever-improving software.
>
>At least that's Dr. Kurzweil's calculation. It may sound too good to be
>true, but even his critics acknowledge he's not your ordinary sci-fi
>fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility
>for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast
>for solar energy.
>
>He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating
>Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his
>own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that
>could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing
>machine.
>
>Two decades ago he predicted that "early in the 21st century" blind
>people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device.
>In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the
>festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when
>he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no
>trouble reading the text aloud.
>
>This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than
>some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive
>growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by
>1998. (He was off by a year - Deep Blue's chess victory came in 1997.)
>"Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable
>trajectories," he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting
>with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At
>first the machines' power doubled every three years; then in midcentury
>the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore's Law);
>now it takes only about a year.
>
>Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth
>in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money
>spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back
>millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through
>the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and
>computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
>
>Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being
>revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the
>beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of
>gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new
>tools, he says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains
>and building machines as smart as ourselves.
>
>This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur
>S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the
>festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic
>machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to
>reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so
>haphazardly.
>"My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an
>engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering,
>but you can't do reverse hacking."
>
>Dr. Kurzweil's predictions come under intense scrutiny in the
>engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to
>the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr.
>Kurzweil's belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created,
>but most think it will take more than a few decades.
>
>He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how
>complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial
>intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don't buy his optimistic
>predictions, he says, that's because exponential upward curves are so
>deceptively gradual at first.
>
>"Scientists imagine they'll keep working at the present pace," he told
>me after his speech. "They make linear extrapolations from the past.
>When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome,
>they worried they'd never finish, but they were right on schedule for
>an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your
>growth every year, you'll hit 100 percent in just seven years."
>
>Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000
>bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr.
>Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a
>conversation that is indistinguishable from a human's.
>
>I'm not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields
>besides computer science, so I'd be leery of betting on a date. But if
>I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I'd put my money on Dr.
>Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner
>than expected. And I'd hate to bet against the chance to be around for
>this one.
>
>
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