By Mike Langberg
Source: Mercury News
Ray Kurzweil, one of the nation's most acclaimed inventors, has some unusual ideas about how we'll live in 25 years.
Billions of sub-microscopic robots will swim through our brains, augmenting our mental powers. We'll eat cloned meat grown in factories, without having to slaughter animals. Inexpensive personal computers will match human intelligence in their ability to analyze information and make decisions.
Then things get weird.
Looking ahead 40 years, Kurzweil believes humans will evolve into semi-mechanical beings who can alter their physical appearance at will. We'll live almost forever, barring accidents or violence, in a world without hunger or poverty. And humanity's expanded brain power will ultimately reach out to control the universe.
This may sound crazy, but Kurzweil makes a compelling case in a new book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which reached store shelves last week and is officially published Monday.
Kurzweil, 57, is best known for technology breakthroughs, including creation of the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind in the 1970s, the first music synthesizer capable of reproducing the full sound of orchestral instruments in the 1980s, and pioneering work on computer speech recognition in the 1990s. All this work has led Kurzweil to a long string of awards and honorary degrees.
He also has been making detailed predictions of the future for more than 20 years, long enough to show at least some of his ideas have proven correct. In the late 1980s, he said a computer would beat the world's best chess player in 1998. IBM's Deep Blue computer indeed defeated champion Gary Kasparov a year ahead of schedule in 1997.
Kurzweil was in the Bay Area last week making a string of appearances tied to his book launch, and I caught up with him in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco.
Soft-spoken but emphatic in person, Kurzweil says human scientific and engineering achievements are growing exponentially and will culminate around the year 2045 in what he calls a "singularity.''
"It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed,'' he writes.
One example of this acceleration is the telephone and the Internet. The first commercial telephone systems were introduced around 1880, but phones weren't widely installed in homes until the 1920s and 1930s, taking almost a half-century to become ubiquitous. Cell phones, in contrast, required only 10 years from their commercial introduction in 1985 to become almost universal.
The Web has moved even faster, straddling the globe in just five years from 1995 to 2000.
At the risk of oversimplifying the complex arguments in Kurzweil's 652-page tome, which includes 105 pages of footnotes, he argues that three converging fields -- genetics, nanotechnology and robotics/computing -- are entering an exponential phase that will create more changes in the next 40 years than in the past 4,000.
For those who don't want to plow through the book, extensive excerpts and commentary are available free on the book's Web site (www.singularity.com).
Kurzweil, who lives and works in the Boston suburbs, is also an unswerving optimist who believes the benefits of these technologies will outweigh the risks, although he's enough of a realist to concede there will be "painful episodes'' along the way.
For all his credentials, Kurzweil's ideas are far from mainstream in the technology community. He even devotes a full chapter of his book to point-by-point refutation of his critics.
Bill Joy, the former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems as well as an acclaimed software engineer, is the yin to Kurzweil's yang. Joy largely agrees with Kurzweil on where technology is heading. But he vehemently disagrees on whether we'll be wise enough to use the new tools to improve the human condition -- a case he made most notably in an article for Wired magazine in April 2000 titled, "Why the future doesn't need us.''
"Can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?'' Joy wrote.
Kurzweil already is putting his optimistic ideas to work in a very personal way, designing an intensive program for "reprogramming my biochemistry'' that includes taking 250 pills a day along with intravenous injections of nutritional supplements a half-dozen times a week. The goal is preserving his body until those sub-microscopic robots will be capable of restoring us to the first bloom of youth.
I'm not sure I buy all of Kurzweil's arguments, but I'm seriously considering eating a few less Krispy Kreme doughnuts and putting more mileage on the exercycle on the chance I can spend my retirement years in the body of a 20-year-old.
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