Word: kurzweil
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...People will beam their flow of sensory experience on the Web, so you can plug in and be someone else, a la Being John Malkovich. We will be able to expand human intelligence." --Ray Kurzweil...
When skeptical listeners scoff at Kurzweil's sci-fi predictions, saying, "Oh, we won't see that for 100 years," he points out that when it comes to "innovation time," 100 years melts down to about 25. That's because, as he says, "our rate of exponential growth is growing exponentially." Evolution accelerates: it took 100 million years for the human brain to develop, but computing power is expected to surpass it within a generation. "By 2040 or 2050 nonbiological intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence," he says...
...Kurzweil delivers bold predictions with confidence and the persuasive calm of someone whose work has revolutionized several fields. With a lifetime of inventions and entrepreneurship behind him--he sold his first company as an M.I.T. sophomore--Kurzweil has pursued a side career charting technological trends. His critics include such luminaries as Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems and author of the 1999 dystopian polemic "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Joy wrote that piece for Wired partly in response to some of Kurzweil's ideas and warned against such horrors as a plague of self-replicating nanobots...
...Kurzweil shares some of Joy's concerns but takes a more optimistic view of technology and man's ability to control it. Some critics challenge Kurzweil's claim that software advances can keep up with such trends as rising processor speed, or that the brain is not too complex to reverse-engineer. And pragmatists might see many predictions--not just Kurzweil's--as divorced from larger social issues. What good are eye computers when we aren't sure where much of the world's freshwater will come from? In his next book, The Singularity Is Near, coming in early...
...meantime, Kurzweil juggles several lucrative projects under the banner Kurzweil Technologies, descendants of his original work in pattern-recognition programs, which simulate human cognition: Medical Learning Co. provides doctors with broad health-care information and a "virtual patient" educational tool. At FatKat, Kurzweil runs both simulated trades and an actual experimental investment fund that uses pattern-recognition software to spot trends in financial markets; a hedge fund is in the works...