The future of artificial intelligence[W]hat excites him most is what he sees over the horizon now. What he calls 'the Singularity.' And what does he mean by that?
KURZWEIL: Well, it primarily refers to our merging with our technology and greatly expanding our human potential. Literally the word refers to a profound transformation. And here we're using it in a context of human history, in that there will be a great transformation of human society. I put it around twenty forty-five. .... And to be a little more specific, by the late twenty-twenties we'll have both the hardware and the software to create machines that are at human levels of intelligence. We've already modeled and simulated twenty different regions of the brain. And we can test those simulations and they perform equivalently to human performance of those brain regions. And the hardware will be quite capable of actually being much more powerful than the human brain.
CURWOOD: So you're saying in the next twenty-five years ... machines will be as smart as we are?
KURZWEIL: Right, now we already have, by the way, hundreds of examples of narrow AI, where machines are performing at human levels and generally beyond for specific tasks. And there are hundreds of examples. .... [E]very time you send an email or connect a cell phone call, intelligent algorithms read the information. Intelligent software flies and lands airplanes, guides intelligent weapons systems, automatically diagnoses electro-cardiogram signals, blood cell images, and I could go on. If all the intelligent software, and by intelligent software I mean software doing things that used to require human intelligence, were to stop tomorrow, our modern infrastructure would grind to a halt.
The future of human healthThe basic thesis is that there are three bridges, to dramatically extending our life- to radical life extension. And what I've been talking about now is bridge one. Using today's knowledge and our knowledge of ourselves to develop a personalized approach to addressing your own health challenges, whatever they may be, to bring us ... [to] ... the full-flowering of the biotechnology revolution where we'll have the means of re-programming our own biology.
CURWOOD: You say this with great confidence - It's not we're likely to - you say this as if it's done already.
KURZWEIL: Well, we actually have the means of re-programming the basic principles of our biology --we can turn genes off, that's a new thing. Now health and medicine is transforming from a pre-information era where we really didn't have information models of how biology worked. It was really hit or miss- oh here's something that lowers blood pressure, but we don't know why it works and there was no theory of operation and invariably these drugs have side-effects. ... [H]ealth and biology and medicine are becoming information technologies, they are subject to what I call the "Law of accelerating returns" which is this doubling of the power of these technologies every year. And you could see it in the genome project- the amount of genetic material we've sequenced has doubled every year. Very smoothly for the last 15 years. The price has come down by half every year. So, things that were not feasible before are becoming quite affordable. And 10-15 years from now it's going to be a very different world in our ability to program these information processes.
....
Bridge Three is nanotechnology. The quintessential application, I used to say "killer app" but people didn't like that in the context of health --is nanobots.