The world’s greatest and most popular inventor and futurist, Raymond Kurzweil, has been a pioneer of so many fields it is not worth mentioning. He has foreseen a future for us that makes me wake up with a cold sweat; nightmares of robotic overlords still roaming through my mind.
And according to the notable thinker, a member of the 18 influential world thinkers chosen to identify the greatest challenges mankind will face in the 21st century, by 2029 we will see robots achieve human level artificial intelligence.
Kurzweil said amongst the thinkers that soon humans and machines will merge, installing small nanites in to our brains to increase our intelligence and health. "It's really part of our civilization," Mr Kurzweil explained. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."
"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said. "We're already a human machine civilization; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."
Tomorrow I’ll be looking further at just what those 18 notable minds came up with – with topics ranging from climate change to our quality of life. But for now, some can rest safe in the knowledge that "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons;” I’ll just continue to quietly panic.
The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system.” Personally, just give me a good book!
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
