Ray Kurzwell knows how to predict the future. He is not a psychic, but he is Google’s director of engineering and he is designing the technology that will impact the future. Kurzwell has a long list of accomplishments, highlighted on Jimi Disu’s Blog in a recent post: “Google’s Ray Kurzweil Predicts How The World Will Change.”
Kurzwell invented the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, flatbed image scanner, and music synthesizer capable of recreating orchestra instruments. His current projects include the Google Brain and finding a cure for aging. His personal goal is immortality by way of technology. He also predicted the Internet revolution; a computer would beat a human at chess, and the fall of the Soviet Union. One has to give him credit for his accuracy and he has even come up with a timeline for what will happen in the next forty years.
What can we expect? Kurzwell believe we will have self-driving cars, personal assistant search engines, be able to switch off our fat cells, click and print designer clothes at home, full-immersion virtual reality, 100 percent solar energy, and vertical meat and vegetable farms. There are some other ideas listed with Kurzwell’s timeline that supplement his predictions.
His most astounding and lofty aspiration is to stay young forever and he describes the goal has three bridges:
“ ‘Bridge 1 is taking aggressive steps to stay healthy today, with today’s knowledge. The goal is to get to bridge 2: the biotechnology revolution, where we can reprogram biology away from disease. Bridge 3 is the nanotechnology revolution. The quintessential application of that is nanobots — little robots in the bloodstream that augment your immune system. We can create an immune system that recognizes all disease, and could be reprogrammed to deal with new pathogens.’ ”
When does science fiction become a reality and will Google be in charge of all these endeavors? Google is already in charge of thermostats and if events follow Kurzwell’s plan, the world is looking at the company holding our hands from life till death—unless death becomes obsolete.
Whitney Grace, January 29, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
See Also:
Deep Mind: Google Search in Flux
