By: Felix Xie
Imagine a world where people lived forever. The catch? Robots living in your veins.
A neon green line represents the fate of humanity for the next few years. The line conveys how much computing power there is in a computer. When the processing power of a computer reaches a certain point, like when a computer has more processing power than all the human brains in the world, many theorize we will reach a point called “the singularity.”
Reaching the singularity may mean that we will become immortal, have immense computational power, and eliminate all social and physical ills. However, we will have to fuse our blood with diamondoid robots.
Why don’t we hear about the robots more? Their arrival is only a few years away — at least according to Ray Kurzweil, a godfather of A.I., our latest technological prophet, and a “principal researcher and A.I. visionary” at Google.
Enter the blood robots. Have no doubt: “The long-term goal is nanorobots.” One day in the next decade, Kurzweil believes, you and I will feed nanobots through our blood stream. The little busybodies will swim to our brains, where they will connect our neocortex to the cloud, allowing us to expand our intellect “millions-fold.” This fusion between man and machine is “the Singularity.”
Through the use of nanobots, we will have direct access to virtual environments, enabling us to imagine ourselves climbing Mount Everest, going to an opera, or enjoying “a sensory-rich virtual beach vacation for the whole family.” From the comfort of your own bed, or cryo-capsule, you can appreciate an abundance of “natural beauty” without the need for wet bathing suits and sunscreen.
By 2040, nanobots will cure most diseases and reverse the aging process. (Kurzweil believes that the first person to live 1,000 years has already been born.) By the early 2040s, you will be able to upload your entire brain to the cloud — or into the skull of a “Blade Runner”-style replicant. You might choose to create a sleeve of yourself, or recreate a dead person.
People are weak. Our bodies, like last year’s technology, are “outdated” and prone to failure. Our brains are intellectual prisons. As Kurzweil puts it, sub-optimal: “We are far from optimal, especially with regard to thinking.”
But the opportunity to talk music with his father, rather than superintelligence or blood that has been optimized, is what Kurzweil wants out of his artificial intelligence dream.