[tt] NYT: (Kurzweil) The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least

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The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by
Information Technology
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03tier.html

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10
years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you
eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may
look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential
progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that
it'll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and
that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on
another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year
faster than you're aging. And then, before the century is even half
over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary
transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal
beings with ever-improving software.

At least that's Dr. Kurzweil's calculation. It may sound too good to
be true, but even his critics acknowledge he's not your ordinary
sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough
credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his
sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating
Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of
his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a
device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of
a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that "early in the 21st century" blind
people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld
device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday
night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a
cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science
festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than
some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the
explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess
champion by 1998. (He was off by a year -- Deep Blue's chess victory
came in 1997.)

"Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable
trajectories," he said, and showed a graph of computing power
starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a
century ago. At first the machines' power doubled every three years;
then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that
inspired Moore's Law); now it takes only about a year.

Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential
growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones,
the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes
goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and
accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the
Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see
nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being
revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show
the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease
of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new
tools, he says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains
and building machines as smart as ourselves.

This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr.
Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking,
empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too
difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it
evolved so haphazardly.

"My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an
engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering,
but you can't do reverse hacking."

Dr. Kurzweil's predictions come under intense scrutiny in the
engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue
to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse
Dr. Kurzweil's belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be
created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.

He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges
how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and
artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don't buy his
optimistic predictions, he says, that's because exponential upward
curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

"Scientists imagine they'll keep working at the present pace," he
told me after his speech. "They make linear extrapolations from the
past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the
human genome, they worried they'd never finish, but they were right
on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and
keep doubling your growth every year, you'll hit 100 percent in just
seven years."

Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a
$10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By
2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by
carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human's.

I'm not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields
besides computer science, so I'd be leery of betting on a date. But
if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I'd put my money on Dr.
Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming
sooner than expected. And I'd hate to bet against the chance to be
around for this one.

Further Reading

"The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." Ray Kurzweil.
Viking Penguin, 2005.

"The Law of Accelerating Returns." Ray Kurzweil. KurzweilAI.net, 2001

"The Singularity: A Special Report." IEEE Spectrum, June 2008

"Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to
Witness the Singularity." Gary Wolf. Wired, April 2008

"The Singularity." Vernor Vinge, Vision-21 Symposium, 1993.

"Humanity Now/Humanity Next." World Science Festival, May 29, 2008.