Tonight I’ve been in Harvard for attending the talk: “Intelligence Will Underlie Everything of Value” by Ray Kurzweil.

Leading inventor Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller.

I am reporting here some quotes:

• “with nanotechnologies we can inject into the the blood artificial red cells that can carry more oxigen in the body. A person could run the olimpic final of 100 meters without breathing”
• “in the near fufure it will be possible to switch on/off genes responsible for diseases and not only”
• “it will be possible to take cells out of the human body, reprogam them and put them back in their place”

But it was more scary the idea that Moore’s law is valid not only for electronic evolution but for everything. Accordng to Kurzweil, medicine and genomics will grow exponentially because of technology improvements. For instance, because of the new CT scan we will have it will be possible to do the reverse engineering of the brain and to reproduce the brain functionalities with computers (i.e. intelligence). No matter what will happen, growing is exponential. Also people life expectancy is growing exponentially.

Thus, it seems we will have super-humans able to live a really long life and intelligent machines able to think as humans… doubts? According to Kurzweil he has been always right… isn’t it scary?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 7:07 am While Dave was in Culture, Science. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.