I don’t know how I missed reading Raymond Kurzweil for so long.  He’s an amazing pioneer in a variety of innovations from music to Artificial intelligence, and his perspectives on the ongoing shift from human to machine thinking are quite brilliant. It’s too bad we miss so much of this, needing as we do our daily fix of Anna Nicole news.

Here are a couple really neat items from a recent interview with him:

KURZWEIL: We’ll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We’ll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we’re gathering about the brain every year.

… nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence—biological intelligence—is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that’s not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization‘s intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation.

Profound indeed. Look at how our modest intelligence capabilities, when applied cleverly, lead to really neat innovations, higher standards of living, better environment, etc, etc. With a *billion times* our abilities the thinking machines should be able to create a blueprint for an earthly utopia. There are plenty of resources on earth to give everybody a high standard of living- we just don’t distribute them optimally, primarily due to hopelessly ineffective economic systems and conflicts in the developing world and only modestly effective ones in the affluent sectors.

When the computers give us the blueprints for change will we choose to implement the suggestions? Will they look for ways to force us to use them? Will they value humanity as we do (which, I would argue, is not much given the state of affairs in the 3rd world and how little attention we pay to that suffering).

Kurzweil Reader

Kurtzweil Website