Earth Walker
May 12th, 2001, 12:22 AM
by Ray Kurzweil
Predictions and prophecies take many forms. For example,
there can be no doubt that the exponential growth of
technology will have an outstanding impact on the future
of the human species. Many long-range forecasts dramatically
underestimate the power of future technology because they are
based on an "intuitive linear" view of technological progress rather than the "historical exponential" view.
In 1965, a computer analyst named Gordon Moore developed
Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of
computer chips doubles approximately every 18 to 24 months.
Because this doubling occurs on an ever-expanding base, it is
not the case that we will experience 100 years of progress in
the twentieth century; rather, we will witness something on the
order of 20,000 years of progress, at today,s relatively slow
rate of exponential expansion.
But any serious consideration of the history of technology shows
that change is exponential, not linear. There are a great many
examples of this, only one of which is the growth of computing
power. In examining a wide range of technologies over many
different time scales, you will see at least an exponential
doubling of growth. This observation does not rely only on the
assumed continuation of Moore's Law, but is based on a rich
model of diverse technological processes, some of which have
been going on for decades. What this clearly demonstrates is
that technology advances at least exponentially, and has been
doing so since the earliest stirrings of civilization.
Most technology forecasts ignore this historic exponential view
of progress and assume instead on the intuitive linear view.
This is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved
in the short term, but underestimate what can be achieved in
the long term. Thus, technological progress in the twenty-first
century will be equivalent to what would be required on the
order of 20,000 years at the current rate of progress.
In terms of the growth of computing, the comparison is even
more dramatic.
There are comparable exponential trends underlying a tremendous variety of other technologies. Communications
speeds, both wired and wireless, are doubling every twelve months. Miniaturization is another pervasive trend: We are
currently shrinking technology, both electronic and mechanical,
at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. The mathematical models I've developed over the past two decades
to describe these trends resulting from the law of accelerating
returns have proven predictive of the developments we've seen
during the 1990's.
From these models, I believe that we can be confident of continued exponential growth in these and other technologies for
the forseeable future.
It is important to note that these trends interact with one another
in profound ways. We are currently seeing exponential trends in
computation, communications, and miniaturization manifest
themselves in the explosion of handheld devices that access
the Web. Because these devices are not large enough to provide
a full keyboard, we will see a strong trend toward communicating
with our machines through voice and language technologies.
Talking is our preferred method of communication with other
people, and the broad trend in computing since its inception has
been for machines to become more like people, rather than for
people to become more like machines. Over the next several years, a legion of virtual assistants will emerge with sufficient
intelligence to converse in natural language within limited task
domains, such as conducting e-commerce transactions, making
reservations, and finding information. When a display is
available, even a small one, these virtual personalities will have
a human-like presence; without a display, they will work entirely
using two-way voice dialogues.
By 2009, computers will disappear. Visual information will be
written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and
contact lenses. In addition to high resolution virtual monitors
appearing to hover in space, these intimate displays will provide
full-immersion visual virtual reality. We will have a very high
bandwidth, with wireless connection to the Internet at all times.
The meaning of the current phrase, "Visiting a Web site" will come
to mean entering a visual and auditory virtual reality environment
where we will meet and engage other real people. There will also
be simulated people there, but these virtual personalities will not
be up to human standards, at least not by 2009. The tiny electronics powering these developments will be invisibly imbedded in our glasses and clothing. Thus we won't be searching
for our misplaced mobile phones, notebooks, etc. In addition, we
won't have to deal with the mess of wires that now entangle
our lives. We'll be plugged in all the time and able to have any
type of interaction with anyone regardless of physical proximity.
Any sort of interaction, that is, except for touching. Tactile
virtual reality devices are already emerging, but will remain cumbersome until virtual reality enters our bodies and brains.
By 2029, as a result of the continuation of exponential trends in
miniaturization, computation, communication, and neural scanning,
we will have billions of nanobots--intelligent robots the size of blood cells or smaller--traveling through the capillaries of our
brains, communicating directly with our biological neurons.
When we want to experience nonvirtual reality, the nanobots
will simply lie dormant within the capillaries. If we want to enter
virtual reality, they will supress all input coming from the real
senses, and replace them with the signals that would be
appropriate for the selected virtual environment. Your brain
could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you
normally would, but the nanobots would again intercept these
interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and
instead cause your virtual limbs to move, all the while providing
the appropriate movement anr reorientation within the virtual
reality environment. Of course, your virtual body will not need to
have the same appearance and other characteristics that it has
in the real world; we could have different bodies for different
partners and situations. The Web will provide a panoply of virtual
environments to explore. Some will be recreations of real places,
others will be fanciful environments that have no real counter-
parts. Some will be impossible in the physical world, due perhaps
to violations of physical laws. We will be able to go to these
virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet others there,
both real people and human simulations. Ultimately there won't
be a distinction between the two.
Just as Webcams showing people's intimate lives are popular
today, during the fourth decade of this coming century people
will "Web beam" their lives, and you will be able to share the full
sensory experience and even emotional response of others
through the Web, similiar to the plot concept of the movie,
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, except that these experiences will
include emotional levels beyond the five senses.
Particularly interesting experiences will be archived and can be
relived at any time.
Using nanobots as brain extenders is a significant improvement
over the idea of surgically installed neural implants, which are
beginning to be used today (for people with disabilities and
medical conditions such as deafness and Parkinson's disease).
Nanobots will be introduced without surgery; they will be
injected or swallowed.
People will have the power to direct them to leave, so the process will be easily reversible. These "bots" would be programmable, in that they could provide virtual reality one
minute,and a variety of brain extensions the next. They could
change their configuration, and alter their software. Perhaps
most importantly, unlike surgically introduced neural implants
that can only be placed on one or at the most a few locations,
these nanobot-based implants will be massively distributed and
therefore can take up billions or trillions of positions throughout
the body.
Oh, and one more thing: We;ll live a long time. The expanding human life span is another one of those exponential trends.
In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to
human longevity; in the nineteenth we added a couple of weeks
each year. With the revolutions in genomics and therapeutic
cloning of organs and tissues, combined with related developments in bio-information sciences, we will add more than
a year every year within 10 years. So take care of yourself the
old-fashioned way for just a little while longer, and you may get
toexperience all of the wonders of the remarkable century
ahead.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of such inventions as
the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the
first CCD flatbed scanner. He also developed the first music
synthesizer capable of recreating the sounds of the grand piano
and other orchestral instruments, as well as the first large
vocabulary speech-recognition device.
IMHO, this scares the S*** out of me. :eek:
Why fear ye the Dark Queen, oh men?
She is your renewer.
--Dion Fortune
Predictions and prophecies take many forms. For example,
there can be no doubt that the exponential growth of
technology will have an outstanding impact on the future
of the human species. Many long-range forecasts dramatically
underestimate the power of future technology because they are
based on an "intuitive linear" view of technological progress rather than the "historical exponential" view.
In 1965, a computer analyst named Gordon Moore developed
Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of
computer chips doubles approximately every 18 to 24 months.
Because this doubling occurs on an ever-expanding base, it is
not the case that we will experience 100 years of progress in
the twentieth century; rather, we will witness something on the
order of 20,000 years of progress, at today,s relatively slow
rate of exponential expansion.
But any serious consideration of the history of technology shows
that change is exponential, not linear. There are a great many
examples of this, only one of which is the growth of computing
power. In examining a wide range of technologies over many
different time scales, you will see at least an exponential
doubling of growth. This observation does not rely only on the
assumed continuation of Moore's Law, but is based on a rich
model of diverse technological processes, some of which have
been going on for decades. What this clearly demonstrates is
that technology advances at least exponentially, and has been
doing so since the earliest stirrings of civilization.
Most technology forecasts ignore this historic exponential view
of progress and assume instead on the intuitive linear view.
This is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved
in the short term, but underestimate what can be achieved in
the long term. Thus, technological progress in the twenty-first
century will be equivalent to what would be required on the
order of 20,000 years at the current rate of progress.
In terms of the growth of computing, the comparison is even
more dramatic.
There are comparable exponential trends underlying a tremendous variety of other technologies. Communications
speeds, both wired and wireless, are doubling every twelve months. Miniaturization is another pervasive trend: We are
currently shrinking technology, both electronic and mechanical,
at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. The mathematical models I've developed over the past two decades
to describe these trends resulting from the law of accelerating
returns have proven predictive of the developments we've seen
during the 1990's.
From these models, I believe that we can be confident of continued exponential growth in these and other technologies for
the forseeable future.
It is important to note that these trends interact with one another
in profound ways. We are currently seeing exponential trends in
computation, communications, and miniaturization manifest
themselves in the explosion of handheld devices that access
the Web. Because these devices are not large enough to provide
a full keyboard, we will see a strong trend toward communicating
with our machines through voice and language technologies.
Talking is our preferred method of communication with other
people, and the broad trend in computing since its inception has
been for machines to become more like people, rather than for
people to become more like machines. Over the next several years, a legion of virtual assistants will emerge with sufficient
intelligence to converse in natural language within limited task
domains, such as conducting e-commerce transactions, making
reservations, and finding information. When a display is
available, even a small one, these virtual personalities will have
a human-like presence; without a display, they will work entirely
using two-way voice dialogues.
By 2009, computers will disappear. Visual information will be
written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and
contact lenses. In addition to high resolution virtual monitors
appearing to hover in space, these intimate displays will provide
full-immersion visual virtual reality. We will have a very high
bandwidth, with wireless connection to the Internet at all times.
The meaning of the current phrase, "Visiting a Web site" will come
to mean entering a visual and auditory virtual reality environment
where we will meet and engage other real people. There will also
be simulated people there, but these virtual personalities will not
be up to human standards, at least not by 2009. The tiny electronics powering these developments will be invisibly imbedded in our glasses and clothing. Thus we won't be searching
for our misplaced mobile phones, notebooks, etc. In addition, we
won't have to deal with the mess of wires that now entangle
our lives. We'll be plugged in all the time and able to have any
type of interaction with anyone regardless of physical proximity.
Any sort of interaction, that is, except for touching. Tactile
virtual reality devices are already emerging, but will remain cumbersome until virtual reality enters our bodies and brains.
By 2029, as a result of the continuation of exponential trends in
miniaturization, computation, communication, and neural scanning,
we will have billions of nanobots--intelligent robots the size of blood cells or smaller--traveling through the capillaries of our
brains, communicating directly with our biological neurons.
When we want to experience nonvirtual reality, the nanobots
will simply lie dormant within the capillaries. If we want to enter
virtual reality, they will supress all input coming from the real
senses, and replace them with the signals that would be
appropriate for the selected virtual environment. Your brain
could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you
normally would, but the nanobots would again intercept these
interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and
instead cause your virtual limbs to move, all the while providing
the appropriate movement anr reorientation within the virtual
reality environment. Of course, your virtual body will not need to
have the same appearance and other characteristics that it has
in the real world; we could have different bodies for different
partners and situations. The Web will provide a panoply of virtual
environments to explore. Some will be recreations of real places,
others will be fanciful environments that have no real counter-
parts. Some will be impossible in the physical world, due perhaps
to violations of physical laws. We will be able to go to these
virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet others there,
both real people and human simulations. Ultimately there won't
be a distinction between the two.
Just as Webcams showing people's intimate lives are popular
today, during the fourth decade of this coming century people
will "Web beam" their lives, and you will be able to share the full
sensory experience and even emotional response of others
through the Web, similiar to the plot concept of the movie,
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, except that these experiences will
include emotional levels beyond the five senses.
Particularly interesting experiences will be archived and can be
relived at any time.
Using nanobots as brain extenders is a significant improvement
over the idea of surgically installed neural implants, which are
beginning to be used today (for people with disabilities and
medical conditions such as deafness and Parkinson's disease).
Nanobots will be introduced without surgery; they will be
injected or swallowed.
People will have the power to direct them to leave, so the process will be easily reversible. These "bots" would be programmable, in that they could provide virtual reality one
minute,and a variety of brain extensions the next. They could
change their configuration, and alter their software. Perhaps
most importantly, unlike surgically introduced neural implants
that can only be placed on one or at the most a few locations,
these nanobot-based implants will be massively distributed and
therefore can take up billions or trillions of positions throughout
the body.
Oh, and one more thing: We;ll live a long time. The expanding human life span is another one of those exponential trends.
In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to
human longevity; in the nineteenth we added a couple of weeks
each year. With the revolutions in genomics and therapeutic
cloning of organs and tissues, combined with related developments in bio-information sciences, we will add more than
a year every year within 10 years. So take care of yourself the
old-fashioned way for just a little while longer, and you may get
toexperience all of the wonders of the remarkable century
ahead.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of such inventions as
the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the
first CCD flatbed scanner. He also developed the first music
synthesizer capable of recreating the sounds of the grand piano
and other orchestral instruments, as well as the first large
vocabulary speech-recognition device.
IMHO, this scares the S*** out of me. :eek:
Why fear ye the Dark Queen, oh men?
She is your renewer.
--Dion Fortune