How far-fetched is it, really, to go from today's Google Glass to nanobots communicating between your brain and a Google cloud that is indistinguishable from a human?
Google's brain in the cloud, also known as a data center. (Credit: Google)
When Google Glass made its first public appearance on April 4, 2012, it signaled the beginning of a new era of computing. Consider the precedent: In the span of half a decade, the computer moved from the desktop to the pocket, and now with Glass it is moving to the head, on its way to eventually integrating itself inside the human body.
Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, calls Glass a "solid first step" along the road to computers that rival and then exceed human intelligence. Kurzweil, who is also an accomplished inventor and futurist, predicts that by 2029 computers will match human intelligence, and nanobots inhabiting our brains will create immersive virtual reality environments from within our nervous systems:
As a Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil is working on improving computer understanding of natural language. As Ray Kurzweil the author of 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,' he is working to reverse engineer the human brain.
(Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Further down the road people will be uploading their entire brains to computers, Kurzweil said. The human brain will gain additional thinking power, expanding the neocortex into the compute cloud in the 2030s, Kurzweil said, accessing trillions of new concepts and experiences at speeds much faster than the biological brain. The fusion of digital and biological parts will enable a qualitative leap for humans based on a quantitative expansion of thinking, according to Kurzweil.
It's not clear whether Google's co-founders fully buy into Kurzweil's view of technology evolution or his notion of
When Google Glass made its first public appearance on April 4, 2012, it signaled the beginning of a new era of computing. Consider the precedent: In the span of half a decade, the computer moved from the desktop to the pocket, and now with Glass it is moving to the head, on its way to eventually integrating itself inside the human body.
Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, calls Glass a "solid first step" along the road to computers that rival and then exceed human intelligence. Kurzweil, who is also an accomplished inventor and futurist, predicts that by 2029 computers will match human intelligence, and nanobots inhabiting our brains will create immersive virtual reality environments from within our nervous systems:
If you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. You will have a body in these virtual-reality environments that you can control just like your real body, but it does not need to be the same body that you have in real reality. We'll be able to interact with people in any way in these virtual-reality environments. That will replace most travel, but we'll also have new travel technologies for our real bodies using nanotechnology.
(Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Further down the road people will be uploading their entire brains to computers, Kurzweil said. The human brain will gain additional thinking power, expanding the neocortex into the compute cloud in the 2030s, Kurzweil said, accessing trillions of new concepts and experiences at speeds much faster than the biological brain. The fusion of digital and biological parts will enable a qualitative leap for humans based on a quantitative expansion of thinking, according to Kurzweil.
It's not clear whether Google's co-founders fully buy into Kurzweil's view of technology evolution or his notion of