Last week, when Bill Gates met the students at Berkeley, he said, “I think a lot of the breakthroughs will be made by people who were trained in biology and computer science.”
And about four months ago Microsoft has been granted a patent on power networking using the human body itself. So what will our new world’s technology trends shifting to…
A slashdotter highlighted an interview with Ray Kurzweil, author and inventor.
Ray Kurzweil predicted what will the world and technology become in next 10 years. He pointed out the importance of biotechnology. And how nanobots, computers will be implanted in our body.
The interesting parts he said are:
Q: Speaking of new models, what will be different about the IT department 10 years from now?
A: Let's look at a few trends. A lot of the equipment that IT departments concern themselves with now—routers and servers—will all be gone. There won't be computers on desks. We'll eliminate most of that clutter, certainly by the end of this decade. Technology will be very mobile; it'll be so small that it'll be virtually invisible. Everybody will be online. Images will be written right to our retinas. We'll have very high-speed bandwidth connections at all times. The computing substrate will be everywhere.
Q: What about people? What will we be like? What will we be doing?
A:…
…
Well, soon computers will be inside us. Within one to two decades, we will be able to place nonbiological intelligence inside us, noninvasively.
By the 2020s we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots—blood cell-size devices—inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons. We will be extending our cognitive capability directly through this intimate merger of biology with machines.
Right now, there's a restricted architecture to the way our brains work. The brain uses electrochemical signaling for information processing, and that's a million times slower than electronic circuits. You can make only about 100 trillion connections in there. That may seem like a big number, but the way in which we store information is inefficient, so that a master of an area of knowledge can really remember only about 100,000 chunks of knowledge. If you use Google, you can already see the power of what machines can do. In the future, we will be able to expand the 100 trillion connections we have with new, virtual ones. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains, it will grow exponentially. As we get to the 2030s, human beings will have biological brains enhanced with more powerful nonbiological thought processes.
So the answer to your question is, if we remain unenhanced, if you just had machines developing on a distinct track, they would surpass humans. But that's not what's happening. We are merging.
After that the topic moves to the medicine, bioengineering, anti aging reverse aging…
Q:You look like you're in good shape.
A:Well, I take this very seriously. I'm very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I'm 56.
What do you do to slow the aging process?
I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I'm really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it's good to be natural. I don't think it's good because biological evolution is not on our side.
…
…
Well, ultimately, there's going to be very little difference between a guy who's 120 and a guy who's 30.
The interview is way too interesting. Read more
here.
