In
four decades computers will be smarter than we are. Their software will imitate our brains
so well that you won't know whether it's a person or machine you're dealing with on the
phone or the Internet.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a big disappointment to many early backers, but that's because they expected too much too soon, according to Raymond Kurzweil, AI guru and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, January 1999), his third book.
Kurzweil is interested in finding a way to "reverse engineer" the human brain so that we can download everything about ourselves—our memories, our dreams, our personalities—into a computer, a process he calls "reinstantiation." Immortality at last.
The line between machines and people will blur even further as we age and we'll be inserting machines into people to replace aging or inadequate body and mind functions. Just as artificial hips now restore human body functions, so too will neural implants enhance our hearing, vision and memory.
Kurzweil, 50, is not just a dreamer. Over the past 25 years he has built and sold four companies. His first, Kurzweil Computer Products, built a reading machine for the blind and was bought by Xerox. One of its first customers was musician Stevie Wonder, whose friendship with Kurzweil led to the development of computerized music synthesizers.
FORBES recently met with Kurzweil.
Forbes: Is your new book science or science fiction?
K: If anything, my views are conservative. The predictions are based on technologies you can touch and feel today.
Forbes: Your book gets pretty weird: People scan their brains into a computer and create self-replicas.
K: By 2040 it will be routine. If you build a computer based on the design of the human brain and instantiate information from a human being onto that computer, it will emerge in the machine and claim to be that person. The machine will say, "I grew up in Brooklyn, I went to MIT, then I walked into a scanner and woke up here in the machine."
Forbes: How are you going to reproduce a human brain?
K: We can just copy it, bit by bit, connection by connection, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. Human neurons are not so vastly complicated that we can't understand them or replicate them. We've already replicated the input-output characteristics of clusters of hundreds of neurons.
Forbes: Would you reinstantiate yourself?
K: Probably. But I may end up jealous of the new Ray in that he shares my history, my desires and my longings, but will be in a far better position than old Ray to fulfill them. These are going to be very smart entities—much smarter than humans. And that's really where power lies. Ultimately these entities will have political power. They will have all the political power.
Forbes: This is good news?
K: Some people who've read the book have come away feeling depressed. They get the idea that human beings are ending, that civilization is ending. Actually we will continue, but in a much more profound way. We are going to become smarter by merging with our machines.
Forbes: A lot of folks will say, stop the world, I want to get off.
K: It's unstoppable. This is not an alien invasion. It's emerging from within our civilization. We're already pretty intimate with our computers. As we move forward, the nexus between machines and humans will become even more intimate.