Brains of future will be man-machine hybrid
Human brains will be boosted with artificial intelligence at some point after the year 2030, one of the foremost thinkers on artificial intelligence (AI) has said. The brain will connect to online AI to become a ‘‘hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking’’, Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, suggests.
Tiny ‘‘nanobots’’ made from DNA strands would connect our brains to the internet, allowing us to augment our own intelligence with artificial intelligence, he says.
In the late 2030s or early 2040s, after the power of artificial intelligence has surpassed that of our own, our hybrid thinking will be ‘‘predominantly nonbiological,’’ he says. ‘‘We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. That’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations.’’
He suggests that we will be able to back up the information in our brains to be saved online.
Kurzweil, the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, has been described by Bill Gates, the former boss of Microsoft, as ‘‘the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence’’.
Kurzweil believes that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in 2029 at a point known as the ‘‘singularity’’. However, he believes that a superintelligent being will be subservient to the needs of humans because it will have been created by mankind.
In the past year a number of leading scientific figures including Stephen Hawking have warned of the perils of allowing AI research to continue without limiting what computers and robots will be able to do. Professor Hawking said in December that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, wrote in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies that the first artificially superintelligent being would probably wipe out humankind.
Kurzweil says that humans should be aware of the potential dangers of AI but that there is a moral imperative to keep developing it. ‘‘Technology is a double-edged sword,’’ he told the Exponential Finance conference in New York. ‘‘Fire kept us warm and cooked our food but also burnt down our houses. Every technology has had its promise and peril.’’ He says that AI is ‘‘not an alien invasion of these intelligent machines to displace us. We will use them to make ourselves smarter’’. He suggests that search engines will soon know us very well. ‘‘They’ll watch everything we’re reading, writing and saying and hearing. They’ll be like an assistant,’’ he says.
The search engine assistant will ‘‘answer your questions before you ask them, or even before you realise you have a question’’.
Kurzweil predicts that people will switch from desktop to portable computers and that computer displays will be built into spectacles, which happened with Google Glass.
However, he also says that selfdriving cars will be on the road by 2009.
‘‘If I had said 2015, I think it would’ve been correct,’’ he says, ‘‘so even the [predictions] that were wrong were directionally correct.’’