SKIRMISHER

There’s something about Ray Kurzweil that has always compelled me to stop and think. After all, Kurzweil’s the guy who once said that “whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier.” In a way, he expressed how the wall presented by Moore’s law can be breached.

Kurzweil is very enthusiastic about the idea of using technology to keep humans immortal. He also envisions a future world populated by groups of humans, cyborgs, androids, and artificial intelligences–and coming from somebody who’s been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the guy Bill Gates called “the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” something tells me Kurzweil might just be right.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post’s Beyond the Future series, Kurzweil talked about genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics–and how these three represent mankind’s greatest tech revolutions.

The same technology that will overcome cancer and other diseases can be used by a bio terrorist to create a bioengineered biological virus. The good news, though, is that we have the technologies to overcome this. For example, RNA interference can combat new biological viruses. But we need to put a rapid response system in place. Each technological response will only work to a certain degree of sophistication so the message for society is that we need to put a higher priority on creating the defenses.

On the question of the actual physical merging of human biology and integrated circuitry, Kurzweil’s says:

“… one that I find compelling is that we will send intelligent nanobots (robots the size of blood cells with nano features) into the human body and brain through the capillaries. One application is to keep us healthy from inside. If this sounds very futuristic I would point out we’re doing this already in animal experiments. One scientist cured type I diabetes in rats with blood cell sized devices with 7 nanometer pores that let insulin out in a controlled fashion and block antibodies. These technologies will be a billion times more capable in 25 years than they are now based on the doubling of power of information technology in less than a year. Ultimately these nanobots will go into our brains through the capillaries and interact with our biological neurons. The ability to do this at a small scale has already been demonstrated. One application: virtual reality involving all of the senses in full immersion highly realistic VR environments from within the nervous system.

WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY [WP transcript]

Stumble it!