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Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil sees a radical evolution of the human species in the next 40 years.
We stand on the threshold of the most profound and transformative event in the history of humanity, the "Singularity."
What is the Singularity? From my perspective, the Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power-the knowledge, skills, and personality quirks that make us human-with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.
This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality. These technological revolutions will allow us to transcend our frail bodies with all their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated. Through the use of nanotechnology, we will be able to manufacture almost any physical product upon demand, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and pollution will vanish. Human existence will undergo a quantum leap in evolution. We will be able to live as long as we choose. The coming into being of such a world is, in essence, the Singularity.
How is it possible that we could be so close to this enormous change and not see it? The answer is the quickening nature of technological innovation. In thinking about the future, few people take into consideration the fact that human scientific progress is exponential: It expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant (10 times 10 times 10, and so on) rather than linear (10 plus 10 plus 10, and so on). I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it's the most important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends.
Our forebears expected what lay ahead of them to resemble what they had already experienced, with few exceptions. Because they lived during a time when the rate of technological innovation was so slow as to be unnoticeable, their expectations of an unchanged future were continually fulfilled. Today, we have...