Futurist Ray Kurzweil: AI-Human Merger Only 12 yrs Away

from TRU News:

Google’s Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil believes a technological singularity will turn some people into super humans by 2029

(VERO BEACH, FLA) During an interview on March 13th at the 2017 SXSW tech conference self described futurist Ray Kurzweil said he believes a singularity, where carbon and silicon-based intelligence will merge to form a single global consciousness, will occur in the next 12 years.

Kurzweil said this singularity would create a cybernetic society including humans with computers in their brains and machines smarter than their creators.

‘By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,’ Kurzweil said. “That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are.”

“Today, that’s not just a future scenario,” Kurzweil continued. “It’s here, in part, and it’s going to accelerate.”

Kurzweil said that machines are already enhancing humans and by connecting chips to the neocortex in our brains this effect will exponentially increase.

“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music, we’re going to be sexier,” Kurzweil said. “We’re going to really exemplify all the attributes we value in humans to a greater degree.”

Kurzweil, who has long been active in the tech sector and is the author to eight books on the subject of trans-humanism including, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999); The Singularity is Near (2005); and Visions of the Future (2015), has previously made147 predictions with 86 percent of them coming true.

In the same realm of techno-philosophy, the US National Science Foundation predicted in the early 2000s that ‘network-enhanced telepathy’ — the process of sending thoughts over the internet – would be practical and implementable by the 2020s.

The term singularity was first used in the 1950s by a Manhattan-project mathematician named John von Neumann.

“Ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue,” Von Neumann wrote.

Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic “The Computer and the Brain.” Neumann was also part of the inspiration for the maniacal former Nazi scientist depicted in Stanley Kubricks 1964 dark-humored apocalyptic film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

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