Kurzweil: "Technology is a double-edged sword"

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was ranked 14th in this year's silicon.com Agenda Setters list. He has invented and commercialised a raft of innovative technologies - including a text-to-speech synthesiser, voice recognition software and a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, garnering a clutch of awards in the process. He has also written extensively on artificial intelligence and robotics.

In several of his published books - including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near - he describes a vision of the future where machine and human intelligence are increasingly combined, augmenting each other and ultimately, in Kurzweil's view, enabling humans to become both smarter and better. "These technologies can enhance not just our intelligence but our ethical and moral sense, our emotional intelligence, and make us more exemplary of what we consider to be human," he says.

Key to understanding Kurzweil's philosophy is what he dubs 'the law of accelerating returns' - or a belief that technological change has an exponential not linear progression and thus information technologies which today seem to be inching forward at a snail's pace will actually reach a tipping point much faster than expected and accelerate ever more rapidly thereafter, enabling disruptive change in the relatively near term.

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"The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller [than the one computer at MIT in 1965] and so that's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we've actually seen in the last 40 years," says Kurzweil.

"The rate is actually speeding up a little bit so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years. And another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking. So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years."

silicon.com reporter Natasha Lomas recently caught up with Kurzweil to discuss his vision of a man-plus-machine future, what intelligent computers will mean for human society and jobs, and what dangers we might encounter in a world awash with advanced technology.

silicon.com: What is the most exciting technology that you've seen in recent years?
Kurzweil: One industry that is just in the last few years transformed from a pre-information era to becoming an information technology is health and medicine… We have software that's running in our bodies that's thousands of years old or more and it evolved when conditions were very different. For example the fat insulin receptor gene says hold onto every single calorie in your fat cells and that was a good idea 1,000 years ago - it's not a good idea today, it underlies an epidemic of obesity certainly in my country. And what would happen if we turned that gene off?

There are other genes that are necessary for heart disease or cancer to progress that we'd like to turn off and we've come up with a new technology… RNA interference, that can turn off selected genes… We also have new methods of adding new genes so… we can update this outdated software that runs in our bodies. We can also turn on and off enzymes and proteins and really reprogram the information processes of underlying biology - and we can design these interventions on computers rather than just try to find some substance that happens to work and we can then test them out in biological simulators.

Now all of these developments… are in an early stage but they're information technologies so they will advance exponentially not linearly - these technologies will be a thousand times more capable in 10 years, a million times more powerful in 20 years and according to my models we'll be adding more than a year every year not just to infant life expectancy but to your remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in rather than running out.

When will the Turing Test be passed? And what will it mean for human society?
I've been quite consistent that it'll happen by 2029… I think [the rules that a computer passes if it fools the judges 30 per cent of the time are] actually too lenient - in the recent test it fooled the judges 25 per cent of the time. Every time they run that test the computers do a little bit better. The first reports [of a computer passing] I probably won't accept it myself… but then as time goes on the computers will pass more and more stringent sets of rules and by 2029 it'll be unarguable that computers have passed. And I do think it's a good test. It's not by the way a test of human consciousness - it's a test of human intelligence. Which is something we can objectively measure even though we can argue about how to measure it.

Consciousness is not something we can readily measure in another entity. However in order for a computer or any entity to pass the Turing Test it has to master human emotion - and human emotion is not some sideshow. What humans do well is both pattern recognition and our emotional thinking - which is a form of recognising patterns that we find in situations. Getting the joke, being funny, expressing a loving sentiment - these are actually the most complicated things we do, the cutting edge of human intelligence.

In terms of the impact on society it will be an important threshold but it won't transform things right away… because having a few more equivalents of human intelligence isn't necessarily going to change things... But because non-biological intelligence will be subject to the law of accelerating returns it will continue to progress both in hardware and software because these intelligent entities can access our source code, they can upgrade themselves… Ultimately non-biological intelligence will be much more powerful than biological human intelligence but it's not an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars - it's coming from our own civilisation. And we will use it as we do today to expand our own reach - we will make ourselves smarter. That is what is unique about human beings… We were the first species to create tools to extend our reach and then we use our tools to create more powerful tools and no other species does that.

Click here to read page 2 of the interview - including Kurzweil's view on whether machines will ever have a soul and some of the dangers of advanced technologies...