In Search of the Sixth Sense

FC: When will people choose to stop aging?

Kurzweil: The killer app for nanotechnology is nanobots. Some will be in the environment, cleaning up, providing energy. Some will be involved in automated manufacturing. Some will be in our bodies, keeping us healthy from the inside. Destroying pathogens, getting rid of toxins, killing cancer cells. It will be routine.

FC: Nanofood?

Kurzweil: Making sure our bloodstream has all the nutrients it needs regardless of what we eat. We’ll ultimately disconnect the sensual and social pleasures of eating from the biochemical task of keeping an optimum set of nutrients in our bloodstream.

We’ve already separated the biological purpose of sex from the social and sensual aspects of it.

We’ll discover the opportunity to express ourselves in different ways. We’ll have the opportunity to be different people. It’s one of the features of virtual reality. I demonstrated this with contemporary technology at TED 2001. I went on stage. I was wearing sensors under my clothing. Computers picked up on my movement, and on a big 12-foot screen in real time it created a pretty life-like animation of a young woman, Ramona. And my voice was transformed to a woman’s voice. It looked like Ramona was giving the demonstration. I sang "White Rabbit". Then my 14-year-old daughter got up, and her body was transformed to Richard Saul Wurman. Warner Bros. heard about this and Al Pacino winds up doing exactly what I did in Samone.

We have technologies today that do that to a limited extent. Makeup. Fashion.

I actually found it to be a profound experience. Once we put on the sensors and got all the equipment going, I was doing this and looking at myself in the cyber mirror. Instead of seeing what I usually see in the mirror I saw myself as someone else. It was a liberating experience.

And we do have these other personalities in ourselves that we’d like to express.

Couples could turn themselves into the other and get some sense of what it’s like to be someone else. A lot of the misunderstanding in the world is that we don’t see ourselves in other people’s shoes. Personal relationships. Education. A student could actually be Ben Franklin in a virtual constitutional conference instead of just dressing up. A lot of psychological exploration. Certainly entertainment and games. I think we’ll realize that we like expressing ourselves in different ways. We do that to a limited extent. We dress up differently. We put on a tuxedo for one event or blue jeans for another event. We’re changing our appearance a little bit. But we’ll be able to go beyond clothing and fashion and hairstyle and makeup.

FC: Will people begin to develop distributed intelligence?

Kurzweil: One of the ways in which our biological intelligence is limited is that we have only limited ways of hooking up our intelligence to others. We have some ways. We have the Internet, language, books, magazines. We have been able to pool human intelligence across individuals. Now that we have computers and the Internet to gather our knowledge and allow us to search through our knowledge, our ability to do intellectual achievements has grown. But we still can’t hook up the resources of one brain to another. Computers can do that. You can take a network of 10,000 computers and they can create one supercomputer and very quickly share knowledge and data and have all the different processes working on the same problem. Then they can be made separate again.

That’s one of the profound benefits of non-biological intelligence, that it can pool its intelligence. I call that falling in love. Human beings, we can kind of merge our thinking with another person. We call that falling in love. But our ability to do that is subtle and fleeting and not something we can control very easily, whereas machines can do that very easily. My view is we will develop a non-biological component of our thinking as we begin to introduce non-biological processes into our brains. We’re in the very early stages of that today. There are people walking around in New York who are cyborgs. They have computers in their brains. For example, the FDA-approved implant for Parkinson’s disease. These are people whose portion of the brain was destroyed by this disease. They have this implant. The implant actually does what those biological neurons used to do. The neurons that are nearby are getting signals from the electronic device just as they used to get signals from the biological neurons that were working. And they’re perfectly happy to get the signals from the electronic device. This hybrid of biological and non-biological components works perfectly well. And in fact the latest generation of this particular implant allows downloadable software from outside the patient. So you can actually download a software upgrade from your neural implant from outside. This is a very early stage -- and it requires surgery -- but ultimately we’ll be sending nanobots, which will have computational resources and communication. We’ll send billions of them through the capillaries of the brain. They’ll be able to communicate wirelessly, non-invasively with our biological neurons. If you go out to 2030, say, and talk to a person of biological origin, they’re going to have a lot of non-biological processes running in their brain. As you interact with them, you’ll be interacting with someone who’s a hybrid of non-biological and biological intelligence. We know that biological intelligence is pretty fixed in its architecture. Today, we have approximately 10^26 calculations per second in the humans species. 50 years from now, the power of our biological thinking will still be 10^26 power. It’s not going to grow. Non-biological intelligence basically doubles every year. The crossover point will be in 2020s. You get to the 2030s and 2040s, the non-biological portion of our thinking is going to be millions of times more powerful than the biological portion. So if you talk to a person of biological origin, the fast majority of their interacting is going to be non-biological.

FC: You say "a person of biological origin" almost as if to imply that there might be people of non-biological origin?

Kurzweil: If the biological portion is becoming fairly insignificant, some people won’t necessarily have one. And we’ll have AI operating at human levels. My position is that by 2029 computers will pass the Turing test, which is to say they’ll be indistinguishable from biological intelligence. But its not going to be a clear distinction, because there’s going to be biological people with non-biological processes running in their brain, there’s going to be non-biological computers that act human because they’re based on the reverse engineering of the human brain. Even that in my view is derivative of human intelligence. It’s the expression of the human civilization. These are not intelligent machines coming from outer space, invading the planet. It’s emerging from within our human civilization. Civilization is already a biological / non-biological hybrid. We do fantastic things that would be impossible without our technology. It’s the technological portion that’s exploding exponentially. We’ll have human-like intelligences that don’t have a biological substrate.

FC: How would distributed technology be manifested? Teams upload and download information with each other?

Kurzweil: We have very efficient ways of sharing information between our personal computers now. Our personal computers are outside our bodies and brains, but just barely. I talked to a woman recently who said her son’s personal computer may as well be inside his brain because it’s an extension of him, and he carries it everywhere he goes. When she comes in the room, she’s just another window because he’s got six windows open on his screen and she’s standing there in the doorway, which is another window. And he’s timesharing between her and the other windows. By early in the next decade we won’t be carrying around these physical objects. Images will be written directly onto our retinas from our eyeglasses or contact lenses and the electronics will be woven into our clothing. We’ll have very high-speed wireless connection at all times. And then it will make its way inside our bodies and brains. It will be a very gradual, incremental process. The way we share information now very fluidly between our personal computers will obviously also happen when these computer processes are running inside our brains. It will be very fluid.

FC: So when will we start seeing something like this?

Kurzweil: But it's affected already. I have people around the country, and it's only a subtle difference between working in our office and people who aren’t. It used to be a big challenge. It wasn’t that long ago. A little over a decade there was no Web. You know what year the first reference to the phrase "World Wide Web" appeared in the New York Times? 1993. Even early adopters didn’t get involved in email until 1994, 1995. I’ve been in business for a few decades. In the early 1990s it was very hard to have someone working with you who wasn’t in your office. Now that’s very routine and we have very powerful ways to share all kinds of knowledge. And when we have really ubiquitous high-quality audio-visual virtual reality, which I think is coming soon, that will be another major step in the ability to work together no matter where you are. And once we have these processes running inside our bodies and brains, which is a couple decades, that will be another major step in the ability to work together and the intimacy of that.

FC: We have five senses for uploading information to the brain. What you’re talking about would introduce a sixth, where knowledge set aside in a storage device can interface with our brain. We’ll have to make the two processes at the same biological pace.