In Search of the Sixth Sense

Kurzweil: You’re bringing up an important issue, which is the speed of the process: biological vs. non-biological. Of course, this analogy comes up a lot when you talk about little companies merging with big companies and the big company has these big gearboxes with big gears that move very slowly and the little company has these small quickly moving gears. Sometimes those gears strip when they try to merge. So it's an analogy in terms of large and small organizations integrating. We have a similar issue when we try to marry biological and non-biological thinking, which ultimately will be a lot faster. Our biological thinking takes place at chemical switching speeds, which are a few hundred feet per second. And that’s the speed with which the chemical gradient moves along the axon. They take place at these very slow speeds and the reset time is about five milliseconds. In a typical dentrite that’s about 200 transactions per second. These are very slow speeds. Electronics are about a million times faster. The speed of light is a million times faster than the chemical switching speed of our brains. So there is a mismatch. Ultimately we’re going to -- we’re in the process of reverse engineering our thinking. I have a new book called the Singularity is Near, when humans transcend biology, which will be coming out this fall. And I concentrate a lot on the process of reverse engineering the brain, which will be the source of understanding the software of human intelligence. Once we reverse engineer that, we’ll be able to take those methods -- we’ll be able to expand our AI toolkit to include the methods the human brain uses. But then we’ll be able to apply them to computer substrates that run a million times faster than biological thinking. When we have non-biological thinking processes working inside our own brains, they will work a lot faster.

FC: How would that work? The human brain is like a bottleneck. You’ve got a fundamental biological problem -- to remember something or make a connection that requires these biological processes is a hardware issue. Are we going to supercede our biological hardware?

Kurzweil: We will have non-biological processes. I don’t even understand now when I remember something where that memory comes from. I try to think of some actress’s name, and I’ll think of it or maybe I won’t be able to think of it, but if I do think of it, I’m not entirely sure. I’m not conscious of how I did that. So, one could imagine one’s memory working a lot better than it does, and a lot of it being non-biological.

FC: But to actually fundamentally change the biology of the brain?

Kurzweil: We get into profound issues of consciousness. I do think our sense of consciousness will start to encompass these non-biological processes. We already have a lot awareness of what we’re doing with our computers and we have a lot of lack of awareness of what goes on inside our own brains. There isn’t a perfect correlation of what goes on in our bodies and brains and what we’re aware of. So as we expand the processes that go on in our bodies and brains with non-biological ones that extend its capability, I think those will also be in the province of our conscious awareness.

FC: Mind blowing.

Kurzweil: Certainly mind expanding.

FC: You’re also working on a product to predict changes in the stock market.

Kurzweil: The company is called Fat Kat. Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adapted Technologies. I founded it about five years ago. We have a blue-ribbon group of investors. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He and John Doerr run Kleiner Perkins. He is our lead investor. Mike Brown is another lead investor -- he’s on our board. He was chief financial officer of Microsoft for many years, and chairman of Nasdaq. And we have a number of other prominent high-tech people backing us. And the concept is applying my field, pattern recognition, to the stock market, particularly to short-term movements of stocks. And if you look at a particular stock it looks like an electric cardiogram. It constantly goes up and down. These little movements look random, and there’s certainly a very large random component to the movement, but its not entirely unpredictable because companies have relationships with one another. They own each other. They’re in supply chains with each other. They’re in industries with each other. There’s all kinds of influences. If you see certain movements in certain stocks, that’s putting out all kinds of ripple patterns and it ultimately will reflect itself in other movements in other securities. In fact the speed with which those reverberations or implications occur is speeding up with the more rapid dissemination of information. We look at data from 10-15 years ago, and we can see similar patterns today. But the patterns 15 years ago were moving much more slowly. Right now, there’s an announcement, and 30 minutes later it's old news because it's been all over the Internet. Whereas, 15 years ago, it would take days for the information to move around. So we actually see very similar patterns. They just move more quickly.