In Search of the Sixth Sense

FC: Do you think there will be a point where people can turn themselves on and off?

Kurzweil: Well, we will be able to separate the software of our lives from the hardware of our lives. That’s another advantage of non-biological intelligence. If you change computers, the viability of your software files isn’t lost. You can copy them over. They outlive the hardware. They don’t necessarily live forever though. If you walk away from some software files for a while and nobody cares about them and you come back, you may find it almost impossible to revive them. Try coming back now to some software that existed on some PDP-One eight-inch disk drive. You’d have to find all kinds of layers of hardware and software to revive that information. In fact, that’s a very serious issue with standards and software formats constantly changing. Software actually does require constant maintenance to remain alive. The basic message is software remains viable if somebody cares about it. And there’s an analogy in our own lives even today: if you don’t care about your own life, then you’re likely to not maintain your physical body very well. But yes, we’ll ultimately be able to separate the hardware and software of our lives. Right now, they’re deeply embedded with one another. When our hardware crashes, the software goes with it. And there is actually information in our brains. It is literally information. I’ve estimated it in thousands of trillions of bytes, reflecting our skills, our knowledge, our memories, our personality. You can argue about those estimates, but there is a certain amount of information there. And right now, when someone dies, that information is lost. In my view, death is a tragedy. It’s a tragic loss of all of that precious knowledge of experience and personality. And ultimately we’ll be able to separate the hardware from the software. But, as I pointed out, it doesn’t necessarily mean the software lives forever -- it’s just no longer dependent on one hardware substrate. It will only live as long as someone wants it to.

FC: What fields and industries will become less important in this future?

Kurzweil: We’ve already seen a migration away from jobs that involve extending our bodies. At the beginning of the 20th century, 30% of the population worked on farms and 30% worked in factories. Those figures are now down to 3% each. So we’ve seen a profound shift there already. Increasingly, professions involve expanding the reach of our minds and creating knowledge. Knowledge in very broad forms, whether the knowledge is music or art or culture or writing or science or technology. Increasingly that’s where our work efforts will be directed. I think people should go with their passion. If they really have a passion for art, we’ve seen a great empowering of the arts through technology. There’s a tremendous need for creating graphics and so on. I know artists that could hardly make a living who are now in tremendous demand as Web designers. It does pay to learn skills to be able to express ones passion in the vernacular and technology of the times. I do have exposure to a variety of fields, and it’s remarkable to me how technically sophisticated every field is becoming, from library science to music to art to certainly science and technology. I do think that we need to have more kids in America pursue science and technology careers. In Asia they seem to understand that. I have some graphs that show the number of science and engineering graduates in the U.S. is actually going down slightly. 60,000 10 years ago to about 55,000 today. Whereas in China, for example, it was only a fraction of our level 10 years ago, and they’re now up to about 300,000 engineers and scientists a year. We see similar progressions in India, Japan, and Korea. So those societies seem to understand that the cutting edge of future economic viability is science and technology and they’re preparing their kids for that. The counter-argument to that is that even our kids who are not becoming scientists and engineers are nonetheless actually becoming very sophisticated to technology. So you talk to a musician and he’s actually extremely knowledgeable about computers. That’s true with almost every field.

We see one trend towards increasing specialization, whereas, take my field of pattern recognition: It's so diverse and there’s so many different areas it’s hard to keep up with even a small portion of it. On the other hand increasingly important work needs to be interdisciplinary -- to draw upon many different fields together. For example, the work I did in speech recognition, we had many different fields: linguists, speech scientists, signal processing engineers, mathematicians, complexity theorists, computer scientists. We had all these different fields working together so we need to be able to build bridges between these different disciplines.