At some point in the future, writes Kurzweil, there will exist a human-designed computer which is (by a very small amount) more intelligent that any person who has ever lived. Such a machine will, in a haphazard process which is similar to the hit-and-miss of biological evolution, design other computers with yet more intelligence, continuing the acceleration away from human capabilities.
The endpoint for such a self-propagating system would be, according to Kurzweil, to turn the whole of the universe into a computer. Like the plot of an outlandish film, reality as we experience it would not be so much augmented as completely replaced.
In this projection of the world, the majority of people would have their repertoire vastly expanded by a computer of some description - the things that contemporary children take years to learn would be uploaded on a chip, thus freeing up literally years for the pursuit of other accomplishments. Those who refused the uploads on moral grounds would be social outcasts.
Kurzweil is either on the money, or it's a complete dud. It's far beyond my own ambition to ever reach the year 2199, the earliest point that the entire universe could be turned into an unimaginably massive processor of numbers. Part of me wishes I could get that far, just out of curiosity.
I want to make some predictions of my own about the future of our species, and I hope someone checks them out for posterity long after I have gone:
- misery is buried so deep within us that it will never be fully eradicated from our species
- no computer-generated emotion will ever transcend the love of one human for another
- the more technology is introduced into our lives, the lonelier we'll (collectively) become
- should a perfect virtual-reality rendering of the universe become our environment, human intuition will tell us that something is 'wrong' with our surroundings, but we won't know quite what it is
- even a computer designed by a computer more intelligent than any human will contain the seeds of its own downfall such that a gifted person can eventually disable it
- there is some property of numbers which we haven't yet realised. Once someone realises it, the most powerful computer currently imaginable will be akin to an abacus. I refer, specifically, to a property of numbers, and not something in the physical world.
- a computer will one day be able to produce music more beautiful to the human ear than Prokofiev or Holst, and it'll do it in a calculated (ie not by sheer weight of probability or combinatorially) way.
