December 10, 2013 -- Updated 1610 GMT (0010 HKT)
Editor's note: Ray
Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and
futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Called
"the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate
thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of
the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the
"rightful heir to Thomas Edison." Ray has written five national
best-selling books. He is Director of Engineering at Google. Below are
five ways he predicts our lives will change.
(CNN) -- By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.
Up until recently, health
and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover
interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side
effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design
interventions on computers.
All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s.
Ray Kurzweil
We now have the
information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in
modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.
We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.
RNA interference, for
example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of
gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune
system, have the ability to add new genes.
Stem cell therapies,
including the recently developed method to create "induced pluripotent
cells" (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the
equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are
being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch.
There are now hundreds of
drugs and processes in the pipeline using these methods to modify the
course of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and aging
processes.
Company fights to keep monopoly on gene
As one of many examples,
we can now fix a broken heart -- not (yet) from romance -- but from a
heart attack, by rejuvenating the heart with reprogrammed stem cells.
The minds behind the Brain Activity Map
Health and medicine is
now an information technology and is therefore subject to what I call
the "law of accelerating returns," which is a doubling of capability
(for the same cost) about each year that applies to any information
technology.
As a result,
technologies to reprogram the "software" that underlie human biology are
already a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome
project was completed in 2003, and will again be a thousand times more
powerful than they are today in a decade, and a million times more
powerful in two decades.
Clinical applications are now at the cutting edge and will be routine in the early 2020s.
By 2030 solar
energy will have the capacity to meet all of our energy needs. The
production of food and clean water will also be revolutionized.
If we could capture one
part in ten thousand of the sunlight that falls on the Earth we could
meet 100% of our energy needs, using this renewable and environmentally
friendly source.
As we apply new
molecular scale technologies to solar panels, the cost per watt is
coming down rapidly. Already Deutsche Bank, in a recent report, wrote
"The cost of unsubsidized solar power is about the same as the cost of
electricity from the grid in India and Italy. By 2014 even more
countries will achieve solar 'grid parity.'"
The total number of
watts of electricity produced by solar energy is growing exponentially,
doubling every two years. It is now less than seven doublings from 100%.
Similar approaches will
address other resource needs. Once we have inexpensive energy we can
readily and inexpensively convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated
water we have on the planet to usable water.
We are also headed
towards another agriculture revolution, from horizontal agriculture to
vertical agriculture, where we grow very high quality food in AI
controlled buildings.
These will recycle all
nutrients and end the ecological disaster that constitutes contemporary
factory farming. This will include hydroponic plants for fruits and
vegetables and in vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat, that is meat
without animals, thereby ending animal suffering.
3-D printing enters the metal age
By the early
2020s we will print out a significant fraction of the products we use
including clothing as well as replacement organs.
Schumer takes aim at 3-D printed guns
3D printing is getting a
lot of attention. There are niche applications such as printing our
replacement parts for machinery, but the opportunity to begin replacing
significant portions of manufacturing is still about five years away.
If we look at the life
cycle of technologies we see an early period of over-enthusiasm, then a
"bust" when disillusionment sets in, followed by the real revolution.
3-D printing buildings of the future
Remember the Internet boom of the 1990s followed by the Internet bust around the year 2000?
That was around the time Google was getting started, and now we have multi-hundred billion dollar Internet companies.
We're in the early boom
phase of 3D printing enthusiasm and hopefully we've learned enough to
avoid a period of undue disillusionment, but I do see the early 2020s as
the golden era of 3D printing.
For example, in the
early 2020s, you'll have a choice of many thousands of cool clothing
designs that are open source and that can be printed out for pennies a
pound.
But that will not mean
the end of the fashion industry. Look at other industries that have
already been transformed from physical products to digital ones, such as
books, movies and music.
Despite enormous changes
in business models (and the availability of many free open source
products) the overall revenues for proprietary forms of these products
remains strong.
We can already
experimentally print out organs by printing a biodegradable scaffolding
and then populating it with a patient's own stem cells, all with a 3D
printer.
By the early 2020s, this will reach clinical practice.
Can a computer diagnose, treat cancer?
Within five years, search engines will be based on an understanding of natural language.
How tech helps beat social barriers
Consider that IBM's
Watson got a higher score on the American television game of Jeopardy
than the best two human players combined.
Test-driving Google Glass
Jeopardy is a broad task involving complicated natural language queries which include puns, riddles, jokes and metaphors.
For example, Watson got
this query correct in the rhyme category: "A long tiresome speech
delivered by a frothy pie topping." It correctly responded "What is a
meringue harangue."
What is not widely
appreciated is that Watson got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and
several other encyclopedias, a total of 200 million pages of natural
language documents.
I does not read each
page as well as you or I. It might read one page and conclude that there
is a 56% chance that Barack Obama is President of the United States.
You could read that page, and if you didn't happen to know that ahead of time, conclude that there is a 98% chance.
So you did a better job
than Watson at reading that page. But Watson makes up for this
relatively weak reading by reading more pages, a lot more, and it can
combine its inferences across everything it has read and conclude that
there is a 99.9% chance that Obama is president.
At Google, we are
creating a system that will read every document on the web and every
book for meaning and provide a rich search and question answering
experience based on the true meaning of natural language.
Virtual tour guides 'creep out' travelers
For example, it will engage you in dialogue to clarify questions and discuss answers that are ambiguous or complex.
Console wars: PS4 vs Xbox One
By the early 2020s we will be routinely working and playing with each other in
full immersion visual-auditory virtual environments. By the 2030s, we
will add the tactile sense to full immersion virtual reality.
Hologram madness
The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.
We've now added the visual sense with video conferencing -- although not yet 3D and full immersion.
The visual sense will
become full immersion over the next decade. We'll also be able to
augment real reality so that I could see you sitting on the coach in my
living room and you could see me sitting on your back porch, even though
we're hundreds of miles apart.
Your augmented reality
glasses will also be able to make suggestions to you for an interesting
joke or anecdote that you could slip into a conversation you're having.
There will be limited
ways of adding the tactile sense to virtual and augmented reality by the
early 2020s, but full immersion virtual tactile experiences will
require tapping directly into the nervous system.
We'll be able to do that
in the 2030s with nanobots traveling noninvasively into the brain
through the capillaries and augmenting the signals coming from our real
senses.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ray Kurzweil
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