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Essays on Infinite Lifespans
Raymond Kurzweil
nals from our real senses with the signals that our brain would
receive if we were actually in the virtual environment.
We will have panoply of virtual environments to choose
from, including earthly worlds that we are familiar with, as
well as those with no earthly counterpart. We will be able
to go to these virtual places and have any kind of interaction
with other real (as well as simulated) people, ranging from
business negotiations to sensual encounters. In virtual reality,
we won’t be restricted to a single personality, since we will be
able to change our appearance and become other people.
The most important application of circa-2030 nanobots will
be to literally expand our minds. We’re limited today to a mere
hundred trillion inter-neuronal connections; we will be able
to augment these by adding virtual connections via nanobot
communication. This will provide us with the opportunity
to vastly expand our pattern recognition abilities, memories,
and overall thinking capacity as well as directly interface with
powerful forms of nonbiological intelligence.
It’s important to note that once nonbiological intelligence
gets a foothold in our brains (a threshold we’ve already
passed), it will grow exponentially, as is the accelerating
nature of information-based technologies. A one-inch cube of
nanotube circuitry (which is already working at smaller scales
in laboratories) will be at least a million times more powerful
than the human brain. By 2040, the nonbiological portion of
our intelligence will be far more powerful than the biological
portion. It will, however, still be part of the human-machine
civilization, having been derived from human intelligence,
i.e., created by humans (or machines created by humans) and
based at least in part on the reverse-engineering of the human
nervous system.
Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German
magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of
humans within a few decades. He advocated that we “develop