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Subject: CURR:Eschoolnews: The End of Handicaps - Ray Kurzweil - CSUN
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Viewpoint: The End of Handicaps
By Ray Kurzweil, Contributing Writer, eSchool News
July 1, 2003
Ray Kurzweil‹inventor, author, futurist, and entrepreneur‹is recipient of
the National Medal of Technology, America's highest technology honor.
Co-founder of Kurzweil Educational Systems, he recently described how key
developments in science and technology will affect society, alter education
and other fields, and benefit all persons, especially those with
disabilities. Kurzweil spoke on March 19 at the CSUN 18th Annual Conference
on "Technology and Persons with Disabilities," California State University
Northridge. This article is based on that address, entitled "The End of
Handicaps."‹the Editors
I've been involved in inventing since I was five, and I quickly realized
that for an invention to succeed, you have to target the world of the
future. But what would the future be like?
To find out, I became a student of technology trends and began to develop
mathematical models of different technologies: computation, miniaturization,
evolution over time. I've been doing that for 25 years, and it's been
remarkable to me how powerful and predictive these models are.
Now, before I show you some of these models and then try to build with you
some of the scenarios for the future‹and, in particular, focus on how these
will benefit technology for the disabled‹I'd like to share one trend that I
think is particularly profound and that many people fail to take into
consideration. It is this: The rate of progress‹what I call the
"paradigm-shift rate"‹is itself accelerating.
We are doubling this paradigm-shift rate every decade. The whole 20th
century was not 100 years of progress as we know it today, because it has
taken us a while to speed up to the current level of progress. The 20th
century represented about 20 years of progress in terms of today's rate. And
at today's rate of change, we will achieve an amount of progress equivalent
to that of the whole 20th century in 14 years, then as the acceleration
continues, in 7 years. The progress in the 21st century will be about 1,000
times greater than that in the 20th century, which was no slouch in terms of
change.
When you say the pace of change is accelerating, most people are quick to
agree, as if that's an obvious statement. But when you ask otherwise
thoughtful observers‹including Nobel Prize winners‹what they expect to see
50 years from now, they often vastly understate the progress of technology.
This happened at a conference I spoke at recently. Time magazine held a
conference on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. Most speakers
looked at the last 50 years and saw how much change there was and used that
as a model for the next 50 years. No less a luminary than James Watson, the
co-discoverer of DNA, said that in 50 years we will have drugs that will
allow us to eat as much as we want and we won't gain weight. I said, 50
years? We have done that in mice already by identifing the fat insulin
receptor gene. The drugs are on the drawing board now and will be in FDA
tests in several years‹and we will have these available in close to five
years, not 50.
The first step in technological evolution took a few tens of thousands of
years: fire, the wheel, stone tools. And now paradigm shifts take only a few
years' time.
The one exponential trend people have heard of is Moore's Law, pertaining to
the accelerating rate of computers and electronics. Every two years, we can
place twice as many transistors at the same cost on an integrated circuit.
They work twice as fast because the electrons have half the distance to
travel, so the speed of computing doubles every two years.
Scientists have been debating when that particular paradigm will come to an
end. Optimists say 18 years, pessimists say 12‹but sometime in the teen
years, we won't be able to shrink computing components any more because they
will be just a few atoms wide. Will it be the end of Moore's Law?
Perhaps‹but other paradigms will emerge that hold even greater potential.
3-D molecular computing
When the trend for traditional computers runs out of steam‹and we can see
the end of that road‹we will have three-dimensional molecular computing.
I pointed this out in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines four years ago,
and it was considered a radical notion then‹but there's been a sea change in
attitude toward that idea. It's now the mainstream view that we'll have 3-D
molecular computing long before Moore's Law runs out.
There's been enormous progress in four years. In fact, the favorite
technology appears to be the one I have felt would win: nanotubes, composed
of carbon atoms, that can be organized in three dimensions and that can
compute very efficiently. They're up to100 times as strong as steel, so you
can use them to create structural components and little "machines." A
one-inch tube of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful
than the human brain.
We are miniaturizing all technology. The first reading machine we created in
the early 1970s used a large washing-machine-sized computer that was less
powerful than the computer in your wristwatch now and cost tens of thousands
of dollars. And we are also miniaturizing mechanical systems, which
inevitably will lead to nanotechnology by the 2020s.
Nanotechnology was first described by Eric Drexler in a pioneering thesis he
did at MIT in the 1980s. Marvin Minsky, who was also my mentor, was the only
professor willing to be his thesis advisor because it was such a radical
idea. Drexler described machines that could be built atom by atom, and then
replicated millions or billions of times. Recently, scientists have used
supercomputers to simulate some of his original designs from 1986.
Threshold of human intelligence
Right now, $1,000 of computing power is between that of the brain of an
insect and a mouse, at least in terms of hardware capacity. We will cross
the threshold of the hardware capacity of the human brain by 2020, and the
computers we use then will be deeply embedded in our environment. Computers
per se will disappear; they will be in our bodies, in tables, chairs, and
everywhere. But we will routinely have enough power to replicate human
intelligence in the 2020s.
Critics say, "Sure, we will have computers that are as powerful as the human
brain, but they will just be fast calculators and will not have the other
aspects of human intelligence." So, really, the challenge is this: Where
will the software‹where will the templates of human intelligence‹come from?
To achieve this, another grand project is needed‹comparable to the human
genome project‹ to really understand the methods used by the human brain.
This project is already well under way, in terms of scanning the human brain
and developing detailed mathematical models of neurons and brain regions.
Resolution, speed, price, performance, and bandwidth of human brain scanning
is growing exponentially. An upcoming technology will be able to see the
structures, non-invasively, of clusters of thousands of neurons, giving
scientists an ability to see how memories work. At that point, we will begin
to understand how the human brain applies different cognitive functions.
One point about the human brain: It's not really one organ.
Asking "How does the brain work?" is a little like asking, "How does the
human body work?" You can't answer that question unless you break it down.
Well, the body consists of a lot of different parts, and the lungs work
differently from the heart, and the liver has many regions.
It's the same with the brain. The brain is actually several hundred
information-processing organs, and they have an intricate architecture. We
are beginning to describe in mathematical models how the different modules
of the brain work. Reverse-engineering the brain
In my view, it is a conservative projection to say that within 20 or 25
years we will have reverse-engineered the principles of how the human brain
works, and we will be using that knowledge to produce biologically inspired
models of computation. We are doing that already. We learned things about
how the human auditory system processes sounds. We used that in speech
recognition, as I demonstrated, and got better results. We are applying
these insights into the software of human intelligence.
Let's talk about some scenarios.
By 2010, computers will disappear. They will be so tiny that they will be
embedded in our environment, in clothing, and so on. We will have
high-bandwidth connections to the internet at all times. We will have
eyeglasses for the sighted that display images directly in our retina:
contact lenses for full-immersion virtual reality.
I have a prototype, a device allowing me to teleport my image in three
dimensions to other locations from my office. I gave a speech to people in
Vienna, Austria. It looked to the audience like I was present in three
dimensions. People who did not know what was going on thought I was there.
By 2010, we all will be able to do this routinely‹full-immersion virtual
reality.
Besides teleportation, we will have relatively powerful (but not human
level) artificial intelligence (AI) on web sites‹artificial personalities
such as the avatar-like Ramona, who greets visitors and answers questions at
the KurzweilAI.net web site.
Technology for sensory impairments
For the deaf, we will have systems that provide subtitles around the world.
We're getting close to the point where speaker-independent speech
recognition will become common. Machines will create subtitles automatically
and on the fly, and these subtitles will be a pretty accurate representation
of what people are saying. It won't be error-free. But then, our own
auditory understanding is not error-free, either. The same is true of
reading machines.
We will have listening systems that allow deaf persons to understand what
people are saying. The inability to do so is the principal handicap
associated with deafness.
For blind people, we actually will have reading machines within a few years
that are not just sitting on a desk, but are tiny devices you put in your
pocket. You'll take pictures of signs on the wall, handouts at meetings, and
so on. We all encounter text everywhere, on the back of packages, on menus.
By 2010, these devices will be very tiny. You will be able to wear one on
your lapel and scan in all directions. These devices probably will be used
by the sighted as well, because they will allow us to get visual information
from all around us.
Such devices also will translate the information from one language to
another for everyone. We've put together demonstration technology to show
just how the information will be transferred back and forth from English to
German, from German to French, from French to English, and so on.
And the voice we use in the demonstration is actually derived from a new
generation of synthetic speech. Although it sounds relatively normal, it is
not recorded human speech. We use that new speech synthesizer in the
Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000 reading systems.
Exoskeletal aid for physical impairments
Another area of progress will be in relation to spinal cord injuries and for
physically disabled people in general. Two different scenarios: I have
always been interested in exoskeletal robotic systems that you could put on
like clothing. Such systems could be used discreetly. They could be worn
under regular clothing and be relatively invisible.
Such a system would work in concert with the user's own sense of balance,
enabling the user to walk and climb stairs. Being unable to do those two
things is the principal handicap in, say, paraplegia. Analysis shows this
approach is feasible. One of the philosophies of developing technology for
the disabled is to work in close concert with the general flexible
intelligence of the disabled person himself or herself.
We are not yet on the verge of creating cybernetic geniuses. But we have
many systems in our societies that already can perform intelligently in
narrow areas. We have hundreds of examples of these machines. Some of them
are flying and landing our airplanes, or guiding intelligent weapons. We
have electrocardiogram systems that provide an analysis as accurate as your
doctor's. We have some systems that can diagnose blood-cell images, others
that automatically make financial decisions involving stock-market
investments. In fact, $1 trillion in stock-market investments use these
systems. Other intelligent systems look for credit card fraud and find
optimal routes for eMail messages and cell phone calls.
In this way technology is already deeply embedded in our infrastructure.
Some observers ask, "What ever happened to artificial intelligence?" It's
like people going to the rain forest looking for ants, with 50 species of
ants right below them. But the ants go unseen, because they are embedded.
A disabled person has a narrow need. In the case of a blind person, he or
she needs access to ordinary printed material. Deaf persons need to be able
to understand ordinary speech from people they encounter at random. Devices
to do such things can work in close concert with the much broader, more
flexible intelligence of the disabled persons themselves.
And that will be part of the philosophy of an exoskeletal robotic device, to
guide and provide balance.
Reconnecting broken nerve pathways
The more profound promise of this research will be to actually overcome
spinal cord injuries and reconnect the broken nerve pathways. One of the
challenges is that the nerves atrophy fairly quickly through disuse. If you
wait years after an injury, since the nerves are not being used, they begin
to degenerate. So the pathway is no longer intact and functioning.
There have been interesting experiments in scanning brain patterns 15 or 20
years after the injury in spinal cord patients. They are asked to perform
certain functions‹lift your leg, walk across the room. The brain-pattern
activity was the same as in a non-disabled person, but obviously it was not
communicating, because the pathways were broken.
Still, it will be quite feasible to pick up the patterns in the brain and
wirelessly communicate them to the muscles, completely bypassing the nervous
system that's no longer functioning.
Ultimately, we will be able to create the muscles as well. We are creating
muscle analogs for robots, but those could be used for disabled persons as
well. There are other challenges‹creating a skeletal system to replace one
that may not be up to the task, dealing with the cardiovascular
implications. These are complex projects, but I believe we will see profound
steps forward by 2010. And by 2020, I think we will have largely overcome
the handicaps of spinal cord injuries.
By 2029, all these different trends will mature and come to a head. A
thousand dollars of computing power will be a thousand times more powerful
than the human brain. We will have completed the reverse engineering of the
human brain.
In some ways, machines can do better than humans. Computers are much faster
than people when they master tasks and can share knowledge. Something this
computer has learned can be shared with thousands of other computers
instantly; whereas, if I learn French, I can't just download that to you.
Enhancing our own intelligence
The implication of that will not be just an alien invasion of intelligent
machines to compete with us. We are going to enhance our own intelligence by
getting closer and closer to machine intelligence‹and that's already
happening.
There are many people walking around now who are essentially cyborgs and
have computers in their brains interfacing with their biological neurons.
The Food and Drug Administration just approved a neural implant for
Parkinson's disease that replaces the portion of the brain destroyed by that
disease. And there are more than a dozen different types of implants like
that in use or being developed. Now, they require surgical implantation; but
by 2029, we will be able to send these intelligent devices through the
bloodstream.
We are already beginning to put them into our bloodstream, although the
process is not as sophisticated as it will be in 2029. We will be able to
send very intelligent nanobots‹nano-robots‹into the blood stream to
communicate with our nervous system, and they will be able to provide a
virtual reality, in which they shut down the signals from my real senses and
replace them with the signals from that environment‹and it can be just as
realistic as actual reality.
Some of these environments will be earthly, some will be fantastic and won't
exist on Earth. A new art form will be to create new virtual reality
environments. You will be able to go there by yourself or with other people
and have encounters with one or thousands of other people in these
virtual-reality environments, incorporating all the senses.
One phenomenon will involve people‹"experience beamers," I call them‹putting
their flow of sensory experience on the internet, kind of like the concept
in the movie "Being John Malkovich."
The importance of hanging around
But the real profound implication will be an expansion of human
intelligence.
Right now, we are restricted to a mere hundred trillion inter-neural
connections. I don't know about you, but I find that quite limiting. Many
people send me books to read, web sites to visit, conferences to attend. And
I would love to be able to do all these things, but our human bandwidth is
quite limited.
Ultimately, we won't be restricted to 100 trillion connections. We will able
to create new ones with nanobots, and we will have 200 trillion connections
or more.
We are today profoundly expanding human intelligence as a species through
the internet and all of our technology. Through much more intimate
connections with this technology, we will continue to profoundly expand
human intelligence.
Human life expectancy is another one of those exponential trends. Every year
during the 18th and 19th centuries, we added a few days to the human life
expectancy. Now, we are at the intersection of biology and information
science.
Today, we are adding about 120 days every year to the human life expectancy.
With the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution, within 10 years, we
will be adding more than a year to the human life expectancy every year.
So if we can hang in there for another 10 years, we may actually get to
experience the full measure of the profound century ahead.
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