A well-known inventor and futurist has proclaimed that in the future, the human brain can be augmented to make it ultra-smart and able to store more information like never before.
The idea, put forth by computer scientist and Google executive Ray Kurzweil, is that time will come when brains can benefit from extra capacity stored in the cloud. Venture Beat reported that this will enable anyone with the access to the technology to potentially learn at an unimaginable rate and have access to a wealth of knowledge.
“Our thinking will grow exponentially, and we’ll become millions of times smarter,” Kurzweil said.
Kurzweil has made some pretty accurate predictions before, including the widespread use of the internet, developments of supercomputers, and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. The multi-awarded scientist has written several books about his predictions and is known to be highly accurate. He’s also created technological advances and made money out of software companies that he built. It is safe to say that he knows what he is talking about.
In a keynote address at Tune’s mobile marketing conference in Seattle a week ago, Kurzweil revealed how he foresees mobile devices will evolve in the next couple of decades. Noting that current phone models are billion times more advanced and 100,000 times smaller than the first computer he used 30 years ago at MIT, he predicts that the trend will continue.
“We’ll do the same thing in the next 25 years,” Kurzweil was quoted as saying. “Computers will be a billion times more powerful, 100,000 times smaller … the size of blood cells.”
He believes that such technological advancements would be enough to allow both augmented reality and virtual reality to be incorporated within the human nervous system, feeding data directly to the brain, without the current wearable hardware currently in use and development.
“That will also allow us to connect our neocortex to the cloud,” Kurzweil said. “Not just to do search and language translation … but to actually to extend the capacity of our brains.”
He explained that in possibly around the 2030’s, mobile devices will be directly accessed by our brains through neural connections. These supercomputers will also be connected to synthetic neocortices in the cloud. If one is to add capacity to the brain, it will just be similar to today’s extending of a cloud-based server capacity.
“In some cases, my 300 million neocortex modules won’t cut it,” he said. “I may need a billion neocortex modules … and I can extend my brain in the cloud.”
If such technology gets developed, humans will then be exponentially smarter than today and would forever alter the human existence in many ways.
He explained that in possibly around the 2030’s, mobile devices will be directly accessed by our brains through neural connections. These supercomputers will also be connected to synthetic neocortices in the cloud. If one is to add capacity to the brain, it will just be similar to today’s extending of a cloud-based server capacity.
“In some cases, my 300 million neocortex modules won’t cut it,” he said. “I may need a billion neocortex modules … and I can extend my brain in the cloud.”
If such technology gets developed, humans will then be exponentially smarter than today and would forever alter the human existence in many ways.
