Ray Kurzweil has stated that in the next 15 years people will connect their brains to the internet directly. At the Exponential Finance conference in New York on the 3rd of June 2015 he said that nanobots made from DNA strands will be used to turn humans
into hybrids (More on DNA nanobot strands can be read in a previous blog of mine).
“Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” Kurzweil also said. “We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human, we transcend our limitations.” He also said that “We’ll be able to extend our limitations and think in the cloud. We’re going to put gateways to the cloud in our brains”.
Kurzweil predicts that connecting brains to the internet or to a cloud network will allow for advanced thinking and before 2040 human thought could be predominantly non-biological. He re-emphasised the point that technology is a double edged sword. “Fire kept us warm and cooked our food, but also burnt down our houses. All technology has had its promise and peril”. Kurzweil now works for Google as director of engineering.
The philosopher Nick Bostrom said in his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. The existential risk to humanity such technology poses. He recently said that he believed it would be a “great tragedy if advanced artificial intelligence is never developed”.
He went on to say. “I think that the path to the best possible future goes through the creation of machine intelligence at some point. I think though it would be greatly desirable to put in some effort to solve the control problem, to figure out how to set up the initial conditions for this intelligence explosion in the best possible way to increase the odds that this big future will be saved according to human values.”
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