Robots – Opinion

The age of neural implants is well under way. We have brain implants based on neuromorphic modeling (i.e., reverse engineering of the human brain and nervous system) for a rapidly growing number of brain regions. A generation of cochlear implants now on the drawing board will provide levels of frequency discrimination that go significantly beyond that of normal hearing. And in Germany, researchers at the Max Planck Institute have developed noninvasive devices that can communicate with neurons in both directions. They have demonstrated a neuron transistor by controlling the movements of a living leech from a personal computer.

Intelligent machines are already making their way into our blood stream. There are dozens of projects underway to create blood stream-based biological microelectromechanical systems (bioMEMS) to intelligently scout out pathogens and deliver medications in very precise ways. For example, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago has created a tiny capsule with pores measuring only 7 nm (7 · 10^-9 m). The pores let insulin out in a controlled manner but prevent antibodies from invading the capsule. Similar systems could precisely deliver dopamine to the brains of Parkinson's patients, and deliver cancer drugs directly to tumors.

As computers become more and more powerful...... they will become small enough to interact with human neurons. Source: Ray Kurzweil

By 2030, electronics will utilize molecule-sized circuits, reverse engineering of the human brain will have been completed, and bioMEMS will have evolved into bioNEMS (biological nanoelectromechanical systems). It will be routine to have billions of nanobots (i.e., nano-scale robots) coursing through the capillaries of our brains, communicating with each other (over a wireless local area network), as well as with our biological neurons and with the Internet. One application will be to provide full-immersion virtual reality that encompasses all of our senses. When we want to enter a virtual reality environment, the nanobots will replace the signals from our real senses with the signals that our brain would receive if we were actually in the virtual environment. We will have a 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 as we will be able to change our appearance and become other people. Experience beamers will beam their entire flow of sensory experiences as well as the neurological correlates of their emotional reactions out on the Web just as people today beam their bedroom images from their Web cams. A popular pastime will be to plug in to someone else's sensory-emotional beam and experience what it's like to be someone else, à la Being John Malkovich. There will also be a vast selection of archived experiences to choose from. The design of virtual environments, and the creation of archived full-immersion experiences will become new art forms.

Ray Kurzweil (has founded, built, and sold companies that have successfully opened markets in the fields of optical character recognition, computer-based music recreation, financial analysis and medical education. In 1990, Ray's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published by the MIT Press. In 1999, he published The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Ray has received a long list of national and international awards, including the National Medal of Technology—the U.S.' highest honor in technology—and nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, music and humane letters

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 nature of information-based technologies. Note that a one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry (which is already working at small 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.