CONNECTING WITH... RAY KURZWEIL: THE FUTURIST
By Kathleen Loughlin
Facebook
July 28, 2009

Original Link

At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people -- from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with...." series. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist and author of several books who's been called a "restless genius" and "the ultimate thinking machine."

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Loughlin: You spoke at Facebook about the exponential growth of technology. How do you think that relates to Facebook and what we are doing here?

Kurzweil: Facebook is a great example of the acceleration of technology. The first technologies -- stone tools by the wheels -- took 10s of thousands of years, the printing press took centuries to be adopted. The telephone took only half a century to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Now, we have a phenomenon like Facebook that takes just a few years. You think about life without Facebook and social networks, it sounds like ancient history. That was only a few years ago. If you think about life without search engines, it sounds like very ancient history and that was only a decade ago.

The pace of change is accelerating and the progression is exponential. We are actually doubling the power of these technologies now in less than a year. Computers today are a billion times more powerful per dollar than when I was a student [in the 1970's], and we'll do it again in the next 25 years. Facebook is a great example of that -- a whole new paradigm of connecting people that now puts together 250 million people in just a few years' time.


Loughlin: Your latest book, "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" <http://bit.ly/xUrmm> is a guide to how medicine and technology will allow people to extend their life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Can you expand on that?

Kurzweil: I just mentioned the exponential growth of information technology and the important point is that it's not just computerized devices or social networks. Health and medicine has just become information technology. They now have the genome, which is the software of life. We have means of changing our genes. We can design and test biological progresses on computers.

We made progress in the linear manner. That's been significant as we had life expectancy of 23 years a thousand years ago, 37 years in 1800 to pushing 80 years today. Now that health and medicine is an information technology, the power of these technologies double every year. These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years. This increase in our life expectancy is going to go into high gear very soon.


Loughlin: Is Facebook helping people live longer?

Kurzweil: Facebook is enabling us to share knowledge and achieve the wisdom of crowds. By being able to harness the wisdom of 250 million people, now on Facebook, we can ferret out the truth of what's going in the world very quickly. We can see this in recent political events. From a practical perspective, it enables somebody with a new idea or new insight to share that, for it to spread virally through these kinds of knowledge-sharing sites.

It really does foster freedom and democracy, and not just on the political level but even things like health and medicine. Patients are going to their doctor's office, armed with the latest knowledge. By being part of the community of people who have their condition, they'll be more knowledgeable than the doctor. [This] changes the nature of the relationship.


Loughlin: You're most well known for optical character recognition. With more and more user generated content online, do you think all the information on the Web will one day be available in speech form?

Kurzweil: We are learning more and more about the human brain, and we are able to transform the information in one modality to another by recognizing patterns. I realized at a fairly young age [that] the heart of human intelligence was pattern recognition, and that's now being confirmed by neurology and brain reverse engineering. Even with the state of the art today, these technologies are still not as good as human pattern recognition, but that gap is gradually closing. With information technology growing exponentially, the ability to change information from one form to another -- particularly those forms that allow us to search for it and intelligently use that information out on the Web -- are fundamental to ongoing progress.


Loughlin: What are the most interesting inventions you've come across recently, and what areas would you like to see more focus and development?

Kurzweil: Mobile phones. The fact that half of the world's population has access to these devices that allow them to access all of human knowledge in a few keystrokes, to actually see it happen is amazing to me. The "have-have not divide" is dissolving. Fifteen years ago, only a wealthy person could have a mobile phone, and they didn't work very well. Today, 3 billion of them are out there and they are becoming increasingly intelligent.

Creative applications. I am impressed with the number of things we can increasingly do on these tiny little devices, cell phones. They do thousands of things. It's 50,000 apps for the iPhone. We have a cell phone that can capture print in 15 languages, speak it out loud and have synchronized highlighting, and translate from one language to another.

There are early prototypes of where I think computing is going. To make devices smaller and smaller, they are more and more convenient, but we actually don't want to look at a tiny screen. We'd like to actually have full immersion screens that we sort of live in. We are going to put these devices in our eyeglasses. We can just create a virtual screen that's large and hovering in air that's high resolution. Electronics will be just woven in your clothes or your belt buckle. The display will be augmented reality, and we'll be online all the time.


Loughlin: You've won a number of awards and honors for innovation and have even been inducted into the U.S. Patent Office National Inventor's Hall of Fame. What advice do you have for aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs?

Kurzweil: Track technology trends. When it comes to the key measures of information technology, they are markedly predictable despite the common wisdom that you can't predict the future. I got into technology forecasting because I realized that timing was critical to being an inventor. If Facebook had been started 10 years ago rather than five years ago, it wouldn't have worked. Plan your project for the world that will exist, two, three, four years in the future when your technology is perfected and narrowed into the marketplace, because that's the world that you'll be interacting with.

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NHNE Singularity Resource Page

Singularity University:
http://singularityu.org/

NHNE Ray Kurzweil Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/498/Default.aspx

Kurzweil New Book: "Transcend: Nine Steps To Living Well Forever"

Transcendent Man (movie):
http://transcendentman.com/

The Singularity Is Near (movie):
http://singularity.com/themovie/