Ray Kurzweil: Three Technologies Will Define Our Future

Over the last several decades, the digital revolution has changed nearly every aspect of our lives.

The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.

Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too.

According to Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies.

This means today’s best tools will help us build even better tools tomorrow, fueling this acceleration.

But our brains tend to anticipate the future linearly instead of exponentially. So, the coming years will bring more powerful technologies sooner than we imagine.

As the pace continues to accelerate, what surprising and powerful changes are in store? This post will explore three technological areas Kurzweil believes are poised to change our world the most this century.

Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics

Of all the technologies riding the wave of exponential progress, Kurzweil identifies genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics as the three overlapping revolutions which will define our lives in the decades to come. In what ways are these technologies revolutionary?

• The genetics revolution will allow us to reprogram our own biology.
• The nanotechnology revolution will allow us to manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic scale.
• The robotics revolution will allow us to create a greater than human non-biological intelligence.

While genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will peak at different times over the course of decades, we’re experiencing all three of them in some capacity already. Each is powerful in its own right, but their convergence will be even more so. Kurzweil wrote about these ideas in The Singularity Is Near over a decade ago.

Let’s take a look at what’s happening in each of these domains today, and what we might expect in the future.

by Sveta McShane, Singularity Hub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I believe this is right. Note: 'Robotics' also means strong AI in various forms.]