Recently at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil reaffirmed his longstanding prediction that the Technological Singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years…
With a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions, futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil has been called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine.
“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence.”
At the recent SXSW Conference, Kurzweil reaffirmed his predictions about the Singularity. Kurzweil made the statements in an interview following his keynote address, that he undertook with his daughter, author Amy Kurzweil Comix. The two discussed their creative work, inspirations, and collaborations across disciplines, while speculating about the future of storytelling, the arts and technology.
“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” he said. “That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. It’s here, in part, and it’s going to accelerate.”
For Kurzweil, the Singularity represents the exponential improvement of intelligence—both human and machine. He envisions the same technology that will make AIs more intelligent giving humans a boost as well.
“What’s actually happening is [machines] are powering all of us,” Kurzweil said during the SXSW interview. “They’re making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.”
“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” the author of The Singularity Is Near
“Ultimately, it will affect everything,” Kurzweil said during the interview. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.”
