Google Futurologist: Humans Will Have ‘Cloud Gateways’ In Brains By 2030
Nanobots in brains will be able to connect us to the Internet within 15 years, claims Google’s Ray Kurzweil
By 2030, humans will be able to directly connect their brains to the Internet using implanted nanobots, according to Google futurologist Ray Kurzweil.
Ten years after that, in 2040, Kurzweil suggested that humans will do a majority of their thinking “online”, as the nanobots increase the cognitive power of the human brain.
Kurzweil likened the scenario to cloud computing and claimed that human thinking will be a mix of biological and non-biological cognitive processes.
Think in the cloud
Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, was speaking at a keynote at the Exponential Finance conference in New York.
“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,” said Kurzweil. “We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations.”
However, Kurzweil failed to describe exactly how nanobots will be injected into brains and how they will be able to connect to the Internet.
67-year-old Kurzweil is also an inventor, computer scientist and author. His notable contributions to futurology include predictions about artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the technological singularity – the speculated time when robots become intelligent enough to self-replicate and exceed human intellectual capacity.
“As I wrote starting 20 years ago, technology is a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm and cooked our food but also burnt down our houses. Every technology has had its promise and peril,” Kurzweil also warned.
However, Kurzweil has been proved wrong on some of his earlier predictions. Fifteen years ago, Kurzwel said that by 2020, the world will be living under a new world government. He also suggested that by 2009, the world’s roads would be full of driverless cars.
“Now that’s not completely wrong,” Kurzwell said.“If I had said 2015, I think it would’ve been correct, but they’re still not in mainstream use. So even the predictions that were wrong were directionally correct.”
