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Volume 72, Issue 123,
Thursday, April 5, 2007
News Inventor: technology moving rapidly Kurzweil says advances will allow
us to emulate human
by KIM THAI
Raymond Kurzweil emphasized the "exponential progression and evolution" of technology and what role medicine and biology will play in the future to an audience of almost 1,000 Wednesday night at Cullen Performance Hall. Kurzweil, one of the nation's leading inventors and futurists, said the future is predictable and medicine will provide the next step in aiding and improving human life. "I passion myself as an inventor," Kurzweil said. "Most inventions fail because the timing isn't right. And I took wind of that and began to make technology models. Common wisdom is that you can't predict the future. That's true of specific measures of technology. "Any specific projects are hard to predict, but certain measures of technology are amazingly predictable. … Certain measures such as price performance, capacity and bandwidth are remarkably predictable." Kurzweil said this predictability extends from not just the technology level but to the medical level as well. "Medicine is becoming an information technology. It's also applicable to any kind of technology that is an informational technology," he said. "We're able to simulate complicated biology processes. We have a new technology where you can turn a gene off. Mainstream skeptics said you could never do this." If technology can turn off and reproduce genes, then prevention in cancer, diabetes and improvement of weight loss will all be possible in the future, he said. Kurzweil used the theory of thermodynamics and models of gas to prove how a complex dynamic system abides by rules and laws, which is why the theory can be predictable on an overall level. Although this advancement is important, he said, understanding biology so software can be created and adapted is much more important than the advancement and capability of the hardware itself. "The new paradigm is really to understand biology. We are beginning to model it, simulate it and reprogram it. And we look at the grand effort to understand the genome. We're in that process (and) it's also advancing exponentially," he said. "Recent scanners see in the living brain to see new spines and synapses. Getting enough data to see how our brain gets enough thought because we do have that plasticity. We can reorganize our brains." Kurzweil said capabilities in the area of artificial intelligence are expanding as well and that he believes technology will be able to emulate the thought process and logic of the human brain in 10 to 15 years. "The exponential progression of information technology is going to enable us to understand and reverse (engineer) the human brain," he said. His estimates were much more radical than his peers, who said at a recent convention that that technology will not reach that point for another 50 years. It is almost impossible to view technology from a linear perspective, he said, because over time, the progression would be a sharp vertical line upwards. Kurzweil demonstrated his company's handheld print-to-speech device in front of the audience. Through advanced optimal technology, the device was able to identify what area had text, take a picture and read it out loud to the audience. "If you understand something in one way, then you really don't understand something. If something goes wrong, then it gets stuck in your mind with nowhere to go," the device said. Another presentation displayed a new program where a person speaks and the machine is able type out what is being said and then translate the text into another language and speak it back to the user. The lecture expressed the positive aspects of technology and how the human mind will only be able to expand, but Kurzweil said during the question and answer session that "technology can be a double-edged sword." "Genetics are helping us lead to preventing diseases, but it's also providing the tools for bioterrorists, too," he said. "Before, we used to assume that people wouldn't be overly destructive. For whatever reason, people will draw reasonable justifications from faith and use this as a weapon. This actually is a daunting specter." Send comments to dcnews@mail.uh.edu |
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