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Ray Kurzweil: Making the World A Billion Times Better
« on: 2008-04-13 15:01:15 » |
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source: The Washington Post
date: Sunday, April 13, 2008
vector: Premise Checker
MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that
it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11
million (in today's dollars) and was shared by all students and
faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a
million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand
times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in the amount of
computation you can buy per dollar.
Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make
another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over
the next 25 years. That's because information technology builds on
itself -- we are continually using the latest tools to create the
next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn't
just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every
aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will
unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer
life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums.
This exponential progress in the power of information technology
goes back more than a century to the data-processing equipment used
in the 1890 census, the first U.S. census to be automated. It has
been a smooth -- and highly predictable -- phenomenon despite all
the vagaries of history through that period, including two world
wars, the Cold War and the Great Depression. I say highly
predictable because, thanks to its exponential power, only
technology possesses the scale to address the major challenges --
such as energy and the environment, disease and poverty --
confronting society. That, at least, is the major conclusion of a
panel, organized by the National Science Foundation and the National
Academy of Engineering, on which I recently participated.
Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a
19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one
ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet
100 percent of the world's energy needs using this renewable and
environmentally friendly source. We can't do that now because solar
panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient,
heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on
nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules)
is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which
energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil
fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from
solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to
meet all our energy needs within 20 years.
Nanotechnology itself is an information technology and therefore
subject to what I call the "law of accelerating returns," a
continual doubling of capability about every year. Venture capital
groups and high-tech companies are investing billions of dollars in
these new renewable energy technologies. I'm confident that the day
is close at hand when we will be able to obtain energy from sunlight
using nano-engineered solar panels and store it for use on cloudy
days in nano-engineered fuel cells for less than it costs to use
environmentally damaging fossil fuels.
It's important to understand that exponentials seem slow at first.
In the mid-1990s, halfway through the Human Genome Project to
identify all the genes in human DNA, researchers had succeeded in
collecting only 1 percent of the human genome. But the amount of
genetic data was doubling every year, and that is actually right on
schedule for an exponential progression. The project was slated to
take 15 years, and if you double 1 percent seven more times you
surpass 100 percent. In fact, the project was finished two years
early. This helps explain why people underestimate what is
technologically feasible over long periods of time -- they think
linearly while the actual course of progress is exponential.
We see the same progression with other biological technologies as
well. Until just recently, medicine -- like energy -- was not an
information technology. This is now changing as scientists begin to
understand how biology works as a set of information processes. The
approximately 23,000 genes in our cells are basically software
programs, and we are making exponential gains in modeling and
simulating the information processes that cracking the genome code
has unlocked. We also have new tools, likewise just a few years old,
that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that
we reprogram our computers. For example, when the fat insulin
receptor gene was turned off in mice, they were able to eat
ravenously yet remain slim and obtain the health benefits of being
slim. They didn't get heart disease or diabetes and lived 20 percent
longer. There are now more than a thousand drugs in the pipeline to
turn off the genes that promote obesity, heart disease, cancer and
other diseases.
We can also turn enzymes off and on, and add genes to the body. I'm
an adviser to a company that removes lung cells, adds a new gene,
reproduces the gene-enhanced cell a million-fold and then injects it
back into the body where it returns to the lungs. This has cured a
fatal disease, pulmonary hypertension, in animals and is now
undergoing human trials.
The important point is this: Now that we can model, simulate and
reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to
the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less
than a year. These technologies will be more than a thousand times
more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in
two decades. We are now adding three months every year to human life
expectancy, but given the exponential growth of our ability to
reprogram biology, this will soon go into high gear. According to my
models, 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year each year
to our remaining life expectancy. This is not a guarantee of living
forever, but it does mean that the sands of time will start pouring
in rather than only pouring out.
What's more, this exponential progression of information technology
will affect our prosperity as well. The World Bank has reported, for
example, that poverty in Asia has been cut in half over the past
decade due to information technologies and that at current rates it
will be cut by another 90 percent over the next decade. That
phenomenon will spread around the globe.
Clearly, the transformation of our 21st-century world is under way,
and information technology, in all its forms, is helping the future
look brighter . . . exponentially.
raymond@kurzweiltech.com
Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist and inventor, is the author of
"The Singularity Is Near" and co-author of "Fantastic Voyage."
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