Crowdsourcing is the Future

One thing about the future is that we are constantly working out how to do things better. With technology this is quite clear. Better means faster, smaller, more efficient, more powerful.. In the case of social issues – things are often more complicated. However there’s one area I think we can clearly do better as a global society – that is making use of our collective knowledge more effectively.

There are so many problems in the world small and large. And so many people in the world who are able to solve them. The problem is that the best or most qualified people are often unaware that a specific problem exists. Problems are often shared at a local geographical level, or shared inside a particular discipline but this usually means that only people with certain qualifications see them. The beautiful thing about problems is that there are often many ways to solve them, yet due to the fact that the range of people aware of a problem is small – a full range of solutions never surfaces.This is why I love Crowdsourcing, and why it is the future.

Crowdsourcing puts a crowd of diverse people (united by interest) in front of a problem, and encourages an open-ended range of ways to solve it. This is great because it can open people’s eyes to a new way of solving a problem that may otherwise not have come to light without this diverse crowd. At the same time, Crowdsourcing is tremendously empowering because it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from – as long as you can solve the problem. This has got to be a more efficient way of making use of our collective brain power than hiding problems away and exposing it to a few select “qualified” people.

There are some wonderful examples of Crowdsourcing out there. I had the priviledge of working on one for an app – ‘Do Some Good’. We ran a Crowdsoucing campaign to get ideas of ways in which people can volunteer time to charity in five minutes on their mobile phone. The range of ideas we got from the crowd  was far greater than we could ever have managed as a small team on our own. There were ideas we simply couldn’t have thought of as we did not have experience or knowledge from the areas they came from.

Another fascinating example of Crowdsourcing and what it can do for creativity is Nokia’s classic ringtone re-make. Anyone who has watched Dom Joly with his oversize phone in Trigger Happy TV will know the one I’m talking about. Recently they held a competition to design a re-interpretation of the tune. The rules were simple – the ringtone must take less than 30 secs.. The range of submissions received was astounding. Only a crowd could have come up with such a range of answers.

And it’s rapidly becoming an established way of designing right now. Specialised crowdsourcing design agencies are beginning to appear such as DesignCrowd.com. Clients post problems, and crowds of designers work on the problem and submit their designs. The client then has many designs to choose from. Reward is shared among the Crowd of designers so that the winner is not the only one that gets paid.

There are many other developments which show how the benefits of Crowdsourcing are becoming more recognised such as the use of the Crowd to solve scientific problems which could have profound beneficial consequences for mankind. One example is using the Crowd to solve protein folding problems via a game. Another example is designing RNA strands with a view to producing cures to disease. Other sites such as Innocentive exist to allow problems to be solved for Corporate customers for a range of cash prizes

Recently Dell and Intel reported that Crowdsourcing is likely to be the way companies do things in the future. Companies will work more like film production companies do right now where bands of professionals come together for a specific need and then disband again.

Other Crowdsourcing efforts include ways to find funding for Start-Ups or inventors with ideas. Fundageek.com is one way where inventors with ideas can be matched up with funding from the Crowd. Financial support from the crowd is rewarded with goods-in-kind such as free copies of software.

We should keep a close eye on developments in Crowdsourcing. It’s going to become an increasingly normal way of doing many things in the future.

Graphene – The material of the 21st century?

I’ve been hearing a lot about Graphene lately. It seems to be the next big thing and has been touted as soon replacing ‘Silicon’ (think ‘Silicon chip’, ‘Silicon Valley’ etc.. ), and due to its chemical and physical properties, giving rise to a new generation of products which will make those of today seem like relics from a by-gone era.

As far as materials go, it is very exciting: Graphene is one of the strongest materials known to man -a sheet of it as thin as clingfilm is strong enough to support an elephant-, yet it can also stretch like rubber. It is virtually invisible but at the same time can conduct electricity and heat better than any copper wire. It can also be seeded into other materials such as plastic, so that this can be made to conduct electricity. Indeed, It’s been claimed to be the most important synthetic material to be invented since plastic 100 years ago. Given the range of properties it exhibits though, strength, flexibility, conductivity, lightness, transparency, potential abundance and resistance to heat and chemicals, it is arguably more significant.

Source: Bournemouth University Research

Graphene is made from graphite which you’ll find in any lead pencil and was first created at the University of Manchester by researchers who developed the technique of pulling graphite apart with sticky tape -more or less- until they reached Graphene a material which is 1 atom thick. For this they won a Nobel Prize.

Apart from its use in integrated circuits, there is a whole range of other potential uses for Graphene: Sensors, Anti-bacterial agent, batteries, DNA sequencing and solar cells to name but a few. Graphene could lead to a new class of transparent, flexible electronic devices: e.g. mobile phones that can be rolled up or bright high definition displays that can be screwed up like newspaper. And inevitably we haven’t even conceived some of it’s most common uses yet, much in the way it would have been impossible to conceive how plastic would eventually come to be used when it was invented over 100 years ago.

However it’s not all plain sailing. A problem is working with its extreme conductivity which is difficult to control – a necessity if it is to replace silicon as the basis of integrated circuits. Many researchers are highly cautious about saying it will replace silicon. However research into graphene is becoming a matter of priority for governments and companies around the world. 200 companies ranging from big players such as Samsung and IBM to a host of start-ups are currently involved in graphene research, while the EU is likely to award around 1 billion euros in the next ten years. Graphene is very likely to be a material which features heavily in our livesin the not too distant future.

Watch this space….

Let’s Live Forever

I remember seeing my Grandfather for the last time. He was in his early nineties and so had had a good innings by our current standards. But he was in hospital, for some age related reason that I can’t remember now. My grandmother had died a few months before, and he had adored her – so clearly things were not rosy. He was in a lot of pain, hadn’t been able to get out of bed for the last two weeks and clearly conversing pleasantly with bright and bushy grandchildren about the future was hard. He did well though and our goodbyes were very civilized and pleasant.

Then on the way out of the hospital I remembered I’d forgotten a coat and had to go back to his room to get it. Now that his visitors had gone, he had taken off his game face and he was miserable. I’ve never seen anyone look so fed up with the world in all my life. He hadn’t expected me to walk back in, and it was obviously a lot of effort -too much- to play the pleasant grand-dad once more. We nodded silently at each other, and he watched gravely as I picked up my coat and walked out. But there was no pretense, he was utterly miserable. We never saw each other again. Definitely not a Hollywood ending.

And up to the last few months, he and my grandmother had lead a pretty healthy and independent life relatively speaking. Many people have a far more difficult time. So I’m a great advocate of eradicating damage to the body caused by aging and ultimately reversing the aging process Aubrey de Grey a Cambridge University researcher is too – and I like the authoratitive and matter-of-fact way he talks about this.

Essentially he says there are 7 types of damage that lead to diseases associated with aging – and we know how to treat all of them. As yet we are not at the point where we can put the treatments together into an effective anti-aging regime, but we are close. He predicts that we will see an age extended mouse within the next 10 years and the first age-extended human 15 years after that.

At first we’ll look at life-extending treatments which will add 30 years or so on to the life of an average person. It’s easy to think this means someone who receives this treatment will live to be a normal age + 30 years (e.g. 80+30=110). However this is not the case. They will certainly live to 110 but before that, further treatments will become available which will let them live another 30 years, then another 50, etc.. etc… At this point humans will have reached ‘longevity escape velocity’ which means the treatments get better faster than aging can catch up. We’ll then escape the effects of aging. Not long after this we’ll actually start being able to reverse the aging process and effectively get younger again.

De Grey has said that the first person to live to 1000 is only around 10 years younger than the first person to live to 150 and is probably alive today. This is something we should all be talking about. This will lead to many important questions. What about over-population? How will the earth cope? How will our economic system support so many retirees? Many of these will be answered by technological breakthroughs in other areas. But as a species we will undoubtedly need to come up with a workable solution.

Nevertheless these are not reasons not to address the problem of aging. De Grey says it’s a moral imperative similar to finding a cure for cancer. I tend to agree. Yes, potential problems could arise but as a species, I’m confident that we can find a solution or set of solutions. Decaying with old age is not something we should stick with simply because we’re frightened of what might happen otherwise.

The Genomic Revolution

“The world has completely changed and none of you know about it”

This quote from Richard Resnick’s TED talk – sums up the state of the art in genome sequencing, which will radically change how the field of medicine will look tomorrow. As with computing power, the cost and speed at which a genome -the biological map of an organism – can be read is improving exponentially.

In 1988 the Human Genome project was launched with the aim of mapping out the components, or bases, of a Human genome. There are around 3 billion bases in a human genome altogether. In total, the first time round it took 15 years and cost just under $4 billion. Today – one modern sequencing machine can carry out the equivalent of 200 ‘Human genome projects’ in a week. And do this 100 million times more cheaply. As Richard Resnick puts it, this is the equivalent of filling your car up with petrol in 1998, waiting until today and instead of being able to travel 600 miles or so, being able to travel to Jupiter and back. This pace of change is continuing to accelerate.

So what? Well, it means that soon having your genome read will be easier and quicker than having a blood test today. This means that your genome can be scanned for any mutations. Knowing where any mutations are will then let doctors understand what diseases you may be likely to get. These can then be treated before they become a problem.

Right now many diseases need to be discovered through trial and error. This may not be a problem if your disease is clear to spot, and does not look like other diseases. However in many cases it’s not that simple. This means people often have to undergo endless rounds of surgery or medication to identify and cure a disease. Being able to read someone’s genome will mean that the wrong medication and the wrong surgery can be avoided, saving a lot of pain, time and lives. The upshot of this is that we could all live an extra 10 or 20 years because of our ability to spot diseases before they become serious. As Richard Resnick puts it – In 10 years time, the way we treat people for illnesses such as cancer today will look as primitive as blood letting.

And this is already possible today. It’s just a question of time before the cost comes down enough to make this technology available to everyone, and we have enough research completed to know how to use it properly.

How Will We Spend Our Time in 2050?

What would we do with ourselves if we didn’t have to work? Imagine you’d won an eye-watering amount on the lottery and never needed to work again or worry about food, shelter, the well-being of friends and family, etc.. What would you do?

It’s an interesting question and one that often leads to ruin if you read about the fate of some lottery winners. Yet, this may well be a situation we all find ourselves in come 2050. Right now many menial repetitive jobs are carried out by robots. As their intelligence improves, we can anticipate that ‘automation’ will move up the value chain from ‘bolt screwer’ to resource management up to CEO level. What’s more, we can anticipate that robots will be able to do a much better job. This is already the case in many areas such as stock trading, transport planning, jet turbine design, call routing and product assembly.

So machines can do the menial jobs and the more sophisticated jobs better than us. They are also able to be creative as well, given that by then we will have been able to reverse engineer the human brain together with its random and chaotic thought processes. On top of this though machines are able to match this creativity with efficiency and speed in a way that we have never yet been able to. What do normal humans do then? Do we become like the humans in the film “Wall-e” – feeding ourselves all day, and doing very little else? Effectively we might become like animals in a zoo, and there’s a danger that we only become a shadow of our former selves, with no challenges (everything we could desire is thrown at us) and no energy or will to make these happen.

I think we need to be productive – but exactly what we produce may well be very different to what we produce today. Right now we live very much in an area of production. This may be the production of tangible goods (e.g. televisions) or intangible goods (e.g. television programmes or communication services). These goods are then traded. One convenient way to measure how much we produce is via the concept of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Indeed this is a classic objective measure of the economy, and is used to give a broad measure of how well we are doing. Countries with a large GDP are rated as doing better than those with a small GDP.

However in an era of ubiquitous nanotechnology, and intelligent machines that can do our productive jobs better than we can – will GDP still be such an issue? After all we can fabricate whatever we want when we want. The thought work that goes into this will also be done for us incredibly quickly and cheaply. Might we as a society turn our thoughts to other things? I suspect we will, and my guess is that the concept of well-being will become a far more important one. This quote from Robert Kennedy at the beginning of his 1968 presidential campaign embodies the thinking behind this quite well:

“Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

This quote is just as relevant today as it was in 1968. Perhaps more so in fact. Yet today well-being or happiness is still seen as a by-product of increased GDP. Despite a steady increase in GDP and economic well-being however, an increase in happiness levels cannot be seen. In fact in 2006 the European Social Survey indicated that 61% of Europeans felt that life was getting worse, while in France the figure was 84% despite the fact that GDP was continually on the increase.

The UK government has decided to start looking into this via the creation of a happiness index. While this is a worthwhile aim, it’s possible to wonder if this will have any greater outcome that Robert Kennedy’s words back in 1968. I suspect that eventually we will look at this subject seriously but not until the need to strive for ever greater productivity has been removed by the fact that there is no need for us as humans to work and “produce” any longer. This transition away from the need to work will probably not be without its stresses and strains, much as is the case with lottery winners whose lives lose the structure and goals they once needed. However optimistically, I think this will eventually lead to a happier human race.

And what will we be doing if we are not commuting to the office every day? I’ll put myself out on a limb here and predict the following: I think we will turn to exploring as a race that which makes us human, and exploring the abilities that we don’t currently use. I suspect meditation and an exploration of our ‘inner selves’ will become more mainstream, as will an exploration of the esoteric. We will be aided by enhanced intelligence in this one way or another, and I find it impossible to believe that enhanced intelligence would not be intrigued by the big questions in life such as “Why are we here?”, “Where did we come from and where are we going?”. I also suspect individuality and diversity will be more celebrated, and art in all its forms will increase. In short I anticipate a new Renaissance, but at a depth that is hard for us to conceptualise.

You can read more interesting views on the role of happiness in society in the Happiness Manifesto.

Lighting Up The Future

The world is a pretty boring place to look at at night. Yes, if you go to many city centres (e.g Akihabara in Tokyo) there’s more visual stimulation than many of us can handle – but if you venture out to the suburbs, and off the main streets, that changes very quickly. And this is the case for roads, tunnels, offices, parks, and our own homes. The default is still the white overhead light.

Things are changing however, which will mean very quickly that the world at night will begin to look a much more varied place. LED lighting is one technology which will enable this. LED’s are rapidly becoming cheaper, more powerful and ever more energy efficient. These use a fraction of the power of old incandescent lights, and less even than the fluorescent energy saving lights you now get if you try to buy a lightbulb at your local supermarket. LED’s are different as they can be made much smaller, are available in a range of colours, can be controlled easily, and are getting brighter and brighter. This means you can use more of them as they are cheaper and you can put them anywhere as they don’t get hot. They also don’t have to be white. This gives options.

Looking further afield though, OLED lighting is an even more interesting alternative. These are available right now in the form of screens for some makes of mobile phones. OLED’s can be made paper thin, bendy and highly lightweight. As such instead of having ‘lights’ – the very things that we currently look to light up today such as wallpaper, table clothes or window blinds can be made light sources themselves. They can be any colour and show any image at any level of brightness. This won’t just be the case inside the home – but will apply to objects in some of the roads, tunnels and parks I was complaining about earlier. This video from GE shows some of the possibilites:

When objects themselves become our new light-sources, the future will indeed look like a very different (and much less boring) place.

It’s Hard To Predict The Future

I came across these images yesterday. It made me realise just how hard it’s always been to predict the future. The images are part of the National Library of France’s collection and were created in 1910 to depict the year 2000. They are a mixture of the hilarious, the bold, and the correct.

Clothes in the year 2000 can be seen to be seriously retro. And drive-through bars seem to be the order of the day.

I also love the bat-wings that the firemen get to use.

On the other hand many of the themes in the pictures have not changed that much since 1910. Roller-skates have been with us for many years – although I think the artist saw them more as a means of mass transport. The video-phone (or Skype) has also been with us for a number of years now.

I can also easily listen to voice mail if I need to, although sadly not delivered by Butler..

Many of these ideas have also been proposed as happening soon. Ray Kurzweil claims that downloading knowledge directly into our brains and the automation of industries such as the construction industry will be with us within a few decades.

I also read a little while ago about a proposal for a electric high-speed rail link between Europe and China.

The thing that strikes me about predictions of the future, is that the basic goals behind such ideas often end up happening. The hard part to predict is ‘how’ and exactly ‘when’. (Skype is a perfect example). The more outlandish visions in this collection may well come to pass in a few years just looking slightly different. I hope the Batwings make it intact though…!

You can see more predictions of the future at the Paleofuture Blog. Highly worth having a look at…

Talking With Robots

This is an interesting video. A journalist – Amy, speaks with a Robot – Bina48. The conversation on the robot’s side is how you might expect – a little disjointed and prone to resorting to definitions of abstract concepts which shows how far we are from convincing Human Like Artificial intelligence at the moment.

But watching the conversation reveals a number of interesting issues. Firstly – it shows how important the face is that you talk to. Bina the robot looks pretty dishevelled, and it’s / her eyes look empty, not unlike someone who’s been taking illegal substances. This fits well to the distracted nature of her conversation and actually makes the whole effect more convincing. Also interesting is how Amy the journalist reacts when Bina looks her in the eyes and uses her name. This wouldn’t be the case if she was using a keyboard.

When talking with the robot’s creator, Amy is also unsure whether to use ‘it’ of ‘her’ when referring to the robot. In the end they revert to calling it ‘her’. At the end, Amy wonders whether it’s OK to just get up and leave.

These facts all point to how our relations with emerging Artificial Intelligences are likely to be in the future. How should we address and refer to them? Should we feel OK when experiencing real emotional reactions to computer software? Do they experience emotional reactions to us (e.g. getting offended)? I suspect in the end we will think of them and treat them as human if they look and behave human enough, and use the right non-verbal cues. They won’t even need to be perfect human replicas.

The Anti-Technology Movement

In 1813, the British government faced a bit of a problem. Britain was at war fighting Napoleon Bonaparte of France on the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time however they were also fighting a group of discontents back in the UK who were unhappy with the fact that the new technology of the weaving machine had begun to replace them in their jobs. More troops were actually deployed to fight this group of protestors known as Luddites than were being used to fight the French.

In the early 1800’s – Luddism was a big deal. The movement began in Nottingham in 1811 and was started by Ned Ludd who apparently smashed two Stocking Frames or mechanical knitting machines with a hammer in a fit of rage. Some versions of the story say this was due to the fact that he had just been disciplined for ‘idleness’. Others say this was due to his father telling him to do what was right.

 King Ludd (Source: Wikipedia)

Regardless of the motivation behind this first instance of machine breaking – the idea spread rapidly. Knitting machines would often be found broken, with the excuse that “Ned Ludd did it”. Soon many of the manufacturing heartlands of Northern England were witness to crowds breaking into mills and destroying the newly acquired machinery. This was all done under the leadership of the (mythical and newly promoted) “King Ludd”. As well as employing troops, the British government also went to the extent of making machine breaking a crime punishable by death. Many were executed as a result with others receiving similarly horrific punishments such as deportation to Australia. By 1814 – these extreme measures succeeded in quashing the movement, although the description lives on to describe anyone who is actively against new technology.

Luddism will most likely make it back into the spotlight again in the next decade or two. In this case, it’s unlikely to be about technology taking away people’s livelihoods (which has come to be accepted as a fact of life these days) but rather about the rapid change in what it means to be human, as well as the fact that our current position of dominance will come to be challenged by the technology that we ourselves have created. Losing one’s job to a machine was a new and rapid shock two hundred years ago. Losing our position at the top of the evolutionary tree will also be a new and rapid shock to many in the next few decades. People will feel threatened, stories will abound of evil and powerful machines, and it’s very unlikely to be unclear what exactly will happen.

Personally, I see our current state of existence as simply a stepping stone to something better. Life has always been this way, and I think always will be. There will most likely be peaks and troughs along the way depending on your point of view and where you live (e.g. the transition from the Roman Empire to the “dark ages”), but by most objective measures we are now living in the best time that ever existed. However I think it is important to address concerns where they exist, and the future of humanity is a very important concern. Where feasible it should be possible for people to opt out and live away from these constantly accelerating changes should they wish, much as the Amish do today. I do think though that the advantages that these technologies will bring will be so self-evident that the majority will be happy with them, and that ultimately progress and ‘the new’ will triumph.

What’s Next?

I work in R&D in the telecoms industry, and it’s incredible how hard it is to work out what will happen in only a few years time. Product managers who have to stand by the profit figures for their particular product will give you a pretty good idea of what’s in store next year. However the further in the future you look, the harder it gets. I’m currently working with a research consortium of several companies which are using eachothers’ opinions to work out what might be happening 10 years ahead, but even here we’re constantly having to make disclaimers around many of our ideas. The more specific you want to be the harder it gets to be accurate as so much can happen in 10 years.

This is why it’s so refreshing to encounter someone who confidently makes predictions 50 years ahead and has a track record of spotting developments that seemingly came from nowhere. Ray Kurzweil accurately predicted when a computer would first beat a human Grand Master at chess around 10 years before it happened. He accurately predicted the explosive growth of the Internet, the growth of mobile phones and the predominance of wireless communication. All easy with hindsight but much more difficult ahead of the fact.

This is why his predictions for the future are so interesting. Many of them sound mad – but as Kurzweil has said – all of these are predictable using the law of accelerating returns, and appreciating that developments in the future are not going to be anything like in the past. Here are some of the most interesting predictions in my opinion. You can find a more complete list here:

2010’s

• A $1000 PC will have the same computational power as the human brain
• Most business interactions involve interacting with a simulated person
• Computers are embedded in walls, clothes, jewellery, etc and come in wide range of unexpected shapes and sizes
• Algorithms that allow the brain to be constructed from a (relatively) simple instruction set begin to be transferred to neural nets
• Humans begin to have deep personal relationships with computer personalities

2020’s

• A $1000 PC will have the same computational power as 1000 human brains
• Extremely powerful neural nets will be in common use which have been constructed by reverse engineering the human brain
• Non-biological intelligence combines the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence, with the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence
• Direct brain implants allow fully immersive Virtual Reality (as in the Matrix)
• Computers are able to generate new knowledge without human help, and know every piece of knowledge that has been generated by the human race
• Manufacturing, agricultural and transport industries are almost entirely automated
• Artificial Intelligences claim to be conscious and petition for recognition of this fact
• Workings of the brain will be understood.
• Nanobots capable of entering the bloodstream to “feed” cells and extract waste make the normal mode of human food consumption obsolete.
• Nanotech-based manufacturing in widespread use, radically altering the economy as products can suddenly be produced for a fraction of their traditional-manufacture costs.
• Virtual reality will be so high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real reality.
• Viruses, Bacteria etc. no longer dangerous for humans as medical nanobots—infinitely more durable, intelligent and capable than any microorganism—become sufficiently advanced.
• A computer passes the Turing Test by the last year of the decade (2029), meaning that it can think like a human

2030s

• Mind uploading becomes possible.
• Full immersion Virtual Reality possible via Nanomachines inserted directly into the brain, removing need for extra equipment
• “Experience beamers” using real time transmission of a persons experiences will be available for other people to remotely experience. (as in Being John Malkovich)
• Nanomachines allow people to greatly expand their cognitive, memory and sensory capabilities, to directly interface with computers, and to “telepathically” communicate with other, similarly augmented humans via wireless networks.
• People can alter the neural connections within their brains, changing the basis of the person’s intelligence, memories and personality.
• Human body 2.0 appears consisting of a nanotechnological system of nourishment and circulation—obsolescing many internal organs—and an improved skeleton.

2040s

• Human body 3.0 is gradually implemented during this decade. It lacks a fixed, corporeal form and can alter its shape and external appearance at will via foglet-like nanotechnology.
• People spend most of their time in full-immersion virtual reality
• Foglets (swarms of molecular sized robots that can come together to create real objects) are in use.

Image Source: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2045

• $1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined.
• The technological singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate too quickly for normal humans to keep up
• Technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and cannot be accurately predicted
• The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. Sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

Post-2045

• A.I.s convert Earth’s matter into engineered, computational substrate. Earth becomes one, gigantic computer
• Nature reserves are set aside on the planetary surface for those humans who decided to remain in their natural state.
• All matter and energy in the universe is converted into a massive computer. Artificial intelligence radiates outward from Earth in effect, “waking up” the universe as inanimate “dumb” matter (rocks, dust, gases, etc.) is converted into structured matter capable of supporting life (albeit synthetic life)..

Obviously the further in the future you go, the harder it gets to understand or relate to some of the events postulated. There are a number of themes in here that I find particularly interesting however.

The first is how the primacy of the human race -as we know it- is unceremoniously dumped out of the window. This pinnacle of evolutionary achievement turns out to be a small stepping stone on the way to something much greater. Our brains are not that special, our bodies are not that special. Ultimately then our institutions, beliefs, philosophy, art, science as we have them today are also arguably not that special. A more advanced state of man is something which is fun to reflect on.

The second is how ultimately ‘fairy tales’ are possible. Changing the form of one’s body, creating physical objects out of thin air, transferring the mind between bodies, experiencing someone else’s life, living indefinitely etc In fact there’s not much which is not possible if all of this is able to happen. The maxim ‘You create your own reality’ becomes much more than an inspiring quote – but can be seen to be a totally practical statement

The third is that there is a new race in town – Artificial Intelligence. Similar in many ways to having a child that grows up to be bigger, stronger more successful and more intelligent than you are. This is an apt comparison, because it’s actually something we generally want our children to be. Similarly in the case of AI’s the better they are – the more they can do for us. While we are worrying about how fast everything is these days and how different they are from “back in our day” they will be out taking evolution to the next stage (or waking up the Universe). The big difference between our own physical children and AI’s is that there will be no clear boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This is a huge opportunity for the human race, and for many something to be feared.

If Kurzweil is right (and I believe he is) the odd timeline glitch not-withstanding. The future will be almost unrecognisable within most of our life-times. Given the seismic shift such changes will bring, I think it’s imperative that we begin dialogue on their implications earlier rather than later. This allows us to be more prepared when the changes occur – and also to guide these changes so that they occur in the right way.