I’d like a new body: Here comes the daring future
Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly in use these days. Even the most cutting-edge medical fields seem likely to chart a new world history in the next few years.
I watched a video about Ray Kurzweil, a futurist whose top 20 predictions about technology I found very interesting because so many have already come true.
He predicted a microcomputer by 2019, and today’s smartphones have gone even further than that in speed and efficiency. Now everyone has his own computer in hand.
But what I find even more interesting is Kurzweil’s forecast that, by 2020, the internet will be accessible everywhere on the planet.
Last May, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets carried 60 Starlink satellites into low orbit and the plan is to boost the number to 12,000, which would indeed deliver global internet access.
In 2022, the relationship between humans and robots will become closer. In 2024, unmanned vehicles will be common on the roads now than many manufacturers are seriously developing them, including Musk’s Tesla Motors.
In 2025, computers will be implanted in people’s bodies in the form of a tiny microchip or nano-bot. By 2029, AI will be greatly improved. Google Duplex already uses AI to respond to vocal commands like a personal secretary and book appointments and reservations.
Medicine will have made tremendous strides by 2032, using nanobot technology implanted in the body to monitor and help manage health and discovering better treatments for disease so that people are less prone to illness and can live longer. Coming soon too, I think, will be gene modification to lengthen the lifespan.
Kurzweil believes that in 2037, the secrets of the human brain will be decoded, offering the possibility of thoughts and memories being uploaded to the digital cloud for storage.
At this point, technology will begin taking two distinct paths.
The first is the AI way now being pursued by Google and other software companies, which will see great improvements.
The second will involve robotics – robots that can walk, flip and demonstrate perfect human-like balance.
It is expected that, by 2038, we will be able to combine AI and robotics to create “robotic people” that look like us, as seen in the movie “Altered Carbon”, set in a future when humans can download their personalities into a chip that can then be implanted in a robot that can have any human appearance the person wishes. We’ll be able to swap bodies and appearances at will.
In 2042, we will be approaching immortality. Medical advances will be crucial to this, but also the concept of “formlessness”, in which a human body is no longer necessary. We will download all the information in our brain to a computer chip and snap the chip into the manufactured body of our own choosing.
And, around 2079-2099, AI will so clever enough to develop on its own without human help.
The world will change dramatically as innovations and inventions emerge as an astonishing rate. Nothing we’ve ever read in science fiction as children could prepare us for what’s to come.
Content from the Think Byte column by Pawutpong Witthayaphanu