Transhumanist Kurzweil Predicts Human/Computer Hybrids By 2030s

Transhumanist Kurzweil Predicts Human/Computer Hybrids By 2030s

"Our thinking will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking"

Image Credits: cblue98, Flickr.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has repeated his prediction that humans will meld with computers in the future, but has revised down the time scale by up to 15 years, suggesting that it will be a reality by the 2030s.

Kurzweil, now the director of engineering at Google, told the Exponential Finance conference in New York Wednesday that people will soon be able to to connect their brains directly to the cloud, and augment their existing intelligence with thousands of computers.

“Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” Kurzweil said, explaining that the brain will use DNA nanobots to make the connection.

“We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves,” he said. “In my view, that’s the nature of being human — we transcend our limitations.”

Kurzweil also said he believes that as the cloud grows in size, the more non-biological human thinking will become, until by the early 2040s, people will be more like machines than they will be human, and would be able to fully ‘back up’ their brains like a hard drive.

Addressing concerns over the nature of a non-biological human future, Kurzweil noted “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.” he said.

Kurzweil has often made such predictions about human/computer hybrids. Last year, at the same conference, he said that in less than two decades computers will be able to read at human levels and will also begin to have different human characteristics.

“My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now,” he said.

“When I say about human levels, I’m talking about emotional intelligence. The ability to tell a joke, to be funny, to be romantic, to be loving, to be sexy, that is the cutting edge of human intelligence, that is not a sideshow.” Kurzweil declared.

Kurzweil appears to have brought forward his predictions, given that two years ago he stated that 2045 would be the timeframe for such advances to become reality.

As Infowars has previously noted, when Kurzweil refers to “humanity,” he isn’t referring to you or I, he’s referring to the 1 per cent – the monied elite who will have privileged access to technology that will allow them to eliminate all forms of disease, dispense with the need for a human body and eventually achieve immortality by existing as a computer program on the world wide web.

It is important to emphasize the extreme likelihood that Kurzweil’s transhumanist utopia will not be available to the entirety of humanity but instead will be the domain of a wealthy aristocracy, creating yet another class system. Kurzweil admits this in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, labeling those who refuse or are incapable of cybernetically augmenting themselves as MOSHs – Mostly Original Substrate Humans.

The notion that everyday Americans will be afforded access to such mind expanding technology is ridiculous when one considers that the majority of Americans are becoming more and more dumbed down by the day.

The idea that such people will be enriching their minds with boundless information and merging into non-biological entities in 15-20 years is somewhat laughable.

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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.