Ray Kurzweil at GDC 2008

For a conference devoted heavily to serious game culture at a sometimes epically pornographic level, it was great to come listen to Kurzweil rattle the brains of developers with the road to singularity.

His talk was excellent and consisted mostly of a rapid fire assault of smoking hot slides and anecdotes that impressed a full house with his prediction work. He drove home the notion that predicting much of the technological and biological evolution is very smooth (and predictable) when graphically represented in exponential terms.

At the end of his talk, Kurzweil provided these predictions for the next 20 years:

2010

• Images written directly to retinas.
• Ubiquitous high handwidth connections to the internet at all times
• Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
• Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
• Augmented real reality
• Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface
• Effective language technologies

2029

• $1,000 of computing will equal 1,000 times the human brain
• Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
• Computers pass the Turing test
• Nonbiological intelligence combines the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence with the speed, memory and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.
• Non-biological inteligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed.

He closed with the statement that in the next 20 years, the sands of time will begin flowing backwards biologically and some of us sitting in the room will likely see the next century…. so hang in there!

These are very important and defining times to be involved with the Metaverse and social computing, and it’s only going to get more interesting from here.