Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts in-body computers and a potential war with machines

AP

Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil, 56, speaks with a reporter during an interview in his office, in Wellesley, Mass., Jan. 12,2005.

By Eli Segall (contact)

Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013 | 2 a.m.

If you worry that the Internet, computers and other electronics play an outsized role in daily life, futurist Ray Kurzweil has one message for you:

This is only the beginning.

Kurzweil, who will speak Sunday night at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Audi Speaker Series, predicts a high-tech society that makes today's lifestyle look straight out of the Stone Age. As he sees it, people will have tiny computing devices in their bodies, more powerful brains and longer lives. Simply put, the world will be dominated by artificial intelligence.

The 64-year-old entrepreneur is the leading evangelist of Singularity, the idea that machines will spontaneously adopt humanlike characteristics, become vastly more intelligent than people and change mankind forever. One possibility is they'll turn on us and wipe out humanity.

Kurzweil has pegged the transformation for 2045.

The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be 1 billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today, he says on singularity.com.

View post:
Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts in-body computers and a potential war with machines