An artificially intelligent future: Ray Kurzweil on engineering the brain

Ray Kurzweil is an American technologist and futurist who is on a mission to make us all immortal, starting with himself, thanks to what he calls 'the law of accelerating returns'. The rate of change is getting faster to the extent that 'within 10 or 15 years we will be able to overcome cancer and heart disease, and stop and reverse ageing'. Thanks to the 'exponential progression' of technology, Kurzweil says, we are heading for 'profound changes', an event horizon where artificial intelligence spirals beyond our control, or even our understanding.

In his latest, published recently in America, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil envisages 'reverse engineering the human brain' and a time when humanity and technology will fuse to give birth to a new sort of existence. But why stop there? Kurzweil believes that beyond this lies an inflection point, a nirvana where we can scan our consciousnesses into computers, then inhabit them as software, for ever, virtually.

So what's next? Machines are going to become more human-like, Kurzweil predicts. In How to Create a Mind, he discusses how to simulate the brain, understand 'the principles of operation, the basic ideas that evolution utilised to create intelligent performance' and then 'focus, amplify and leverage them' to create even smarter machines.

Kurzweil dismisses the claim of his detractors that it would take 'trillions of lines of code' to simulate a brain. He sees the brain as layer upon layer of pattern recognition, that extend from spotting the shape of a letter to irony, humour or pity. 'There are 300 million pattern recognisers in the human cortex,' he says. By simulating these biological modules, he is confident that before long the moment will come when computers can model human consciousness.

And yet, Kurzweil adds, 'There are limitations to the human brain.' The electrical signals that zip around our heads are somewhat sluggish. So why not, he says, develop ways to download our minds into machines? 'We have extended our physical reach and we are now going to extend our mental reach, by merging with our tools.' To do that non-invasively will take technology that he predicts is only a few decades away.

Now 64, he wants to ensure that he is still around when humanity takes its next evolutionary step. His father died of heart disease, and he himself was diagnosed with high cholesterol and type 2 (adult) diabetes aged 35. After using old-fashioned diet to tackle these problems, Kurzweil decided to try speculative ideas. A decade ago he met Terry Grossman, a 'leading proponent of immortality medicine', who prescribed a cocktail of complementary treatments. In reality, that means about 150 pills a day. Kurzweil claims his physical profile now matches that of 'someone much younger than myself', so he may still be alive when scientists build the next 'bridge' in technology, the stem cell revolution, and that in turn will keep him making predictions until the subsequent bridge, when nanobots will have been designed to prowl around his bloodstream.

A conversation with Kurzweil is entertaining, thought-provoking and just a little bit bonkers. But one thing is certain this is a man who is not prepared to accept his limitations.

Roger Highfield is director of external affairs at the Science Museum Group. 'How to Create a Mind', by Ray Kurzweil, will be published by Duckworth in February

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An artificially intelligent future: Ray Kurzweil on engineering the brain