Introduction

I once spent a few days with the late dolphinologist John C. Lilly, M.D. Talking about advanced intelligence in other species. I asked him, "How can you say that dolphins are more intelligent than we are? Isn’t knowledge tautological? How can we know more than we do know? Who would know it, except us?"

Ray Kurzweil posits that we will soon be facing a similar question through the merger of human and machine intelligence. "One response is not to want to be enhanced," he says, "not to have nanobots. A lot of people say that they just want to stay a biological person. But what will the Singularity look like to people who want to remain biological? The answer is that they really won't notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants....there's a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won't actually notice."

Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur, has been pushing the technological envelope for years in his field of pattern recognition. Among his many accomplishments, he developed the technology behind the flatbed scanner, and he is a leading expert in speech recognition. In his radical view of the future the operant word is....exponential. For example, "One application of sending billions of nanobots into the brain is full-immersion virtual reality. If you want to be in real reality, the nanobots sit there and do nothing, but if you want to go into virtual reality, the nanobots shut down the signals coming from my real senses, replace them with the signals I would be receiving if I were in the virtual environment, and then my brain feels as if it's in the virtual environment. And you can go there yourself — or, more interestingly you can go there with other people — and you can have everything from sexual and sensual encounters to business negotiations, in full-immersion virtual reality environments that incorporate all of the senses."

Read on.

— JB