Inventor, writer and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a pioneer in speech and character recognition, reading technology, music synthesis, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He has founded nine businesses in those fields, including Kurzweil Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and he's won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Technology. In his recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil, 57, predicts that ultimately, human intelligence and computer intelligence will fuse and become indistinguishable. He recently told Computerworld how and when that might come about.
Your idea to reverse-engineer the human brain seems pretty far out.
Until recently, we haven't had the tools to scan the brain with sufficient resolution. But there are five or six new scanning technologies. For the first time, we can see the brain creating our thoughts.
The amount of data we are gathering about the brain is doubling every year. As we get the data from particular regions, we can rather rapidly create detailed mathematical models of them. It’s a conservative expectation that we will have a very accurate detailed simulation of all the regions of the brain by the late 2020s.
Ten quadrillion [1016] calculations per second is sufficient to emulate all the regions of the brain. Japan just announced two supercomputers that will achieve that by 2010.
The question arises, Are we intelligent enough to understand our own intelligence? Maybe that’s a feature of complex systems——they can’t be so complex as to understand themselves. But it turns out that’s not the case.
But why re-create the brain in software when we already have it in wetware?
It’s going to be very powerful, because we’ll be able to combine what currently are advantages of human intelligence, particularly our pattern recognition, with ways in which machines are already demonstrably superior.
What’s the future of the computer itself?
Once we get past Moore’s Law, we’ll use 3-D molecular computing. (In the late 2040s), one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry will be 100 million times more powerful than the human brain. On the software side, machines (in the 2030s])will be able to access their own source code and improve it via an ever-accelerating, iterative design cycle. So ultimately, these systems will be vastly more intelligent than humans and will combine the advantages of biological and nonbiological intelligence. I don't see this as an alien invasion of intelligent machines; this is emerging from within our civilization.
Early in the next decade, images will be written directly to our retinas. How can you make screens really tiny but big at the same time? Put them in your eyeglasses and beam images directly to the retina.
What do you mean when you say computers will “disappear”?
They’ll make their way into our clothing and into the environment, and they’ll be very tiny. We'll also move away from the idea that the computers we use are spokes into a.network but not part of the network, to where every device will be a node on the network, meaning that not only will you be sending and receiving your own messages, you'll be passing on other people’s messages. It will be continually self-organizing, so that all communication links will be continuously finding the most efficient path.（To Be Continued）
一切皆IT
Ray Kurzweil是一名发明家、作家和未来学家，他也是语音和字符识别、阅读技术、音乐合成、虚拟现实和人工智能的先驱。在这些领域，他先后成立了九家公司，其中包括设在麻省坎布里奇市的Kurzweil技术公司。他获奖无数，其中包括美国国家技术奖。在他的新书《奇迹将至:当人类超越生物的时候》中，57岁的Kurzweil预言，人类智能最终将与计算机智能融合而无法区分。他最近告诉美国的《计算机世界》，这些将如何以及何时出现。
你有关人脑逆向工程的想法好像还是非常遥远的。
时至今日，我们还没有工具能以足够高的分辨率扫描大脑，但现已有5或6种扫描新技术，我们人类第一次能看到大脑生成思想。
我们收集到的大脑数据的数量每年都要翻一番。利用获得特定区域的数据，我们就能相当快地建立起有关它们的详细数学模型。 到2020年，我们将拥有大脑所有区域的非常精确的详细模拟，这还是一个保守的预测。
每秒10×1016次计算足以仿真大脑的所有区域。日本不久前宣布到2010年有两台巨型机将达到这个速度。
问题就来了。我们是不是足够的聪明能理解自己的智能？这可能就是复杂系统的特点——它们不能复杂到能理解自身。但实际不是这样的。
为什么我们有了湿件（即人脑）还要再造软件的人脑？
它将非常强大，因为我们能把目前人工智能的优势（尤其是模式识别）与机器已经展现的优异的方法结合起来。
计算机本身的未来又是什么样的？
一旦超越了摩尔定律，我们就将利用三维的分子计算。(到了20世纪40年代后期)，1立方英寸的纳管电路将比人脑强1亿倍。在软件方面，(20世纪30年代，)机器将能访问它们自己的源码，并通过一个不断加速的迭代设计周期对其进行改进。因此，最终这些系统将远远地比人类更聪明，能将生物和非生物智能的优势结合起来。我并不认为这是机器智能的外来入侵，它是从我们的文明中产生出来的。
在下个十年初，图像就能直接写到视网膜。你如何制造实际非常小但同时又非常大的屏幕？将屏幕做进眼镜，再将图像直接射到视网膜。
你说计算机将“消失”，这是什么意思？
它们将做进我们的衣服以及进入环境，它们将非常小。我们也将从目前我们使用的计算机只是网络的连接物（像车轮的辐条）但不是网络的一部分这样的想法，转移到每个设备都是网络上的节点，意思是说，不仅你能收发自己的信息，而且还要传送别人的信息。它是连续地自我组织的，因此所有的通信连接都是在寻找最高效的路径。
文章来源于领测软件测试网 https://www.ltesting.net/
