Attention all inhabitants of Earth: This is a message for all human beings, including those of you who are members of the Tampa Bay PC Users Group in Tampa, Florida. There is something you should be aware of: The human species is going to go extinct, and that will happen relatively soon, probably within the next few hundred years. It’s not that we’re all going to die at the same time. It’s that within the next 100 years most people, if not everyone, will voluntarily merge into the intelligent machines that are even now being planned and created, resulting in what will arguably be a new species.

At least that’s what well-known scientist, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil postulates in his book, recently out in trade paperback, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Yes, I know, it sounds like just so much mumbo-jumbo baloney, on the same level as the predictions 50 years ago that we’d all be commuting to work in helicopters today. But Kurzweil deals with such skepticism, and draws upon an extremely good record in predicting the future of technology to bolster his vision.

Many of us in the TPCUG remember quite clearly the dawn of the "microcomputer" revolution. It happened, if any event like that can be specifically pinned down, in 1981 when the IBM-PC was introduced. Prior to that everyone was fiddling with Apple II’s and Texas Instrument TI-88's (was that it?), and Altairs, and Commodores, and various computer operating systems, mostly CP/M. Of course, the stodgy, backward business world resisted all along, regarding microcomputers as mere "toys"...until IBM came out with its Personal Computer, whereupon the new "micro"computer was "validated", and the revolution began in earnest.

That revolution has been driven by the inexorable march of "Moore’s Law." Gordon Moore, an inventor of the integrated circuit and in 1965 the chairman of Intel Corporation, postulated then that the number of switches (transistors, if you will) that could be placed onto the face of a silicon wafer would double about every twelve months. In 1975 he is said to have increased the timeline to "every 18 months" (although Kurzweil notes that Moore today says that "his 1975 update was to twenty-four months, and that does appear to be a better fit to the data").

So far no insurmountable obstacles have been encountered to the continuation of Moore’s Law. But Kurzweil notes that chip companies only have confidence that the process can continue for about another 15 to 20 years, when "the paradigm will break down. The transistor insulators will then be just a few atoms thick, and the conventional approach of shrinking them won’t work."

"What then?" Kurzweil asks.

He spends a considerable portion of his book explaining "what then." And explaining why the continued exponential growth of computing power won’t hit a brick wall as expected around 2018 (think quantum computers for starts). If he’s right, the result will be the creation of machines with computing power billions of times more powerful than the human brain, and, ultimately, the merging of human intelligence with machine (or "artificial") intelligence.

Mere science fiction? Kurzweil, who is the inventor of the music synthesizer, reading machines for the blind, and a leading variant of speech-recognition technology, was named Inventor of the Year in 1988 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, Carnegie Mellon University awarded him its top science prize in 1994. He’s not a nut case. And, in fact, he has an enviable record of correctly predicting the future over the past 20 or so years (which he goes over in the book).

What he predicts now—in fact, postulates as "an inexorable emergence"—is the imminent arrival of machine intelligence superior to human intelligence:

Kurzweil is so sure of his predictions that he includes a detailed timeline, handing over the last five chapters of his book to explicit scenarios that he sees emerging in 1999, 2009, 2019, 2029, and finally what the world will look like in 2099. He postulates that by about 2020 a computer that can be purchased with $1,000 of today’s dollars will have the computing power of a single human brain. Then...well, here’s what he says:

I know, I know, it’s incredible (i.e. "not credible") and beyond belief, and there are all kinds of arguments to throw in Kurzweil’s face. We all know about the current limitations of computers and computing, and it seems reasonable that it’s going to be more than a little hard to overcome hurdles in the future to attaining the kind of computing power Kurzweil is talking about. Yet he’s an acknowledged expert in the area, active in computing and invention for over 20 years and making spot-on predictions through the whole time.

There are two concepts which Kurzweil argues are driving the evolution of humans and machines: The Law of Time and Chaos and The Law of Accelerating Returns. The definition of the Law of Time and Chaos is this: "In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos." A further definition of "chaos" is needed: "It refers to the quantity of disordered (that is, random) events that are relevant to the process....If we’re dealing with the process of evolution of life-forms, then chaos represents the unpredictable events encountered by organisms, and the random mutations that are introduced in the genetic code."

The next Law postulated by Kurzweil, which he says is the opposite of the Law of Time and Chaos, "is the most important and relevant for our purposes." This "inverse sublaw" to the Law of Time and Chaos is "the Law of Accelerating Returns." Definition? "As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes)." Thus, "The Law of Accelerating Returns...applies specifically to evolutionary processes. In an evolutionary process, it is order—the opposite of chaos—that is increasing."

But wait! Surely Kurzweil isn’t arguing that biological evolution itself is "speeding up"! Well...yes, he does make that argument. Evolution has one huge deficiency, he notes:

The Law of Accelerating Returns also suggests that evolution will devise a way to bypass itself. That is, it evolves intelligence (namely, us) which is capable of devising intelligence (namely computers) that surpasses itself. Furthermore, says Kurzweil, the Law of Accelerating Returns "predicts that the progression in the capabilities of human-created machines will only continue to accelerate. The human species creating intelligent technology is another example of evolution’s progress building on itself. Evolution created human intelligence. Now human intelligence is designing intelligent machines at a far faster pace."

In fact, Kurzweil argues that normal biological evolution will eventually have to be scrapped altogether by humans. Consider the human brain, the most complex object known in the universe, a crowning achievement of billions of years of biological evolution. Says Kurzweil:

Yes, everyone, he’s talking about scanning and exactly replicating every neural connection and synapse in our brains, in a computer a billion or more times more powerful than the most powerful computers in existence today. "When will this happen?" Kurzweil asks, not figuratively. His guess is that by the year 2023 a personal computer costing $1,000 will have equal processing power to a human brain. From there it is only a short jump to being able to replicate all the connections of a single brain in a single computer.

Ultimate meaning? Immortality. That is, we’re not going to have to die.

So that’s it. Ray Kurzweil, a respected scientist and inventor, is either off his rocker, or is foretelling a future that is assured and unavoidable, and will happen within the lifetime of many us reading this article.