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是一名發明家、作家和未來學家，他也是語音和字符識別、閱讀技術、音樂合成、虛擬現實和人工智能的先驅。在這些領域，他先后成立了九家公司，其中包括設在麻省坎布里奇市的Kurzweil技術公司。他獲獎無數，其中包括美國國家技術獎。在他的新書《奇跡將至:當人類超越生物的時候》中，57歲的Kurzweil預言，人類智能最終將與計算機智能融合而無法區分。他最近告訴美國的《計算機世界》，這些將如何以及何時出現。
你有關人腦逆向工程的想法好像還是非常遙遠的。
時至今日，我們還沒有工具能以足夠高的分辨率掃描大腦，但現已有5或6種掃描新技術，我們人類第一次能看到大腦生成思想。
我們收集到的大腦數據的數量每年都要翻一番。利用獲得特定區域的數據，我們就能相當快地建立起有關它們的詳細數學模型。 到2020年，我們將擁有大腦所有區域的非常精確的詳細模擬，這還是一個保守的預測。
每秒10×1016次計算足以仿真大腦的所有區域。日本不久前宣布到2010年有兩臺巨型機將達到這個速度。
問題就來了。我們是不是足夠的聰明能理解自己的智能？這可能就是復雜系統的特點——它們不能復雜到能理解自身。但實際不是這樣的。
為什么我們有了濕件（即人腦）還要再造軟件的人腦？
它將非常強大，因為我們能把目前人工智能的優勢（尤其是模式識別）與機器已經展現的優異的方法結合起來。
計算機本身的未來又是什么樣的？
一旦超越了摩爾定律，我們就將利用三維的分子計算。(到了20世紀40年代后期)，1立方英寸的納管電路將比人腦強1億倍。在軟件方面，(20世紀30年代，)機器將能訪問它們自己的源碼，并通過一個不斷加速的迭代設計周期對其進行改進。因此，最終這些系統將遠遠地比人類更聰明，能將生物和非生物智能的優勢結合起來。我并不認為這是機器智能的外來入侵，它是從我們的文明中產生出來的。
在下個十年初，圖像就能直接寫到視網膜。你如何制造實際非常小但同時又非常大的屏幕？將屏幕做進眼鏡，再將圖像直接射到視網膜。
你說計算機將“消失”，這是什么意思？
它們將做進我們的衣服以及進入環境，它們將非常小。我們也將從目前我們使用的計算機只是網絡的連接物（像車輪的輻條）但不是網絡的一部分這樣的想法，轉移到每個設備都是網絡上的節點，意思是說，不僅你能收發自己的信息，而且還要傳送別人的信息。它是連續地自我組織的，因此所有的通信連接都是在尋找最高效的路徑。
文章來源于領測軟件測試網 http://www.kjueaiud.com/
