iMedia: You will be giving the keynote address for the iMedia Breakthrough Summit. What can the audience expect from your presentation?
Kurzweil: I will provide a broad perspective on how the exponential growth of information technology will transform communications in the decade ahead and beyond. This exponential growth is remarkably predictable, belying the common wisdom that you cannot predict the future. The price-performance of computing, for example, has been growing at a smooth exponential pace going back to the 1890 American census. Exponential growth is also very explosive. Taking 30 steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16... ) gets us to a billion, whereas 30 steps linearly (which reflects our intuition about the future) gets us to 30. That is why people's imagination about the future is often very limited compared to what happens.
iMedia: You've proposed that exponentially advancing technology may be advancing too quickly for people to keep up with. And indeed, marketers are already struggling with consumers adopting technology more rapidly than they can plan campaigns around. Any advice you can offer to help marketers manage this accelerated technological pace and deliver innovative solutions for their clients?
Kurzweil: The trend so far is that communications technology is moving closer to us rather than forcing humans to become more like the classical notion of a machine. When I was a student at MIT, you did have to be an engineer to use the computer, and I had to use my bicycle to get to the one computer on campus. Today, I have a computer on my belt, and I am able to access virtually all human knowledge with a few keystrokes. And, already, 5 billion people have these mobile devices in their pockets. The technologies that succeed in the marketplace are the ones that meet our basic human needs to communicate and socialize.
Within 20 years, computers will match human intelligence and pass the "Turing test," in which they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. But this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us and displace us. We will use these machines as we have always used our tools -- to extend our own reach. We will put these machines inside our bodies to keep us healthier, and in our brains to make us smarter. We will send these computers, which will be the size of blood cells, into our brains noninvasively through the capillaries. If it sounds futuristic to put computers in our brains, I would point out that Parkinson's patients do this already, and the latest generation of this FDA-approved neural implant allows new software to be downloaded into the computer in the patient's brain from outside the body. That's today, and in the future we will all be doing this with millions of such computers in a noninvasive fashion. So we will need to merge with our technology in order to keep up with it.
But my advice for the decade ahead is to consider basic human needs that go back millennia. It was by serving those needs that current technologies such as the cellphone and social networks have been able to succeed.
iMedia: Through your work, you have been able to accurately predict the internet's content explosion, and the ubiquity of wireless communications (on devices that are ever decreasing in size). What current breakthrough platform do you find most compelling? And which ones do you expect to see in the next few years that will transform the landscape of interactive media?
Kurzweil: Every device we handle will become intelligent and part of the ever pervasive network. We will be online all the time with a seamless blend of real and virtual/augmented reality. Our everyday reality will essentially be one encompassing interactive media.
Jodi Harris is senior editor at iMedia Connection.
On Twitter? Follow Jodi at @Joderama. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
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