He’s clearly a brilliant guy with some very significant accomplishments behind him. Ray Kurzweil offers predictions on where we will be with technology in the future.
In Kurzweil’s estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing “a person’s entire personality, memory, skills and history”, by the end of the 2030s; humans and non-biological machines will then merge so effectively that the differences between them will no longer matter; and, after that, human intelligence, transformed for the better, will start to expand outward into the universe, around about 2045. With this last prediction, Kurzweil is referring not to any recognisable type of space travel, but to a kind of space infusion. “Intelligence,” he writes, “will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst [and] spread out from its origin on Earth.”
The article didn’t elaborate on what you’d be able to do with this off-site backup of your life’s worth personality, memories, and skills. If you bump your head, will you be able to do a restore operation to put it back?
Will we be able to wipe one person’s brain clean and download somebody else’s thoughts into it?
