Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Machines 'to match man by 2029'
By Helen Briggs - BBC science reporter, Boston - Saturday, 16 February 2008

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has
predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make
them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil.

He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to
boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said.

"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence
or better, in many different areas, he said.

Man versus machine

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level
artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional
intelligence by 2029," he said.

"We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and
mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to
keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with
our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into
full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges
facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.

BBC