Ray Kurzweil on nanobots and pending immortality
Ray Kurzweil is in the news lately, first describing stock-picking to some hedge fund investors, where the most successful investment strategy is determined exactly in the way the best chess move is during any given move:
Because arbitrage opportunities disappear so quickly now, neural networks have emerged that can consider thousands of scenarios at once. It is unlikely, for instance, that Microsoft will begin selling ice cream or IBM declare bankruptcy, but a nonlinear system can consider such possibilities, and thousands of others, without overtaxing computers that must be ready to react in milliseconds.
The at SC06 the inventor described the nanobots that would cruise the human body, cleaning blood passages and doing a lot of useful work, which is required for a body to avoid heart diseases:
By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;
He even points at the exact year, when computational power will exceed the human intelligence:
Computer, or non-biological, intelligence created in the year 2045 will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.