Futurist and scientist/inventor Ray Kurzweil welcomes the new year with predictions of how technology will change humanity by 2020. Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand are among Kurzweil’s forecasts for the coming decade.
He believes accelerating change will continue to be driven by exponential growth in the power of information technology, which approximately doubles for the same cost every year. He notes that there has been a billion-fold increase in the amount computation per dollar since he was a student at MIT in 1965.
Kurzweil foresees, “the very idea of a smart phone will begin to change. Our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in the air. Our entire visual field of view will be a three-dimensional full immersion virtual realty.”
In the field of health, he notes that there are over a thousand projects to change our genes away from disease and toward health, not just in newborns but in mature individuals. Health interventions can be designed on computers and tested on biological simulators. These technologies are doubling in power every year and will get a thousand times more powerful in a decade.
Memory will be constantly aided by the information available on the Internet. Kurzweil predicts that memory and the Internet will begin to become indistinguishable. With regard to energy, Kurzweil explains that we have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet all of the world’s energy needs and it is possible to create the technologies to completely replace fossil fuels.