Kurzweil's predictions about the future of robotics

Ray Kurzweil wakes the world with his vision on Robotica. Kurzweil says:

the boundary between man and machine is quickly disappearing

The Greek were the first who believed in copying the human race. In 1772 the famous Swiss Watchmaker Pierre-Jacques-Droz build the 'self thinking child' named L'Ecrivian (the writer) which could write. The 'brain' of L'Ecrivian was a mechanic computer which, even for todays standards, was very complex. The word robot came to our world from Czech Karel Capek in 1921 who called his play "Rossum's Universal Robots". The play was about machines which took over certain tasks from the human race. So Robotics is not only we talk about in the 21th century. But nowadays we are entering a world were intelligent robotics is a normal aspect of live.

We are making tremendous strides toward being able to understand how the brain works. The performance/price ratio, capacity and bandwidth of every type of information technology, electronic and biological alike, is doubling about every year. I call this pervasive phenomenon the law of accelerating returns. Our grasp of biology is proceeding at an accelerating pace, also exponentially increasing every year. It took scientists five years to be able to sequence HIV, for example, but the SARS virus required only 31 days. The amount of genetic data that’s been sequenced has doubled every year since the human genome project began in 1990, and the cost per base pair has come down by half each year, from $10 in 1990 to about a penny today. We are making comparable gains in understanding how the genome expresses itself in proteins and in understanding how a broad range of biological mechanisms work. Indeed, we are augmenting and re-creating nearly every organ and system in the human body: hearts and pancreases, joints and muscles.

Kurzweil says that the human brain isn't as complex as it seems. This because the design of the brain is hidding in the human Genome. And this Genome doesn't hold that much information.

Since we know the genome’s structure, we can compress its information to only 30 million to 100 million bytes, which is smaller than the code for Microsoft Word. About half of this contains the design of the human brain.

Because of the developments in Artificial Intelligence Kurzweil predicts that we can make with 20 year good simulations of the human brain. And we can integrate this knowledge in simple computer by the early 2030.

So we will have both the hardware and software to achieve human-level intelligence in a machine by 2029. We will also by then be able to construct fully human like androids at exquisite levels of detail and send blood-cell-size robots into our bodies and brains to keep us healthy from inside and to augment our intellect.

What Kurzweil says is that we in 2030 are able to transplant/copy our body and mind into machines. This will be the ultimate virtual world integrated with our physical world. Is this scenario a progress for the human race?

More information:Popsci