Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Mon 19 Nov 2007 07:34 PM PST
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Ray Kurzweil |
Published on Edge
on January 2007. Reprinted with permission.
Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope.
Let me take these in order.
I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information
technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now
preoccupy us.
Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.
Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences
(such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future
nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development
will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also
by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already
a major area of venture funding.
Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram
biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through
the same exponential growth of information technology, which we
see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic
data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per
base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a
billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting
a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can
turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults)
with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins
and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining
the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes
as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will
be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be
a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease
and aging.
Consider prosperity. The 50-percent deflation rate inherent in
information technology and its growing purview is causing the decline
of poverty. The poverty rate in Asia, according to the World Bank,
declined by 50 percent over the past ten years due to information
technology and will decline at current rates by 90 percent in the
next ten years. All areas of the world are affected, including Africa,
which is now undergoing a rapid invasion of the Internet. Even sub-Saharan
Africa has had an average annual 5 percent economic growth rate
in the last few years.
OK, so what am I optimistic (but not necessarily confident) about?
All of these technologies have existential downsides. We are already
living with enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy all mammalian
life on this planet-weapons that are still on a hair-trigger. Remember
these? They're still there, and they represent an existential threat.
We have a new existential threat, which is the ability of a destructively
minded group or individual to reprogram a biological virus to be
more deadly, more communicable, or (most daunting of all) more stealthy
(that is, having a longer incubation period, so that the early spread
is undetected). The good news is that we have the tools to set up
a rapid-response system like the one we have for software viruses.
It took us five years to sequence HIV, but we can now sequence a
virus in a day or two. RNA interference can turn viruses off, since
viruses are genes, albeit pathological ones. Sun Microsystems founder
Bill Joy and I have proposed setting up a rapid-response system
that could detect a new virus, sequence it, design an RNAi (RNA-mediated
interference) medication, or a safe antigen-based vaccine, and gear
up production in a matter of days. The methods exist, but as yet
a working rapid-response system does not. We need to put one in
place quickly.
So I'm optimistic that we will make it through without suffering
an existential catastrophe. It would be helpful if we gave the two
aforementioned existential threats a higher priority.
And, finally, what am I hopeful, but not necessarily optimistic,
about?
Who would have thought right after September 11, 2001, that we would go five years without another destructive incident at that or greater scale? That seemed unlikely at the time, but despite all the subsequent turmoil in the world, it has happened. I am hopeful that this respite will continue.
© Ray Kurzweil 2007
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