20 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
nephew of the famous American mathematician Edward Kasner, and subsequently the inspiration for the name ‘Google; the Internet search engine.
Ray Kurzweil, the prolific inventor and futurologist, is fascinated by this exponential growth. Exponential curves grow slowly to start with but they pick up speed rapidly and, in the end, growth tends towards infinity. We are all painfully acquainted with one example of exponential growth: The common cold. Each infected cell in our body releases virus particles into the blood which infect further cells, leading to an exponential increase. This makes us feel rotten. Luckily our immune system can also respond exponentially, albeit somewhat delayed, so we survive. In the case of computer power there is no opposing immune system fighting back, so Kurzweil thinks computers will achieve almost limitless processing power; perhaps even within our lifetime. He thinks this will lead to some interesting consequences, for example, allowing people to live forever! Far-fetched? Follow his argument.
The two most important elements in keeping us alive are medical imaging, to see what is wrong; and genetic engineering, to fix those things. Both are improving in line with digital technology, doubling in power every 18 months. As computers get better at seeing into our bodies, and our ability to sequence and synthesize spare parts improves, we will reach a point where we can fix almost any problem. Kurzweil figures technology is improving and his body is decaying at just the right rate to mean by the time he needs heavy duty medical intervention it will be available. Barring a traffic accident or mad-axe-murderer, he should live forever. Even if his calculation is slightly off, the next generation will definitely have this option.
You might dismiss this as science fiction, but some amazing things are already happening. Recently a female patient in the USA suffering from bone cancer had her jaw replaced with a 3D printed component. Doctors were able to scan her head and take an image of the good side of her jaw, flip it right to left within the computer and repair any problems they saw. Then they sent the image to a 3D printer. The printer made a new jaw from tungsten powder, which was fused in a kiln. The final stage was to cover the metal part with an inert bone-like substance to give the human body a scaffolding on which to build real bone. They then performed the operation to remove her old jaw and replace it with the new one: result, brand new healthy jaw.
There are some practical limits to the power of computers on the horizon. Currently, the wires in a silicon chip are about twenty-two nanometers wide. That’s around a thousandth of the width of a human
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