READING 2 Ray Kurzweil, Futurist

RAY KURZWEIL,

FUTURIST

Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold. 6.3

Are computers going to be smarter than people someday? Maybe. Are they going to do even more in the future? Probably. But are they going to tell stories and have a sense of humor1? Will they have feelings? Ray Kurzweil believes this will happen.

Who is Ray Kurzweil? He’s an author, an inventor, a computer scientist—and a “futurist.” He makes predictions about artificial intelligence2 . He believes that by 2029, computers are going to do things better than humans. He predicts that by 2045, computers will be 1 billion times more powerful than all human brains together. Just as we now carry little computers (smartphones) in our hands, someday soon, he says, we’re going to have little computers in our brains.

Kurzweil is good at making predictions. For example, here are a few of his predictions from his book The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in the late 1980s:

• Documents will include more than just words.

They will include voice, music, and other sounds. • Computers will be as common as pencils and books in schools. • We will have wireless networks to share information.

Today’s computers search for answers to our questions, but they don’t understand what they are searching. Kurzweil is now working on a project that will improve the way computers search. He predicts that one day computers will actually understand our questions before we ask them!

Kurzweil also thinks technology is going to help us live longer. In fact, he has a very unusual prediction: he thinks that technology will help us live forever3 .

Is this ever going to happen? What do you think?

1 sense of humor: an ability to understand and say funny things 2 artificial intelligence: computer programs that are able to learn and perform human-like thinking tasks 3 forever: for all future time