What comes next in the world of technology really is the billion dollar question – if you knew what tech would be the next big thing, you’d rake in an absolute fortune.
Some of the big developments at the moment are in wearable virtual reality technology, though we’ve not really hurdled the issue of how daft you look wearing them.
Meanwhile, it seems as though the world and its aunt is hopping on the AI bandwagon without really giving much consideration to what it is we’re doing in a big-picture sense.
If only we could know where this is all going to end up that would be a truly splendid thing, but for now predictions are the best we’ve got.
One of the most famous in the business is ‘tech prophet‘ Ray Kurzweil, who correctly predicted that computers would get so good at chess that they could beat grandmasters, what a huge success the internet would be and famously predicted the iPhone.
He successfully predicted a number of technological advances, including the iPhone. (Frazer Harrison/WireImage)
It may be a bit worrying then that in his new book The Singularity Is Nearer, he predicts that humanity will merge with AI by 2045 and become immortal cyborgs.
Not to sound sceptical, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
According to the Daily Mail, he’s also made some other predictions about what technological developments might be in store for us.
Another of his big calls is that AI will resurrect the dead, in a manner of speaking, by simulating the personality of someone.
Kurzweil suggests that eventually these AI replicas of a dead person could be placed into working bodies, meaning that nobody’s ever really gone if they don’t want to be.
This one may sound crazy, but experts have warned about the dangers of AI leading to this, saying that there needs to be protection against an ’emerging digital afterlife industry’.
Ray Kurzweil has made some more predictions, including suggesting we’ll eventually be immortal cyborgs. (Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)
He also reckons that humans will become significantly more intelligent as we can plug directly into machines.
Some technology is now allowing people to directly control computers with their minds, but Kurzweil believes that we could merge with AI to significantly boost our brainpower.
All I’ll say on this one is that I’ve see a lot of science fiction and people plugging their brains directly into technology rarely ends well.
He reckons that while we become a race of immortal cyborgs by 2045, the path to immortality really begins in 2030 as AI can speed up the medical research process and help develop new treatments and medications in a short order.
In a slightly less dystopian bent, he also suggested that life would become cheaper and easier as more of what we do gets automated to provide for us.
So that’s nice.
