The Future of Man

Following the predictions of Ray-Kurzweil is always interesting. This is the man who correctly forecast in the late 1980s that communications technologies such as mobile phones would greatly undermine the grip of authoritarian governments.

His other forecasts over the past few decades have included the reliance by advanced military powers on "intelligent" weaponry, and the pooling of home computers to perform super-computing tasks, as seen with the SETI@home project.

He also predicted that computers would beat the best human players at chess, something that was achieved in 1997 by IBM's Deep Blue.

Kurzweil, an American inventor who holds patents for a wide range of appliances including speech recognition and optical character recognition software, certainly makes a lot of predictions about the future and you could argue that, like a keen gambler, if you place enough bets you'll always end up with some stand-out winners.

But there's one prediction, above all others, is certainly one to watch.

"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that.

" Eventually, he added, man and machine will merge: "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.

Via Guardian Unlimited