The Smartest Futurist On Earth

By Brian O'Keefe

If you went around saying that in a couple of decades we'll have cell-sized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our bloodstream, or that we'll be able to upload a person's consciousness into a computer, people would probably question your sanity.

But if you say things like that and you're Ray Kurzweil, you get invited to dinner at Bill Gates' house - twice - so he can pick your brain for insights on the future of technology. The Microsoft chairman calls him a "visionary thinker and futurist."

Kurzweil is an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades. He invented the flatbed scanner, the first true electric piano, and large-vocabulary speech-recognition software; he's launched ten companies and sold five, and has written five books; he has a BS in computer science from MIT and 13 honorary doctorates (but no real one); he's been inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame and charges $25,000 every time he gives a speech - 40 times last year.

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Kurzweil, however, has something bigger on his mind than just making money -after half a lifetime studying trends in technological change, he believes he's found a pattern that allows him to see into the future with a high degree of accuracy. The secret is something he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, and the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen, he says, and almost more extreme than we can imagine.

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He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen - wacky in a Sleeper kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening)...

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