Ray Kurzweil has been notably prescient with his predictions on how fast AI will come. Genius is a term thrown around often, but he really fits the bill. He’s invented some really cool stuff over a long period of time.
His editorial in The Econonomist outlines his nicely bullish predictions about the impact of AI on humanity. The areas he believes will be most impacted are energy, manufacturing and medicine.
Much of the progress will be driven by AI’s ability to create new solutions (e.g., materials, designs, therapies) by searching much more of the problem space than we can do with current techniques.
I hope he is right. There is a lot of potential good to be derived from AI advances. Especially interesting is his concept of medicine advancing to the point of “longevity escape velocity” where we gain more than 12 months of life expectancy every year for people willing to follow the proscribed habits and therapies. Kurzweil predicts this will happen in the next decade.
That would be a huge change. If you could live essentially forever barring accident or violence, what would that be like? Many questions abound from religion, to economics, to politics and almost every other aspect of life as a human.
Kurzweil has been right about of lot of stuff, will he be right this time?