Futurologists. An elite, invitation only group, where membership requires you to have invented some gadget or technology that has been half decent. Or something.
Once you become a member, for some reason you can make wild and crazy predictions about the future, and rather than being branded a complete nutcase fruitloop like normal; people actually listen.
Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of some amazing synthesizers and all round tech guru, has predicted that machines will achieve human level intelligence by 2029. Thats a pretty specific date. Not 2030. Not 2028. 2029.
There are other predictions in there too, but lets have a look at artificial intelligence for a second. Arguably, we are no closer to artificial 'intelligence' than we were in the 1960s. Everything you ever see in a computer game isn't intelligence. It is merely an illusion, based on pre programmed rules, clever visuals and a very limited concept of learning. IF the player shoots from the left, AND there is cover nearby THEN duck behind it. The bots in most games are not much more advanced than that.
More sophisticated AI isn't in a particularly advanced state either. Remember Arnie in Terminator 2? "My CPU is a Neural Net Processor, a learning computer" Neural Networks, which very roughly model collections of real brain neurons, have not been the holy grail of AI that people might had though in 1991.
There are fundamental differences between the intelligence you can create on a digital computer built out of silicon, and the human brain, with its messy biology. I personally dont think human level intelligence is possible.
On the other hand, one prediction is that flesh and machine will become one. That the future will see computer directly connected to our brains. It sounds wacky, but it might work. "I know kung-fu."
Before that, we have machines that read your brain waves. Hot on the heels of OCZ's Neural Impulse Actuator, another company has a similar machine.
Food for thought on a Wednesday methinks. Certainly there will come a time in the near future, where we look at our Mouse and Keyboard and think how primitive it is.
