Dec 09
In Ray Kurzweil’s amazing 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil predicts that computing power will continue along the exponential track of Moore’s Law, such that by the year 2030, a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. At that point, computers will be capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own with no human assistance. By scanning the compendium of knowledge on the Internet, some computers will “know” literally every single piece of public information generated by human beings (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every law and theorem).