The coming age of 'spiritual machines' - When will computers exceed human intelligence?

Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. Ray Kurzweil first began speculating about the future when he was a child, but only later as an adult did he become seriously involved with trying to accurately forecast future events. Kurzweil came to realize that his success as an inventor depended largely on proper timing: His new inventions had to be released onto the market only once many other, supporting technologies had come into existence. Considering the ongoing exponential growth in computer capabilities, this means fantastic new technologies will become available long before the vast majority of people—who intuitively think linearly about technological advance—expect. This core idea is expressed by Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Kurzweil projects that between now and 2050 technology will become so advanced that medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving and even improving quality of life. The aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available. Kurzweil argues that much of this will be a fruit of advances in medical nanotechnology, which will allow microscopic machines to travel through one’s body and repair all types of damage at the cellular level. Ray Kurzweil is currently making a movie due for release in 2009 called “The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future” based, in part, on his 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near”. (from Wikipedia)

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book by Ray Kurzweil. How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we’d better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we’ve only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. (from Amazon)