From an interview with Peter Diamandis.
By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.
By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.
By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.
Similar to mine (which reflect Kurzweil’s influence), but different timelines.
“Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.”
By the 2020s? No way. Even by 2030, new vehicles being sold in dealers right now will likely be the *average* age vehicle on the road (the current average in the US is over 11 years, but that number has been growing steadily). There’s no way those cars and their human drivers will be banned from highways in the 2020s.
“By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real.”
Think about what that would require — not just real-time photo-realistic imagery (that’s the easy part). The hard/impossible part would be VR for the entire peripheral nervous system. A way to A) paralyze your actual physical body and B) a way to swap in virtual sensations and virtual muscle actions (including an interface with the nervous system — preferably non-surgical! — to enable all of that).
When will that happen? My prediction would lie somewhere between ‘not in the lifetime of anyone already born’ and ‘never’.
“We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.”
Great. When my mind/consciousness is uploaded, I’d like several copies, please, so the group of us and sit around and argue which is the ‘real’ me.
I wonder what a sensory deprivation tank would be like with VR goggles.
He better get busy, then.
That timing seems very aggressive to me. I was an advisor to Intuitive Surgical for a number of years (ticker: ISRG) and the amount of R&D spending and FDA hurdles were incredible. To my knowledge, Intuitive is the only significant robotic surgical company out there, and the medical device industry is a very long way from having a workable nano-surgical robot. I know less about the other areas, but I think Diamandis is vastly underestimating the political, economic and legal roadblocks that will be posed by regulators, bureaucrats and vested interests.
Yes, this is too “optimistic” a time frame. Move them all out about 50 years.
Nanobots smarter than macrophages in 10 years? Errr, no.
Then there is the gray goo: “Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air”
Paraphrasing, “If your nanobots are small enough to give you everything you want, they are small enough to take away everything you have”
Yeah, this opens the door to all the sci fi dystopias.
We are currently eager to import replacement people “who do work ‘mericans won’t do”. If we get nanobots that can do ten times more work for one tenth the input of humans, the overlords will no doubt come up with a nifty phrase to excuse the further replacement of the native stock.
We’ll have nukyouler fusion before any of that happens. 20 years away, right?