INTERVIEW:Ray Kurzweil
By Peter Nowak, special to CBC News
Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil, co-founder of Singularity University on the NASA Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, Calif. (Russel Daniels/Associated Press) E-readers such as Amazon's Kindle are exploding in popularity and the e-books themselves are selling briskly. But getting lost in all the excitement is how these books look on the screen.
Most electronic readers simulate the look and feel of the printed page and are fine for text-heavy editions. But many graphically intense books are simply unsuitable for black-and-white devices such as the Kindle.
A potential solution is coming from unexpected quarters. Ray Kurzweil, best known as the futurist who espouses the coming of the "Singularity" — a point in the near future where computer intelligence combines with human thinking to produce a sort of super-intelligence — is working on the problem.
Kurzweil has teamed up with the National Federation for the Blind in the U.S. to develop Blio, a free, downloadable e-reading app for Windows PCs, soon to be available for Apple and Android devices.
Kurzweil discussed Blio, as well as his other passion — technological advancement and the Singularity — with CBC News. Below is an edited version of that interview.
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CBC News: What makes Blio different from other e-readers?
Kurzweil: It preserves the original format of the book. Every other e-reader is basically ePub format, which is a web-like format that is quite different from the way a book is laid out.
As an author myself, I know how much pain-staking care goes into that format, it's part of the communication of the book.
Peter Nowak is a Toronto-based science and technology writer and the author of Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Fast Food Created Technology as We Know it.
Certainly for any kind of complex work, like a textbook or cookbooks and travel books and children's books, the original graphics are very important. Most publishers will not give permission to any of the e-readers because they don't preserve that information.
Another feature is for the device to read the material out loud with synchronized highlighting. There's a lot of research showing that builds reading skills.
Almost half the population has one reading issue or another. Dyslexia, for example. There are also slow readers and people reading English as a second language, the elderly who have low vision and of course the blind.
All these groups can benefit from the presentation of material visually and auditorily with a synchronization between the two.
CBC: How is this different then from the iPad? Apple is also trying to push multimedia books.
Kurzweil: It's still actually an ePub format. Other people may be moving in this direction but we're still the only reader that can preserve the original PDF format.
An example page showing a scientific text in the new reading app Blio. (Courtesy Ray Kurzweil/NFB)
CBC: How did you become interested in this stuff?
Kurzweil: I actually have a 35-year history in reading technology. My first major invention was a reading machine for the blind.
In the mid-nineties, I got involved with reading machines for dyslexic individuals. The Kurzweil 3000 is still a leading product for kids with dyslexia. It does a lot of other things besides reading, but it was actually an early e-reader.
If you're going to develop an e-reader for people with reading problems, you're really developing something that could be helpful for everyone. That's the goal with Blio.
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CBC: To shift gears a bit, you coined the term "the law of accelerating returns." Do you think it applies to all technologies?
It applies to information technologies. It applies to any technology where you can measure the fundamental information properties.
So, density of magnetic storage. Genetic sequencing. People thought [the Human Genome Project] was crazy in 1990 because only 1/10,000 of the genome had been sequenced by that time. But it kept doubling every year.
Half way through the project only one per cent had been collected so the skeptics were going strong, but that was actually right on schedule. One per cent is only seven doublings from 100 per cent.
The number of bits moving around the internet, spatial resolution of brain scanning, the number of bits we're downloading about the brain, the number of nodes on the internet, total bit capacity of wireless networks from Morse code to 4G today — that's what grows exponentially.
If you keep your predictions to these fundamental measures, they follow very precisely.
CBC: What about something like genetically modified food?
Things like genetically modified foods involve other things like regulation, politics and marketing, which is where predictions get complicated.
Genetic technology has grown exponentially but there's been a spate of articles recently saying, 'We were supposed to have a genomics revolution, what happened?'
Teach a man to fish. An employee holds a four-month-old stellate sturgeon, created by artificial fertilization, at the Novocherkassky fish farm in Russia in November 2010. GM foods are proceeding on many fronts. (Vladimir Konstantinov/Reuters)
In fact, we are having that, but there's this boom-bust psychology that attends to every major transformation. The adoption of the internet was actually exponential but when Wall Street came back in 2000 and looked at the internet, it said, 'Gee, it hasn't changed every business model, I guess we were wrong.'
Meanwhile, it was progressing exponentially but it was at that stage — like the genome project — where it had only transformed one per cent of the market. Now you have dot-coms — they're not called that anymore but that's what they are — like Google with $20 billion of real revenue and $2 trillion of e-commerce, so it is a revolution.
For genetic foods, if we go out 20 years, these technologies will be a million times more powerful than they are today and they really will transform not only agriculture, food production and many industrial processes, but all of health and medicine.
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CBC: Are scientists too myopic or conservative in their views? They usually can't or won't make such predictions.
Kurzweil: There are two barriers here. One is that linear thinking is hard-wired in our brains. That is our intuition about the future.
A scientist may be sophisticated in his own field but he may not have studied technology progression and he may just apply his linear intuition to his own work.
Secondly, there's kind of an ethic in science to be very conservative and to say nothing about what might happen, and also to minimize one's own work. At least that's the polite, apparent ethic.
That's why we see scientists saying, 'We know nothing about the brain, we've barely scratched the surface.' That's just kind of an ethical guideline but it's actually not useful because it doesn't guide society as to the impact of these technologies. It's just not a positive thing.
Technology will grow in power and it brings with it both promise and peril, so we need to prepare for both.
CBC: So if we develop the ability to replicate our brain and personality as a digital file, as you predict, will we become immortal?
Kurzweil: I do think we'll be able to capture the information in our brains and bodies that constitutes our skills, personality and memories. It's not a poetic metaphor to say that it's information, but it's very much an information process.
We take it for granted that if you throw your PC out the window and it smashes into a dozen pieces, you can recreate its memories, skills and personality from a backup.
A child robot with biomimetic body at Osaka University in Japan in 2007. An early version of robotic AI, it can change facial expressions and speak using an artificial vocal cord. (Koji Ueda/Associated Press)
We take it for granted that you can't do that with biological intelligence, that when the hardware crashes the software dies with it.
Ultimately, we'll be able to separate those, to preserve the software and not have it be dependent on a particular hardware substrate. That does not guarantee immortality, however.
Information doesn't last forever. Information only lasts and lives as long as someone cares about it, so that you maintain it and update it to the latest standards and so on.
We see analogs to that already. If somebody doesn't care about themselves, they probably don't last that long.
We are information today. You can say, 'No Ray, you're this physical stuff, you're skin and bones,' but actually the particles that make me up are completely different from what they were six months ago.
What persists — and we're getting into a philosophical realm of identity here — is the pattern of information, not the actual stuff.
Even in our natural biological state it's a continuity of pattern. Ultimately we'll be able to capture that pattern and recreate it if the physical embodiment gets disrupted. It's still not a guarantee but it does protect us from many of the downsides that we see today.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/12/03/f-ray-kurzweil-interview.html#ixzz17MsAP5Wf
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