Ray Kurzweil: The Six Epochs of Technology Evolution | The Nantucket Project | Big Think

Ray Kurzweil: The Six Epochs of Technology Evolution | The Nantucket Project | Big Think: "Ray Kurzweil is an expert at predicting the future. Some of his career highlights include foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, the invention of the Internet and a computer beating a man at chess.

So what will the coming decades hold for us? In tracking our progress in the technological-evolutionary journey, Kurzweil has identifies six epochs, each of which is characterized by a major paradigm shift.


For one thing, it will be harder than ever before to find a distinction between human and machine. In fact, "it will be all mixed up," Kurzweil says. "The bottom line is we are one human-machine civilization. This technology has already expanded who we are and is going to go into high gear when we get to the steep part of the exponential [curve]."

Some key dates along the way: by 2020, "we’ll have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain, but we won’t be finish yet with reverse-engineering the human brainand understanding its methods." That will happen by 2029, when "we’ll have reverse-engineered and modeled and simulated all the regions of the brain. And that will provide us the software/algorithmic methods to simulate all of the human brain's capabilities including our emotional intelligence. And computers at that time will be far more powerful than the human brain."

Sound both scary and liberating? It should.