It may seem like heaven now...

I have finally found an answer to all the questions that inquire about what our future will be like in just a couple of decades. Human kind will all be highly advanced and have the knowledge and power to operate robots. A man named Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions of how the future will become like. Ray is the founder of Kurzweil Technologies and he has thought out how and what technology is going to do for humans in the near future.

For the coming 2009, Kurzweil predicts that “People are successfully working together despite living in different places. The average household has more than a hundred computers—which is to say chips—most of which are embedded in appliances, entertainment and telephone systems, automobiles, and even key chains. House hold robots have emerged but are not yet fully accepted. Intelligent roads are in use, Kurzweil predicts, primarily for long-distance travel.”

Some of these sound like great advancements, but I’m not really sure about the Household robot thing. I still have doubts about what is going to happen if they malfunction. If those household robots start to malfunction, they can cause danger to the people in the house and destroy things. For me, I would never really trust any robots to do my everyday chores because they don’t have feelings or thoughts. One of the main goals of Kurzweil is to have robots understand humans and act like them.

If you think Kurzweil’s prediction for 2009 is weird, you wouldn’t even want to know what he’s going to say for 2019. In his 2019, he predicts that the blind, deaf, or the paraplegic will have computers in them to camouflage their disabilities. The household robots will also be fully accepted by the human race and commercial transactions will include a simulated person with high-quality animation and understanding of language. I’m kind of anticipating for this year to come because I would want computers that are largely invisible to be embedded in walls, tables, desks, clothing and body.

Since I have seen many movies like “Minority Report,” I would like to see how these computers really work in real life. In this decade, everything will be safe. There are fewer crimes because of tiny cameras everywhere. Car accidents have also been significantly reduced because the intelligence of automobiles and highways. War or battles will be fought with tiny little flying weapons the size of insects. Kurzweil later imagines himself having a conversation with a 2019 person, Molly.

Molly and Kurzweil’s conversation got to the point where technology will go wrong. Molly says, “It’s true that the century so far has seen much less bloodshed. But the other side of the coin is that the technologies are so much more powerful today. If something did go wrong, things could spiral out of control very quickly. With bioengineering, for example, it feels a little like all ten billion of us are standing in a room up to our knees in a flammable fluid, waiting for someone—anyone—to light a match.”
She mentions that if anything were to go wrong with the robots, then everything would just go haywire. So in this decade, people aren’t really sure that the robots they have created are fully functional. Molly says, “Yeah, I just hope they work.” After hearing what Molly said, I’m not sure that I want to advance into the future. Maybe it isn’t as safe as it seems. My uncle doesn’t really like technology because of something that happened to him a while back.

He was working all night on this computer typing up his work. His computer was old and on for too long so the fan stopped working. Since there wasn’t a fan to cool down the chips and processor working in the computer, it kind of exploded on him. He wasn’t injured, but he was traumatized and vowed never to use a computer again. Things like this might happen in the near future when technology and computers are everything to mankind. This is just like how Molly pictured it.

If the robots were to somehow burn out and explode, it might actually injure people because of their size. I think the robots would be pretty big because they need to resemble human beings. After 2019, Kurzweil advances to the 2029. He claims that by this year, many areas of the brain have already been decoded and understood. People will have amazing memory because networks modeled on the brain’s neural activity are now faster.

There will be many different implants for the body. Some of these include Ear implants that provide communication both ways to the web. Mind implants allow people to trade thoughts with computers. The automated agents are now capable of learning on their own. It’s also really hard to tell if a person is handicapped or not because nerve stimulation makes all of the disabilities quaint. This is a very good thing for disabled people because now they can live normally like others.

People will no longer laugh at them because they are different. Another remarkable discovery that was made in this decade is nanobots. Humans have successfully created bots that are injected into the body to patrol and maintain it. “…if anything goes wrong in a person’s body, it can be caught extremely early.” A lot of people wouldn’t have died if nanobots were invented earlier. Sicknesses like cancer and other incurable diseases will finally be cured.

Technology seems to have advanced dramatically after just ten years. However, Kurzweil does not stop predicting here. He strives deeper into the year 2099. In this year, humans are no longer flesh and blood. Kurzweil later introduces the idea of MOSHs—Mostly Original Substrate Humans. He explains that MOSHs are people that insist on using their own flesh and neurons to live and think. They are honored and protected by the “grandfather legislation,” but they are not as smart as the other humans that choose to be “software-based.”

Many different ideas were formed from the curve. I believe in Kurzweil’s curve scenario. In the next couple of decades, life will probably be just like how Kurzweil predicted it. Technology will experience a great leap and many other things will be invented. Humans will no longer be normal humans. They will be half machine and half flesh beings that are smart and advanced. Things may seem desirable now, but eventually, the hell scenario will come. Life wouldn’t look too great then will it?