Futurist: We'll Someday Accept Computers as Human

CNN (03/12/12) Brandon Griggs

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil told a capacity crowd at the recent South By Southwest Interactive festival that computer technology is really part of who we are, and humans and technology will eventually merge.  "We are a human-machine civilization," Kurzweil said.  "If we can convince people that computers have complexity of thought and nuance ... we'll come to accept them as human."  When asked by interviewer Lev Grossman whether machines with artificial intelligence would try to dominate humans, Kurzweil said he was more concerned about what humans will do to themselves.  The 64-year-old author of "The Singularity Is Near" said nanotechnology that is 1,000 times more powerful than human blood cells could be injected into the bloodstream to give people superhuman endurance.  Kurzweil also was asked about Apple's Siri, and he said it would only get better.  Kurzweil noted that people talking to computers in natural language is an amazing threshold.  He also predicted that Moore's Law will come to an end by 2020, and that within the decade search engines will no longer wait to be asked but will listen to humans in the background and provide results.
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-12/tech/tech_innovation_ray-kurzweil-sxsw_1_computers-humans-inventor-and-futurist?_s=PM:TECH

'IPad Deconstructed' Forum Makes Case for Federal Research

Computerworld (09/22/11) Patrick Thibodeau

Federally supported research sparks game-changing innovation, according to a U.S. Capitol forum on the future of federal research moderated by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn. He says in an interview that the forum used the iPad as an example, as most of its components came from federally supported research. Von Ahn argues against a Senate proposal to cut the budget of science research funding, saying that a reduction could hurt the sustainability of U.S. technological leadership. He notes that private tech companies cannot do research on their own, as they have a priority to deliver commercial products in the short term. However, federal research projects take a long-term view and are borne out of the pursuit of basic questions. "If you look at lot of the game-changers [new technologies] over the last few years, it's not because someone was trying to solve a specific problem, it was just because somebody was trying to understand something better," von Ahn says.
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