Imagine having millions of nanobots in your brain that constantly remind you to log into Google+. That seems to be the vision of Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who tells The Wall Street Journal that by the 2030s we’ll have “millions, billions of blood cell-sized computers in our bloodstream… keeping us healthy, augmenting our immune system, also going into the brain and putting our neocortex onto the cloud.”
And what will these nanobots do for us once they’re in our brain, you ask? Well according to Kurzweil they’ll help us think of wittier quips that we can use to impress people.
“In 2035, I see somebody approaching me and I want to impress them and I want to think of something clever… I’ll be able to access additional neocortex and think of something clever,” he explains.
Kurzweil, of course, has earned his fame by making bold predictions about technology’s future and he believes that humanity will use technology attain immortality sometime over the next 30 years. Of course, the 65-year-old Kurzweil is smart enough to know that there’s a chance his flesh body (or as he calls it, “Body 1.0”) could die before he gets to upload his brain into a computer and fly around the world as a swarm of nanobots.
To ensure that he lives long enough to see such technological marvels, Kurzweil has said that he takes “250 supplements (pills) a day” and receives “a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract).”
The lesson here is that while the thought of hooking our brains up to the cloud sounds crazy right now, it’s not nearly as far-out as some of Kurzweil’s other predictions.
