@frigg: I think Kurzweil dates this moment to about 20 years earlier than intel.

Mark Wilson

Ray Kurzweil has been spreading this news for years and has a lot of factual data to support the theories of exponential growth, and a coming "Singularity".

I think Intel is playing it safe by saying 2050, the less conservative estimates put the date around 2030, give or take a few years.

I always get a little irritated hearing this kind of technology compared to the "Cylons", the "Matrix", the "Borg", and the "Terminator". The chances of a negative outcome need to be considered and avoided, but the positive benefits could eliminate poverty, ignorance and put humanity on a much better path.

Bauart

But if the Hadron Collider actually unravels the fabric of space time, why should I care?

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

Now that I think about it, chip for brains is the the new shit for brains...

Hvedhrungr

Intel, you keep your chips away from my nervous system!

Hvedhrungr

Sounds like someone's been reading their Kurzweil.

frigg

i'm waiting for a BCI since i read neuromancer.

krom

Will we all look like cylons by 2050?

schrosa

yeah the singularity.

but that will happen only if we avoid the Economic collapse due to climate change or WW3 with a Sino-Irano-Russian alliance.

Personally I am a pessimist and I think this century is gonna be pretty shitty.

helldiver

Mmmm... toast.

Hectorvex

@Open_universe: Give it access to the World Wide Web, and it might just screw us in a subtler fashion.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

I for one welcome Our blah blah blah.

takashimiike 3G edition

@open_universe: One really smart machine in a box with no arms and no legs comes up with some GREAT economic theories that it offers up to the "right" few to get them to help enslave the "wrong" many. End of story - and no arms or legs.

bombs_away

Smarter than yourself -> Seems like you need to understand the mechanics of smarter. We have been pretty successful at designing stronger/faster/flyi-er/swimi-er things than we can do. Once you know what makes "smart" the optimization of it gets pretty straight forward.

(Besides, if you let it design the next generation of itself things start to build quickly...)

bombs_away

Baloney. Think it through, people,

(1) What does it mean to "overtake" humanity? Okay, so you're on a bus with Albert Einstein, and he can out-think you a dozen ways from Sunday. How does he end up enslaving you?

(2) Computers in a box. Hmmmm. No arms and no legs. Okay, they are as smart as Einstein, how exactly do they enslave us?

(3) Okay. Super-intelligent computer discovers all the fundamental laws of the universe. In its spare time, it cures cancer, gifts us with immortality, etc. How exactly does it enslave us?

Much ado about nothing. Even if you had a whole "civilization" of these supercomputers, would they really be a threat to us? The most likely scenario is we'll cyborg with them, that is, advances in technology will be applied to enhancing people.

Open_universe

@clockradio: Maybe it doesn't actually have to be smarter, but be more like an intelligent insect. No sense of morality. It's all logic, which, by itself, is probably pretty friggin' cruel.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

Does this mean its OK for me to date my PS3...?

bombs_away

@Bauart: I get irritated too, cause no one EVER mentions Johnny Mnemonic.

Hectorvex

How do you design something smarter than yourself? Isn't that a sort of oxymoron?

clockradio

[news.bbc.co.uk]

Anyway, here's an interesting story about simulating a mouse brain on a supercomputer. Thing about these robots, in all seriousness, is that they probably will never be able to kill us all, because their gaining the means to do so would probably not be able to result from whatever applications for them we deem the most profitable.

You hear that Ponies? You can rest easy.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

@mister_s: Hey, we were given a big sexy to-do list regarding the end of the world via Hadron SuperColliding, so when it comes to apocalyptic cybornetic people-eating, I can't help but think that maybe, in its own spectacularly screwball way, it might spare us the grief.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

@Bauart: 2030 is the date that by raw processing power computers are about on par with us. 2050 is the time software might actually be smart/efficient enough to challenge us in the thinking department.

But considering minesweeper is quite difficult for some... it might be more like 2012.

Log1c

man, i hope Hadron Collider posts make it on the disemvowelment list soon.

mister_s

Either way, I hope we use subcutaneous RF connections. Those plugs in the skin look terrible and they are a pain to keep clean.

aec007

@bombs_away: On the bright side, that might take care of the whole overpopulation thing for us.

Gann

Ill go get myself a shotgun, and some anti-zombie gear..

When it comes time, all those chips in ur heads fry taking out the part of your brain that controls emotions and free-will and you all become flesh eating cyborgs who worship "the Collective"

That or your ipod chips in your head will malfunction and you won't be able to turn them off, meaning you all will walk around humming "the girl from Ipanema", or worse... RICK ASTLEY!!!! which is again gonna sap everyone's emotion control and free-will..

either way.. No way am I gonna stand by and wait for "the one" (Neo or Steve Jobs..?) to show up and save us..

I'm gonna blast y'all!!!

Mith

IMHO I beleive that machine intelligence is a good thing and will probably lead to all the great story-book geek endings I could hope for... But if the things come out of the defence industry with goal seeking capabilities, a sense of self preservation and an ability to view any human beings as "the enemy" there may problems.

Look how well we treated the great apes and large ocean going mamals that are probably closer cousins to us than a machine intelligence is going to be.

bombs_away

"We're supposed to start with these operation programs first. That's major boring shit. Let's do something a little more fun. How about... combat training."

"Ju jitsu? I'm gonna learn Ju jitsu. "

Bob1967

@Mark Wilson: That's Kurzweil's target for replicating the brain, but he makes the points that the achievement is part of a process, an S curve, the early stages of which are less noticeable, but explode in obvious ways beyond the knee of the curve. He attributes conservative estimates to "scientific pessimism," with people like Rattner mired in current generation tech, economic models, scientific skepticism, and running a business.

The fact that Rattner publicly discusses something that sounds impossibly science fiction for most people is bold, even if Rattner adds a couple expectation-lowering decades to the prediction. But given the accelerating rate of technological progress, which is itself accelerating (if Kurzweil has a "main point," that's probably it), if you believe the man, a Brain In A Box Battlemodo by John Herrman in 20 years is not out of the question.

frigg

We'll all get chips in our heads in 2050 and then following Moore's law we'll all be obsolete by 2052.

RyanNiger

This is your brain....This is your brain on toasters.

kaffeen

@analogs: Yeah... but then people from the 50's never thought about the computer revolution and the internet. Something completely unexpected yet very 'technological' happened. Might be the same in 50 years.

guibom

I'd give my left nut (assuming we're not neutered by then) to see this dipshit on a news show in 2050 getting laughed at. Didn't people learn a lesson after the 50's sci-fi craze, thinking we would be living with robots and traveling to the stars by the year 2000?

Reasoning better than a human? In the "not-so-distant future"? What a moron. I guess when you're a big shot at a company like Intel, you're pretty much required to make loft predictions that make your company seem like they're working on something totally groundbreaking.

analogs

@aec007: For real. I'm hoping the human - machine interface looks a little...less infected.

Geisrud

When do the sex-bots come?

1roll20s

2050 huh, in that case would it be possible to live forever, in a machine?

lilaliendog

IMHO...

Imgaine a pill you that you swallow. No bigger than a common vitamin or something. A swarm of engineered particles each about the size of a virus move from the GI tract into the blood stream. They're either small enough to cross the blood brain barrier directly or they work as a group to create a breach they can pass through (and then seal behind them cuz the manufacturers lawyers say they have to for liability reasons).

They then set up shop in a few neurons that are all very near cell death (again for liability reasons). They hijack the cell's, rest the telomere clocks so the cells are young and healthy again and then get to work using the ribosomes to create funky proteins that self assemble into objects more like bacteria than viruses.

The bacteria size objects then form networks of tendrils to establish contact with the relevant parts of the brain. (Depending on which pill you bought you might focus on motor control for faster/more accurate physical intelligence or better cross-hemispheric connections for improved creativity...)

Off course the bacterial network doesn't need to be confined to just the brain. You could grow infrared vision. You could grow super hearing. You could grow stronger faster muscles. You could grow baby blue skin and hair. You could grow…

Having the bacteria size units construct/grow things like micro transceivers and such for off body comunication would be fairly straight forward and certainly don't violate any physical laws.

Upgrades and updates could be either sent as raw information to the bacteria via EM or you could just take another pill with the new information encoded into it…

Everything is "powered" by glucose so you might be a bit hungrier for a few days while everything is growing into place but since your brain already consumes most of your calories it is really nothing new for your energy budget.

An oak grows from an acorn / your BCI grows from a pill.

One more geeky thought and then I'll stop, I promise - if a machine took over the world and didn't want to "upset the apple cart" and get a lot of people hurt in the panic... How would we even know? Once it controls a few key people through the basics (money, power, arranged sex), perhaps w/o the key people evening knowing they are being controlled the rest of us already follow those key people.

bombs_away

I have always found non-bodily things sticking out of human bodies disgusting.

OPRAH

Sorry, the title for this article: fail.

My son is a cyborg as he has a silicon chip implanted in his skull that mediates audio from a wearable, wireless device directly to his auditory nerve (cochlear implant + processor).

Speaking up for my son, get your facts straight as there are hundreds of thousands of cyborgs in this world today. Self depricating humor is fine -- let's just improve our collective IQ here (yes, Borg "collective" pun intended :).

Intel was not talking about cyborgs at all. After all the posts in the past several years about cyborgs, I would assume Gizmodo would have retained some of this information. I understand why the the staff at Gizmodo wants to see memory implants! :)

brutek

Also, in the photo above, perhaps someone should take a look at that person's bed sores. They don't look too good. ;)

Noobs-R-Us

Kurzweil is an idiot. The fact that NO ONE has been able to predict the future with any amount of certainty should have given him a clue to keep his trap shut. Hasn't he seen the Jetsons? What about those countless commercials and world's fairs where they show what the future will be like in 20 years? Who here hasn't had more than a few chuckles at those ridiculous predictions?

He's also crazy for mega dosing himself on vitamins every day. He thinks he's doing himself good when in fact, he's pushing his organs into overdrive. One day it will shut down on him and he will be dead. Gone will be another silly man in the annals of history.

Noobs-R-Us

@Noobs-R-Us:
Not bed sores. Decubitis ulcers.

robinandtami

I'm looking forward to making the choice between death and uploading my mind into the solid state society.

SgtBeavis

yeah well suck my chips

chanmoss

There are already tons of people out there smarter than I am, even more importantly, more "connected" and richer than I am.

Am I enslaved? Nope.

And I don't suspect that to change when a super-intelligent computer arrives on the scene. Big deal, it can "understand" more than I can, faster. Then what?

Open_universe

Computers will never conquer us. They have no legs!

ccavallini

Humans prone to BSOD?

Onizuka

@HellTempest: The Cold War, you mean the one that just heated back up?

GeekyNerdGuy

@solOptimus: That was the Cold War, which wasn't really War, per say, but yeah, I understand waht you mean.

The Atom Bomb, Fighter Jets, among others.

HellTempest

@helldiver: Ummmm....right. War will push us into the singularity much fasterthan peace. Look at how much of our tech was invented in wartime (WE WENT TO THE FREAKIN MOON!).

solOptimus

@GeekyNerdGuy: Yes, yes I do. We aer having a discussion about this on my clan's forums "The Cold War Part 2." What with Russia invading Georgia and the US backing Georgia, it's as clear as a lake with perfect skies.

HellTempest

2050, eh? Heh, I knew that one... weird...

Oh, you want to know why? Dunno, has something to do with an eerie precognition of a WW3 in 2058.

...

Yeah, I'm kidding. Ooooor am I?

Klappstuhl

WW3, climate crisis, poison gas, tearing off our atmosphere. blah blah blah. all the more reason to have supercomputers that can calculate through singularities and send us off to explore far regions of space, where we can meet aliens. happiness.

kittiegeiss

We will develop a race of machines, they will develop interstelar space travel and leave us here to live with the mess we made.
Imagine 8 billion people without machines to help them. It would be the largest die off ever.

reddingofish

Apple iphone V50.1 - GPS, infa red vision, image capture, brain implant, lastest software release to be taken analy, now with penile erection disfunction bugs patched (sorry no cut and paste yet).

Bob1967

I hope that microsoft is dead around that year because if we get some software from them on our body...we are extremely fucked.

Mike918

@brutek: My 78 year old mother just had a pacemaker installed (implanted is, I suppose, the proper term). We've been teasing her that she is now a cyborg ever since. Her new nickname is "2 of 6".

Depending on how liberal your use of the term cyborg is, we really do have cyborgs amongst us already.

distortedloop

@1roll20s: They'll be confiscated at the border; or did you miss that article? ;-)

distortedloop

For some reason I feel like right now we're in a transitional stage, just like awhile ago. Right now technology is cutting edge and we're thinking of all these things, but I see everything fleshing out between 2040-2050. I think we're going to get some amazing stuff then.

kylo4

We build machines in order to enhance our own ability to explore, discover, learn, not to enhance themselves. They'll only be smart enough to know how to assist us. Without us, they'd have nothing to do.

Nickolai_the_Russian_guy

@Bauart: I'm with you, buddy.

@clockradio: It's a good thing Deep Thought didn't know...or we wouldn't be here.

Barion

Yeah.. Freaking great. By then the script kiddies will be able to freaking rickroll my auditory nerve directly.

narcolepticdoc

@kylo4: I agree, by 2050 we will probably see more fleshed out tech.

I'll probably be to old to give a hoot by then though. XD

-Core-

@bombs_away:
Really liked that comment. XD

-Core-

Now all we need is those flying cars we were supposed to have by the year 2000 and we're all set.

TheLostVikings

did anyone read intel's other releases? the one about the "catoms" lead back to the idea of a universal constructor dissolving the earth. Would be pretty cool to have a shapeshifting cellphone. Would suck to be consumed by said cellphone.

gmx

As if it's not already too easy to identify the geeks ...now they'll have crew cuts and a jack on the back of their heads.

DeborahCachimba

@distortedloop: Agreed! Many people still state it will be in the future. All the people being helped now realize very thankfully how technology has helped them in the present. Hollywood scares the common folk with scary cyborgs. We need more positive role models for the cyborgs of today and tomorrow.

brutek

@brutek: What's really amusing is that I suspect many of the "real" cyborgs out there (ie., older folks with pacemakers) don't even know what a cyborg is!

My mother never watched Star Trek:TNG or Six Million Dollar Man or the like, and I assume much of her generation did not as well. I tease her about being a cyborg now, but until my sister explained it to her, she really didn't make the connection.

I think it will be much sooner than 2050 when people start becoming cyborgs by choice, rather than necessity; by that I mean choosing to add "enhancements" to ourselves to give us greater skills or abilities we don't have naturally, not just adding implants to correct defects or injuries. Think about all the people who run around with their stupid bluetooth headsets constantly in their ears, how many of them wouldn't jump at the chance to have some kind of bluetooth headset surgically implanted just under the skin behind their ear for a full time connection without the hardware hanging on the outside of the ear?

distortedloop