Intel: We will be borg by 2050

Intel CTO Justin Rattner, at his keynote speech in San Francisco's Intel Developer Forum, told the seated that by 2050, the gap between humans and machines will close. And Intel, of course, will be selling you the implants.

He said Intel's research labs are already looking at human-machine interfaces and examining future implications to computing with some promising changes coming much sooner than expected.

"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. "There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."

Other cool stuff addressed by Rattner include an implementation of resonant wireless power and "catoms," microscopic robots that collectively change their arrangement to create "shape-shifting materials."

Borg, Tesla and The Culture all in one press release, oh my!

Intel CTO Says Gap between Humans, Machines will Close by 2050 [Intel]

[#1 posted by things , August 21, 2008 11:31 PM]

the singularity is near

[#2 posted by rageahol , August 22, 2008 1:29 AM]

sounds like ray kurzweil.

which means, of course, that he's full of shit.

[#3 posted by dculberson , August 22, 2008 6:51 AM]

I wonder if people skills will translate to interacting well with thinking machines?

[#4 posted by zuzu , August 22, 2008 9:31 AM]

sounds like ray kurzweil. which means, of course, that he's full of shit.

Because cochlear implants and insulin pumps don't already exist?

Say what you will about the eccentricities of the Singularity / Extropian / Futurology cultures... particularly when they're just waiting for it to happen, instead of making it happen; as Alan Kay said,

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

But I don't see as much reason to doubt accelerating change as a phenomenon.

Though one of the major hurdles has been that software engineers are generally not improving the software they use to write software; instead firms tend to simply increase the total number of programmers... hence the entire Java enterprise codemonkey culture. It's one of those failures of the crowd to act wisely, as James Surowiecki wrote about in his book. c.f. The Logic Of Failure by Dietrich Dorne.

[#5 posted by Enochrewt , August 22, 2008 2:39 PM]

All I know is that the picture used in this article freaks me out, and will continue to freak me out in the future.

[#6 posted by Not a Doktor , August 23, 2008 5:18 PM]

Why borg? Why not Ghost In The Shell?

[#7 posted by Gilbert Wham , August 25, 2008 1:46 AM]

These Catoms will be programmed with LOLcode I assume?