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By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News, Boston
Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US
inventor has predicted.
Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in
people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.
The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices
implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.
"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained.
"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to
displace us."
Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human
levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.
Man versus machine
"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to
achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human
intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.
We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains... to make us smarter
Ray Kurzweil
"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand
our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."
Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in
people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted
Mr Kurzweil.
"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and
interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.
CHALLENGES FACING HUMANITY
Make solar energy affordable
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Reverse engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Advance personalised learning
Explore natural frontiers
The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and
automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the
nervous system".
Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great
technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National
Academy of Engineering.
The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig
Venter.
The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on
Monday.