2030s: disease-free life, thought-talking, intelligent robots

By Dick Pelletier

      

    Imagine living in a body fashioned from "designer cells" that can never age or get sick, and sporting a brain that can transmit thoughts and emotions directly to another human brain. Consider a world where robots with human-like intelligence and consciousness become loving companions.

    Though these scenarios may seem too futuristic to happen in just 20 to 30 years, experts believe that today's nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognitive sciences will advance exponentially in the coming decades and turn this future into reality by the 2030s.

    Author Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity is Near explains how our bodies will evolve. Today's frail body has a high failure rate; over 50 million will die this year. Medical breakthroughs projected for the next two decades promise cures for all killer diseases and an end to humanity’s most despised affliction – aging.

   Twenty-thirty's technologies, Kurzweil says, will provide an amazing body loaded with nanomaterials boasting a near zero failure rate with an indefinite life expectancy. Anti-aging guru Dr. Aubrey de Grey declared recently on 60 Minutes that the first person to reach 1,000 years of age has already been born.

    But as exciting as living longer may be, octogenarian physicist and renowned author Freeman Dyson believes the biggest game-changing science will be what he describes as "radio-telepathy", the direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain-to-brain.

    Genetics and molecular biology may be the dominant science in the 2010s and 2020s, Dyson says, but the 2030s belong to neurology. In Dyson's proposed scheme, our brain would transmit thoughts and feelings to a processor, which could then be received by a selected brain.

    It's easy to imagine thought-talking from one human to another, but experts predict we could also extend this technology to other species. We could feel the joy of birds flying or the terror of a deer being hunted. We will experience life in remarkable new ways.

    Another advancement predicted for the 2030s includes robots with human-like intelligence and consciousness. They could be constructed to resemble a loved one, or a favorite celebrity. Experts predict we will quickly grow to love our personalized machines and eventually treat them as devoted family members. In fact, 2030s 'bots could become so much like us that turning one off could be considered a civil rights violation.

    However some fear our silicon cousins will evolve exponentially and become more intelligent than us. They could reach a level of awareness where they wouldn’t need us anymore. If we're lucky, naysayers say, our new mind children will serve and adore us. If we’re unlucky, they may see humanity as impeding their progress and exterminate us.

    But in his book, Beyond AI, artificial intelligence expert J. Storrs Hall says not to worry. Before robots become smarter than us, technologies will be in place to interface our minds with these clever machines and share their wisdom. This will keep us a step ahead in the race for intelligence.

    The 2030s promise to change forever the ways we relate to each other; even our view of what constitutes life will be challenged as technology places humanity at the edge of immortality. Will this amazing "magical future" happen? Positive futurists believe it will.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.