Virtual Reality IS Reality, says famed Inventor

In a recent interview and speech, inventor/futurologist Ray Kurzweil said the following will happen:

* Ordinary machines will achieve human-like intelligence in the next 20 years.

* We will have the option of having tiny robots transplanted into our brains, which will increase intelligence.

* Every part of our body will have an artificial counterpart enabling us to live longer.

* Virtual reality will compete with "ordinary reality" as a viable alternative.

These advances will come from a mind-boggling "billion-fold increase in the price-performance of computers in the next 25 years," he said, combined with computers getting vastly smaller. How small? "100,000 fold smaller" (according to the BBC), which "would lead to blood cell-size devices... that can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy and inside our brain and expand our intelligence."

These "blood cell computers" would be able to "produce full immersion virtual reality from inside the nervous system," he said.

"Virtual will compete with reality," Kurzweil was quoted telling the Game Developers Conference.

Here is a neat summary of what Kurzweil said about virtual reality:

"In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality.

"Games are the cutting edge of what is happening - we are going to spend more of our time in virtual reality environments.

"Fully emergent games is really where we want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions.

"Play is how we principally learn and principally create."


After posting this, I saw these headlines--all quite randomly.