Ray Kurzweil, who will never die, is a brilliant and amusing inventor and thinker, but I believe he’s wrong in predicting that in 20 years or so we’re going to have nanobots introduced into our systems that allow us to directly plug our brains into the Internet. In what appears to be a Singularitarian circle jerk, some other futurists, including his associate Peter Diamandis, are very excited by his pronouncement, though let’s remember that Kurzweil has sometimes been wildly off in his prognostications. Remember when computers disappeared in 2009 because information was written directly onto our retinae by eyeglasses and contact lenses? Neither do I.

Such developments aren’t theoretically impossible, but such an aggressive timeline and so little attention to the downsides is puzzling. From Diamandis at Singularity Hub:

The implications of a connected neocortex are quite literally unfathomable. As such, any list I can come up with will pale in comparison to reality…but here are a few thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Brain-to-Brain Communication

This will deliver a new level of human intimacy, where you can truly know what your lover, friend or child is feeling. Intimacy far beyond what we experience today by mere human conversation. Forget email, texting, phone calls, and so on — you’ll be able to send your thoughts to someone simply by thinking them.

Google on the Brain

You’ll have the ability to “know” anything you desire, at the moment you want to know it. You’ll have access to the world’s information at the tip of your neurons. You’ll be able to calculate complex math equations in seconds. You’ll be able to navigate the streets of any cities, intuitively. You’ll be able to hop into a fighter jet and fly it perfectly. You’ll be able to speak and translate any language effortlessly.

Scalable Intelligence

Just imagine that you’re in a bind and you need to solve a problem (quickly). In this future world, you’ll be able to scale up the computational power of your brain on demand, 10x or 1,000x…in much the same way that algorithms today can spool up 1,000 processor cores on Amazon Web Service servers.•