Organic evolution is slow, human tech evolution is an order of magnitude faster, artificial intelligent evolution and progression will be exponentially faster.

Human brains are slow, millions of times slower then a computer. But we are really good at recognizing patterns and doing some things that computers can’t do yet.

Ray proclaims that once we create an AI the future will expand beyond us. And be given to our human creations.

This will happen on several fronts, intelligence, energy and nano-technology. With sufficient nano-technology we will be able to replace our blood, replace our organs to solve problems of disease and longevity.

He talks of how quickly technology is getting better and cheaper, Moore’s law, photo voltaic panels, nano tubes and reversible computing. The future is quite exciting, he also addresses the concerns of war, terrorism. We can’t stop funding research or we will be vulnerable to those who keep doing research.

Self replicating nano-tech will be a game changer, the ability to assemble and create whatever elements we desire for a very low price will change how we access resources. If we can arrange the elements, proteins, amino-acids to create what we want it will change industry, food creation and more.

Ray is now the head of engineering at google who have recently purchased a slew of interesting companies including Deepmind and Boston Dynamics. The book was written a decade ago and today we are getting closer then ever. Speech recognition is better, IBM’s Watson is amazing, pattern recognition algorithms are much better and self driving cars work, just waiting for legislation/insurance decisions. Good VR are almost here from Valve, Sony, Facebook and the AR glasses from Microsoft look useful.

I think the future is going to get more exciting.