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Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...
Globe and Mail
Kurzweil sees a future in games
March 3, 2008
By BLAINE KYLLO
Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.
The 60-year-old futurist, best knows for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.
“Games are a harbinger of everything,” said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. “In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.”
Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.
Mr. Kurzweil is what you'd call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest – he has a bachelor of science from MIT – he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.
Through his numerous companies he's invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He's the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990's The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world's chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
Mr. Kurzweil's predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.
A Persian folk tale tells of a king presented with a beautiful chessboard, and when the king offered anything in return, the craftsman asked for a grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, 16 on the fourth and so on. The king agreed, but by the time he had reached the 19th square, more than half a million grains of rice were required. The king forfeited his realm instead.
The problem, said Kurzweil, is that humans seem to be hardwired to intuit things as following a linear trend. On a linear graph, for example, the growth of the World Wide Web seems like it came out of nowhere. But when plotted as an exponential curve you see “exquisitely smooth exponential progression,” said Kurzweil. Which is why, he explained, he was able to accurately predict the growth of the Internet twenty years ago.
In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the ‘70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore's Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.
But what does all this have to do with video games?
Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we'll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we'll have the software to do the same.
Kurzweil used the “Uncanny Valley” phenomenon – which refers to the negative emotional response that humans have toward simulated humans (such as robots) that are “almost human” – as an example. The reason computer-created characters can “seem like demented humans,” he suggested, was not because of modelling or mapping, but language. “The key to human intelligence was language,” he explained. The moment, then, at which software is able to generate human speech and dialogue, will be when the valley is traversed. “We'll be there by the late 2020s,” said Kurzweil.
But we're already seeing changes in the gaming industry, and Kurzweil suggested that the rate of change is such that anyone working on a project that will take more than six months needs to be aware of this fact. “Pong was crude,” he said. “That was 1972.”
By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. “They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,” he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects “full-immersion” games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don't forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We'll have to “enforce reality,” maybe “by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.”
A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called “an intimate merger.” Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having “complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.”
“A kid can become a virtual Ben Franklin,” said Kurzweil. “Everyone will be able to expand their intelligence by virtue of using such devices.”
In a backstage interview after his presentation, Kurzweil said he thinks the descriptor “video games” is limiting “because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life ... But it's been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity.”
“Play is how we principally learn and create,” said Kurzweil.
The continuing growth of computers is already leading to a democratization of gaming, he said. The price of gaming systems means that more people have them and they are more powerful than the supercomputers of the sixties. “The tools of production are also being democratized,” he said. Creating a new game that can be played by multiple players around the world can be done with a $1,000 laptop.
Massively multiplayer experiences, in games or in virtual worlds, harness the ability to interact. The “dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication” harnessed by the gaming industry will “create new, emerging forms of intelligence.”
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