Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

We Are Becoming Cyborgs.
The human body version 2.0 scenario represents the continuation of a long-standing 
trend in which we grow more intimate with our technology. Computers started out as large, remote machines in air-
conditioned rooms tended by white-coated technicians. They moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now into 
our pockets. Soon, we'll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. By the 2030s we will become more 
nonbiological than biological. As I discussed in chapter 3, by the 2040s nonbiological intelligence will be billions of 
times more capable than our biological intelligence. 
The compelling benefits of overcoming profound diseases and disabilities will keep these technologies on a rapid 
course, but medical applications represent only the early-adoption phase. As the technologies become established, 
there will be no barriers to using them for vast expansion of human potential. 
Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that 
of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we "urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain, so 
that computers can add to human intelligence, rather than be in opposition."
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Hawking can take comfort that the 
development program he is recommending is well under way. 
There will be many variations of human body version 2.0, and each organ and body system will have its own 
course of development and refinement. Biological evolution is only capable of what is called "local optimization," 
meaning that it can improve a design but only within the constraints of design "decisions" that biology arrived at long 
ago. For example, biological evolution is restricted to building everything from a very limited class of materials—
namely, proteins, which are folded from one-dimensional strings of amino acids. It is restricted to thinking processes 
(pattern recognition, logical analysis, skill formation, and other cognitive skills) that use extremely slow chemical 
switching. And biological evolution itself works very slowly, only incrementally improving designs that continue to 
apply these basic concepts. It is incapable of suddenly changing, for example, to structural materials made of 
diamondoid or to nanotube-based logical switching. 
However, there is a way around this inherent limitation. Biological evolution did create a species that could think 
and manipulate its environment. That species is now succeeding in accessing—and improving—its own design and is 
capable of reconsidering and altering these basic tenets of biology.