Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Experience Beamers.
"Experience beamers" will send the entire flow of their sensory experiences as well as the 
neurological correlates of their emotional reactions out onto the Web, just as people today beam their bedroom images 
from their Web cams. A popular pastime will be to plug into someone else's sensory-emotional beam and experience 
what it's like to be that person, a la the premise of the movie 
Being John Malkovich
. There will also be a vast selection 
of archived experiences to choose from, with virtual-experience design another new art form. 
Expand Your Mind.
The most important application of circa-2030 nanobots will be literally to expand our minds 
through the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence. The first stage will be to augment our hundred trillion 
very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobot communication.
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This will 
provide us with the opportunity to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking 
capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of nonbiological intelligence. The technology will also 
provide wireless communication from one brain to another. 
It is important to point out that well before the end of the first half of the twenty-first century, thinking via 
nonbiological substrates will predominate. As I reviewed in chapter 3, biological human thinking is limited to 10
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calculations per second (cps) per human brain (based on neuromorphic modeling of brain regions) and about 10
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cps 
for all human brains. These figures will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering adjustments to our genome. 
The processing capacity of nonbiological intelligence, in contrast, is growing at an exponential rate (with the rate itself 
increasing) and will vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s. 
By that time we will have moved beyond just the paradigm of nanobots in a biological brain. Nonbiological 
intelligence will be billions of times more powerful, so it will predominate. We will have version 3.0 human bodies, 
which we will be able to modify and reinstantiate into new forms at will. We will be able to quickly change our bodies 
in full-immersion visual-auditory virtual environments in the second decade of this century; in full-immersion virtual-
reality environments incorporating all of the senses during the 2020s; and in real reality in the 2040s. 
Nonbiological intelligence should still be considered human, since it is fully derived from human-machine 
civilization and will be based, at least in part, on reverse engineering human intelligence. I address this important 
philosophical issue in the next chapter. The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of 
biological and non biological thinking mediums, but more important, one of method and organization of thinking, one 
that will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way. 
Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and 
neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human 

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brain is highly constrained. As the nonbiological portion of our thinking begins to predominate by the end of the 
2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain's neural regions. Brain implants based on 
massively distributed intelligent nanobots will greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve all of our 
sensory, pattern-recognition, and cognitive abilities. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another, they 
will be able to create any set of new neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing), 
create new hybrid biological-nonbiological networks, and add completely nonbiological networks, as well as interface 
intimately with new nonbiological forms of intelligence. 
The use of nanobots as brain extenders will be a significant improvement over surgically installed neural implants, 
which are beginning to be used today. Nanobots will be introduced without surgery, through the bloodstream, and if 
necessary can all be directed to leave, so the process is easily reversible. They are programmable, in that they can 
provide virtual reality one minute and a variety of brain extensions the next. They can change their configuration and 
can alter their software. Perhaps most important, they are massively distributed and therefore can take up billions of 
positions throughout the brain, whereas a surgically introduced neural implant can be placed only in one or at most a 
few locations. 
M
OLLY 
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