Brent Kearney

VBS TV has posted a quirky, documentary-style interview with Ray Kurzweil. For those who have read his books or listened to his speeches, there isn’t much new material here. Although, it does help clarify what Kurzweil means when he says that biology and other areas of science are becoming information technology, and thus subject to the same exponential growth in progress.

Visit VBS for the rest of the interview.

In another post I put forward an example of one way that biology could be considered to be transforming into information technology: a computer programming language was developed that manipulates DNA into rearranging cellular matter according to the instructions in the computer program. In this example, there is a direct mapping between IT and cellular biology: the former manipulates the latter.

I was on the right track, but as the interview shows, Kurzweil extends that idea, assuming that in the future there will be a full flowering of nano-technology, as conceived by K. Eric Drexler. From the interview:

Ten years ago, if I wanted to send you a movie, I’d send you a FedEx package. I’d now send you an e-mail attachment. Same for a music file, or a book. These can now be sent as information files. Those used to be physical products, and increasingly, more and more physical products will become just [information].

Ultimately, when we have full-scale nano-technology, which is re-organizing matter and energy at the molecular level, I’ll be able to e-mail you a toaster, or toast…

The idea is that once we can fully describe an object at the atomic level, we will have an atomic blueprint for it. Then that object essentially becomes information, because all we would need to reconstruct that object in physical reality is the appropriate manufacturing technologies. According to Kurzweil, once mature nanotechnology is developed, we will be able to fabricate any objects with the same efficiency with which we can now copy books and movies.

As the Paul Rothemund talk demonstrates, this is already beginning to happen in biology. Every aspect of the genome is being intensely studied and mapped out; a comprehensive map of the human brain is scheduled for completion in 2012. This is why Kurzweil has been saying that biology is presently becoming an information technology.

Once in the form of pure information, technological progress occurs exponentially, as Kurzweil notes:

There’s a new iPhone that’s twice as powerful as last year’s for half the money, and that’s not just because Apple is so brilliant. It’s true of all electronics, and in fact it’s not just electronics. It’s true of anything where we have information, whether it’s brain scanning or biological technologies.