GDC: Games on the cutting edge of societal evolution, says Kurzweil

Author, inventor and noted futurist Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote speech at GDC in which he attempted to forecast the next 20 years in gaming.

"The gaming industry really fits in with what I want to talk about, which is the acceleration of progress," he explained.

He noted that game consoles today are equivalent to the supercomputers of only a few years ago, and that they are really the "cutting edge of what's happening."

Kurzweil lamented the use of the term "game" to describe our industry — just as he dislikes the term "artificial intelligence" — because it makes everything sound unreal, and therefore unimportant, as in: "It's just a game."

They are much more important to Kurzweil.

"Ultimately, virtual reality is going to be really competitive with reality," he said.

Kurzweil has been studying technology trends for thirty years, because his basic interest has been in being an inventor. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments.

"The key to being successful as an inventor is timing," he said. He doesn't doubt that 95 per cent of teams could really build what they say they can build if given the resources — but 95 per cent of those projects will fail because the timing is wrong.

Kurzweil disagrees with the notion that the future is unpredictable. While that may be true with specific projects, he demonstrated that progress is an "exquisitely smooth exponential progression."

In his opinion, there has been a very smooth, very predictable progression over the 20th century despite unpredictable human history which included two World Wars, a Cold War and the Great Depression.

This progression doesn't just apply to computers and communication devices, but also affects everything we care about such as our health and medicine — which he now considers to be yet another information technology.

Noting that the computer in a cell phone is a million times cheaper and smaller than the computer he used at MIT in the 1960s, he expects another billion-fold increase in price performance and capability in the next 25 years.

"We are now in a situation where the acceleration is so fast that things change very rapidly in just a matter of a few years," he said.

Industries not currently thought of as information technologies — such as medicine and energy production - will be considered as such in the future

"By the 2020s, our economy will all be information technology - the games will have taken over the world," he said, to wild applause.

The challenge, then, comes from the software. Will it be able to accurately model human intelligence? Kurzweil thinks so, believing that in 20 years we will have models and simulations of all regions of the human brain.

Eventually, we will be unable to tell the difference between AI and real intelligence.

Based upon exponential progression, Kurzweil said that had he been asked to predict the future in 1900 — at a time when 1/3 of the economy was in agriculture and another 1/3 in manufacturing — he would have said that by 2000 only 3 per cent would be in agriculture and 3 per cent in manufacturing.

The people of that time would have found that disturbing. Won't that be awful? What will people do to make a living? Kurzweil jokingly added: "Don't worry, they'll find employment in the gaming industry."

Kurzweil sees computers "disappearing" as they become part of clothing and belt buckles, with visual displays built into eye glasses.

Images will be written directly to our retina. We will have a high bandwidth connection to the internet at all times. There will be a full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality as well as augmentation of real reality.

"Real reality is going to continue to be a little irksome for a few years," he said.

By 2029, Kurzweil things that we will have reverse-engineered the human brain. By that time, USD 1,000 of computing power will give us 1,000 times the capability of the human brain.

Kurzweil noted that human beings are the only species that refuses to be limited by our biology.

"The tools of creativity have been democratised; The tools of production will also be democratised," he said.