Palscience

A leading US inventor engineer Ray Kurzweil said that human and machines will soon merge through a devise implanted in the human body to boost human intelligence and health.

“It’s really part of our civilisation,” Mr Kurzweil said.

“But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”

Man Vs Machine

“I’ve made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029,” he said.

“We’re already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that.”

“We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told BBC News.

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.

CHALLENGES FACING HUMANITY

1. Make solar energy affordable
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Reverse engineer the brain
7. Prevent nuclear terror
8. Secure cyberspace
9. Enhance virtual reality
10. Improve urban infrastructure
11. Advance health informatics
12. Engineer better medicines
13. Advance personalised learning
14. Explore natural frontiers