by Niel de la Rouviere

Created on: February 15, 2009

People do not want to admit it, but it is inevitable. Giving up your control to a computer is already in motion, but it is not the dystopian future that people envision it to be. Already you are giving control to your computer: it is doing your banking, sending your vital emails, keeping notes, saving private documents; in a sense it makes life more efficient. You are still in control of the computer, but a life without it is too far-fetched to imagine, thus one can argue that computers are already "controlling" humanity.

However, the "command" over humanity seems to imply the science fiction incentive of machines becoming intelligent sentient beings and arising to create a totalitarian state that burdens humans to become a futile minority; read I, Robot. Many humans feel the need to be in control of their actions and giving up certain aspects to the precision of machines is task many will loathe to do. However, to stress again, it is inevitable.

According to Raymond Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and inventor, who writes many books on the future of mankind, predicts that by 2020 the personal computer will have the same processing power as the human brain. By 2045 a $1000 personal computer will be a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. Therefore, the processing power and intelligence of computers will be vastly more intelligent than all humans combined and it in turn sets in motion the singularity, a self-replicating, self-improving artificial intelligence. The speed of improvement will be rampant and will forever change mankind.

However, before we take Kurzweil's predictions as true, we should look at his book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines", which was published in 1990 which successfully predicted the rise of the Internet culture. So, there is some truth in Kurzweil's predictions. He assures us, that although machines and computers will become vastly intelligent, the "command" that so many people see in movies, is unlikely to happen, because of the fact that by then the distinction between humans and machines will be so hard to define that there will be no violent attack or outburst against its "own kind".

Humans will be so integrated into the amazing power that machines and computers can provide them, that they will become, excuse the cheesy science fiction terminology, cyborgs: augmented reality goggles, nanobots within our blood streams, improved skeletons, advances in medication, vast wireless telepathic networks provided by chips in our brains. This might sound like fiction, but just consider how much technology has changed within the last 100 years: airplanes, radio, television, cars, computers, mobile phones, Internet; the list goes on and on. So brace yourself for an even faster advancement in technology, but do not fear, it will be for the better. Within a hundred years the face of human existence will indistinguishable from what we perceive now.

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