Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (63 page)

7
“To this day, AI programs”:
Sheffield et al., p. 30.

8
“100 million things, about the number a typical person knows”:
Kurzweil, p. 267.

9
In 2006, it was estimated that there were 950,000 industrial robots: World Robotics 2007,
IFR Statistical Department (Frankfurt: International Federation of Robotics, 2007).

10
“Discovering how the brain works”:
Fred Hapgood, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,”
Technology Review,
July 11, 2006,
www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17111
.

11
He was in a semiconscious state for several weeks:
John M. Harlow, M.D., “Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head,”
Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
11, May 1999, pp. 281–83,
www.neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/11/2/281
.

12
“It is not impossible to build a human brain”:
Jonathan Fildes, “Artificial Brain ‘10 Years Away,’ ” BBC News, July 22, 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8164060.stm
.

13
“It’s not a question of years”:
Jason Palmer, “Simulated Brain Closer to Thought,” BBC News, April 22, 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/8012496.stm
.

14
“This is a Hubble Telescope of the mind … it’s inevitable”:
Douglas Fox, “IBM Reveals the Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time,”
Popular Mechanics,
December 18, 2009,
www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/extreme-machines/4337190
.

15
“After we solve this”:
Sally Adee, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,”
IEEE Spectrum,
June 2008,
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/reverse-engineering-the-brain/0
.

16
“Within thirty years”:
Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?” paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in
Whole Earth Review,
Winter 1993,
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html
.

17
“I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened”:
Tom Abate, “Smarter Than Thou? Stanford Conference Ponders a Brave New World with Machines More Powerful Than Their Creators,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
May 12, 2006,
http://articles.sfgate.com/2006–05–12/business/17293318_1_ray-kurzweil-machines-artificial-intelligence
.

18
“If you could blow the brain up”:
Kurzweil, p. 376.

19
Philosopher David Chalmers has even catalogued:
http://consc.net/mindpapers.com
.

20
“life may seem pointless if we are fated”:
Sheffield, p. 38.

21
“One conversation centered”:
Kurzweil, p. 10.

22
“It’s not going to be an invasion”:
Abate,
San Francisco Chronicle,
May 12, 2006.

23
“intelligent design for the IQ 140 people”:
Brian O’Keefe, “The Smartest (or the Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth,”
Fortune,
May 2, 2007,
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/14/100008848/
.

24
“It’s as if you took a lot of good food”:
Greg Ross, “An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter,”
American Scientist,
January 2007,
www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hofstadter
.

25
“will evolve into socially intelligent beings”:
P. W. Singer, “Gaming the Robot Revolution,”
Slate,
May 21, 2009,
www.slate.com/id/2218834/
.

26
“When I was a kid”:
Rodney A. Brooks, “Making Living Systems,” in John Brockman, ed.,
Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today
(New York: Sterling, 2008), p. 250.

27
“My prediction is that by the year 2100”:
Rodney A. Brooks, “Flesh and Machines,” in Denning, p. 63.

28
“At Little League games”:
Pam Belluck, “Burst of Technology Helps Blind to See,”
New York Times,
September 27, 2009, p. A1,
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/health/research/27eye.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=“burst of technology”&st=cse
.

29
“It’s great. I have a feeling”:
BBC-TV, October 18, 2009.

30
“Over the next ten to twenty years … wireless Internet”:
Rodney A. Brooks, “The Merger of Flesh and Machines,” in John Brockman, ed.,
The Next Fifty Years
(New York: Vintage, 2002), p. 189.

31
“Fifty years from now … Darwinian evolution”:
Ibid., pp. 191–92.

32
“When I try to think of what I might gain”:
Stock, p. 23.

3. FUTURE OF MEDICINE: PERFECTION AND BEYOND

1
“Biology is today an information science”:
David Baltimore, “How Biology Became an Information Science,” in Denning, p. 43.

2
“You have to have a strong stomach”:
Nicholas Wade, “Cost of Decoding a Genome Is Lowered,”
New York Times,
August 10, 2009, p. D3,
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11gene.html
.

3
“Embryonic stem cells represent”:
Jeanne Lenzer, “Have We Entered the Stem Cell Era?”
Discover,
November 2009, p. 33,
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/nov/14-have-we-entered-the-stem-cell-era/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
.

4
“It’s gorgeous”:
Ibid.

5
By 2001, there were more than 500:
Stock, p. 5.

6
But there have been setbacks:
Ibid., p. 36.

7
“What we are seeing today”:
Kate Kelland, “Gene Maps to Transform Scientists’ Work on Cancer,” Reuters, December 18, 2009.

8
“Cancer is an army of cells”:
David Baltimore, “How Biology Became an Information Science,” in Denning, p. 54.

9
“Homo sapiens,
the first truly free species
”: Kurzweil, p. 195.

10
“Although many genes are likely to be involved in the evolution”:
Stock, p. 108.

11
“It’s as if they remember”:
Jonah Lehrer, “Small, Furry … and Smart?”
Nature
461 (October 2009): 864.

12
“The obstacles to his understanding”:
Ibid.

13
In fact, scientists believe that there has to be a balance:
Jonah Lehrer, “Smart Mice,”
The Frontal Cortex,
October 15, 2009,
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/smart_mice.php
.

14
“We all know that good-looking people do well”:
Sheffield et al., p. 107.

15
“There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death”:
Kurzweil, p. 320.

16
“If something like age-1 exists in humans”:
Kaku, p. 211.

17
Finally, in 2009, the long-awaited results came in:
Nicholas Wade, “Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging,”
New York Times,
August 17, 2009, p. D4,
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18aging.html?ref=caloric_restriction
.

18
Scientists have found that sirtuin activators:
Nicholas Wade, “Quest for a Long Life Gains Scientific Respect,”
New York Times,
September 29, 2009, p. D4,
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29aging.html?ref=caloric_restriction
.

19
His colleague Sinclair, in fact, admits that he:
Nicholas Wade, “Scientists Find Clues to Aging in a Red Wine Ingredient’s Role in Activating a Protein,”
New York Times,
November 26, 2008, p. A30,
www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/health/27aging.html?scp=6&sq=sinclair%20resveratrol&st=cse
.

20
“In five or six or seven years”:
Wade, “Quest for a Long Life,”
New York Times,
September 28, 2009, p. D4,
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29aging.html?ref=caloric_restriction
.

21
“Such interventions may become commonplace”:
Kurzweil, p. 253.

22
“Gradually, our agonizing”:
Stock, p. 88.

23
In 2002, with the best demographic data:
Ciara Curtin, “Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead,”
Scientific American,
March 2007.

24
Every year, 79 million:
Brown, p. 5.

25
“I believe that by 2050”:
Richard Dawkins,
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Mariner, 2004), p. 113.

26
Even more interesting is the HAR1 region of the genome:
Katherine S. Pollard, “What Makes Us Human?”
Scientific American,
May 2009, p. 44.

27
This cell would then be reprogrammed to revert:
Nicholas Wade, “Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome,”
New York Times,
February 12, 2009, p. A12,
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/science/13neanderthal.html?scp=3&sq=neanderthal
&st=cse
.

28
“Are you going to put them in Harvard”:
Ibid.

29
“will doubtless raise”:
Dawkins, p. 114.

30
“A year ago, I would have said”:
Kate Wong, “Scientists Sequence Half the Woolly Mammoth’s Genome,”
Scientific American,
January 2009, p. 26,
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=woolly-mammoth-genome-sequenced
.

31
“Traditional Darwinian evolution now produces”:
Stock, p. 183.

4. NANOTECHNOLOGY: EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING?

1
“The grandest dream of nanotechnology”:
Carl T. Hall, “Brave New NanoWorld Lies Ahead, “
San Francisco Chronicle,
July 19, 1999,
http://articles.sfgate.com/ 1999–07–19/news/17694442_1_atom-molecules-nanotech
.

2
“Eventually, the goal is not just to make computers”:
Ibid.

3
“Nanotechnology has the potential”:
quoted in Kurzweil, p. 226.

4
The key to these nanoparticles is their size:
James R. Heath, Mark E. Davis, and Leroy Hood, “Nanomedicine—Revolutionizing the Fight Against Cancer,”
Scientific American,
February 2009, p. 44.

5
“Because the self-assembly doesn’t require”:
Emily Singer, “Stealthy Nanoparticles Attack Cancer Cells,”
Technology Review,
November 4, 2009,
www.technologyreview.com/business/23855/
.

6
“It’s basically like putting”:
“Special Gold Nanoparticles Show Promise for ‘Cooking’ Cancer Cells,”
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009–03/acs-sgn030909.php
.

7
Yet another way to steer a molecular machine:
Thomas E. Mallouk and Ayusman Sen, “How to Build Nanotech Motors,”
Scientific American,
May 2009, p. 72.

8
“Today, it takes a room filled with computers”:
Katherine Harmon, “Could a Microchip Help to Diagnose Cancer in Minutes,”
Scientific American
blog post, September 28, 2009,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=could-a-microchip-help-to-diagnose-2009–09–28
.