Competition - your days may be numbered

"Competition - your days may be numbered" seems an appropriate header when referring to the latest offering from the BBC.

Helen Briggs the BBC Science Reporter based in Boston reports that:

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil.

He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost 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."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

I have to confess that I was not much taken by the possibility that natural intelligence could be supplemented by devices that would give the less gifted among us some real equality (or God forbid - superiority).

I mean where would that all leave things like competition?

Besides, if everyone was capable of intelligence beyond their current capacities where would it leave politicians?

Probably without a job!

Indeed the only part of this story that I liked was the bit that suggested that:

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons".

If these nanobots can get into my system and interact with any cancer cells that may remain there or actually find and destroy the little beggars that may return to haunt my system, I am all for the human/machine hybrid that is being predicted indeed, I am saving up as we speak!

I am not sure I can wait until 2029 though, so can we have all this "soon as" please?

If that's possible, I may even survive long enough to become not only one of the oldest, but probably one of the smartest among all the generations of my family!

On the other hand, if the predicted revolution (it can't really be called evolution I suppose) does not come in time - then I may well end up being one of the youngest among the leaves that have fallen from the family tree.