The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

It is nonetheless conceivable—though this is a philosophical question that can’t be scientifically tested—that subjective consciousness requires a more detailed simulation of the brain. Perhaps we would need to simulate the individual ion channels inside neurons, or the thousands of different kinds of molecules that may influence the metabolism of a given brain cell. Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute estimated that these higher levels of resolution would require 1022 or 1025 operations per second, respectively.[150] Even in the latter case, they projected that a $1 billion (in 2008 dollars) supercomputer could achieve this by 2030, and be able to simulate every protein in every neuron by 2034.[151] In time, of course, exponential price-performance gains would drastically reduce those costs. What you should take away from all this is that even wildly altering our assumptions does not change the essential message of the forecast: computers will be able to simulate human brains in all the ways we might care about within the next two decades or so. This isn’t something a century away that our great-grandchildren will have to figure out. We are going to accelerate the extension of our life spans starting in the 2020s, so if you are in good health and younger than eighty, this will likely happen during your lifetime.