If you feel overwhelmed by how fast the world is changing around you, it's going to get worse. The fact is that our rate of progress now doubles every ten years. With each new stage of technology building on the previous stage of technology, progress now becomes exponential.
In the 19th century we saw more technological change then in the nine centuries preceding it; in the first twenty years of the 20th century we saw more advancement than in all of the 19th century. Now paradigm shifts occur only every four years. A good example is the World Wide Web, in which it was completely different then it is today. Since the eighties the World Wide Web had grown from 20,000 nodes to 80,000,000 nodes. It didn't even exist ten years ago. The 21st century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change. Then we will experience a phenomenon called " the singularity"- a merger between humans and computers. .
The reverse engineering of the human brain will provide insights in building more intelligent (and more valuables) machines. By the second half of the 21st century there will be no clear distinction between human intelligence and machine intelligence. On one hand we will have biological brains vastly expanded by implanting them with microscopic robots called nanobots. On the other hand we will have fully non-biological brains that are copies of human brains, even if vastly expanded.
Texas Instrument is already working on a high-resolution projector that would represent a significant step toward nanobots. Once the technology makes nanobots .
possible, we will see them added to our blood. They will communicate not just with each .
other but also with biological neurons. In this way, we will be able to merge natural and virtual realities. Thus machines will possess the ability to emulate the richness, subtlety and depth of human thinking.
We must now admit that computers are potentially millions of times faster than human neural circuits.