Summary of the Ray Kurzweil's presentation on, "How technology will transform us?"

Ray Kurzweil- photo courtesy of google 

by Mahdi Abdullah Murad

In a presentation given by Ray Kurzweil under the title, “how technology will transform us?”,  Kurzweil addressed his views about different grounds of the technology that is experienced and will be faced in the future such us, overcoming the disease and poverty, the evolutionary process of the technology, the acceleration of the evolutionary process in both biology and technology, and the communication. Moreover, he demonstrated his predictions of how the technology will be in the future.

In the case of the extension via the biological evolutionary process, what Kurzweil stressed was that the evolution of DNA. Also, how the evolution used the knowledge of the DNA evolution to bring on the next stage. As he described the process as an inherit nature of the evolutionary process, “The biological evolution is inherit nature of the evolutionary process.”  In other words, he talked about the technological improvement in the field of technology. Print and press, the size of the computers, and the evolution of the computer generations in designing the shape of the computers were those matters that he addressed. He went throw the process of adaptation that press and print, and the computer generations had seen by testifying how much time did press and print take till be adapted, and how do the computers changed from their first generation till now in their designs. Communication was another topic that he highlighted during his speech. He described the revolution of the communication as a major revolution by identifying the role of the expansion of the wide wireless, and the internet. Furthermore, the most thrilling part of his presentation was a part that showed the ability to see the internal parts of the human body via the development of the technology, as he said, “the most exciting opportunity is actually to go inside human body.”  He told and showed exact sight of the animation of a respirocyte oxygen in capillary. More to the point, in the last part of his speech, Kurzweil stated his predictions about how the future of the technology would be and what changes human could see and face via the evolutionary process in the technology. He claimed that we would succeed to revise human’s brain by 2020. He stated that the computers would be more powerful than the human brain. He also asserted that the cell phones would be improved in a way that would have the ability to translate speeches.

Regardless of what Kurzweil said, I would like to state a few of my comments concerning what he indicated during his speech. It is the second day that I attended my Information Technology Class at The American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, and Dr. Roger Gayer, who is my instructor, had assigned Kurzweil’s presentation as a homework and asked his students to summarize it. For I am a beginner and don’t have a lot of information about the technology, I am interested in anything that not only famous people will say about the technology, but also those that have been said by ordinary people. For this reason, I watched the Kurzweil’s presentation three times. I gasped during almost all of the points that he pointed out for almost everything was new for me as an Iraqi. The day before I watched the video, Dr. Roger showed us the Internet World Statistic. What I saw there was that my country have % 1.1 of those people who has access with the internet and technology. I ALMOST CRIED! If we compare the other countries and the how technology transformed the life of other nations, we are under their feet. What the Iraqi students are studying in their schools and colleges is the very basics of the computers such as starting, formatting, and playing games. What the other people do with the technology is providing the legend stories. Dear Kurzweil, I am telling you that you made me think more deeply and think about being creative via my field. I am happy more than the happiest man in the world with my major, Information Technology, now.  God help us to rise the number of the technology and computer users in Iraq.