Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash

Someone took Transcendence very, very seriously. Allegedly, our entire beings will be merged with the cloud via nanobots in less than 15 years from now. That, according to Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google.

If anyone knows anything about information – how it’s stored, managed, and shared across the globe – it’s probably the guys behind the world’s biggest search engine. Speaking at the Exponential Finance conference, the computer scientist touched on many of his decade-old predictions, including one about human nature and our restless need to evolve technologically.

“We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human — we transcend our limitations.”

‘A hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking’

Bold projection, or mere inevitability? Kurzweil was talking about cloud computing. He’s not alone in this forecast either. But as a noted inventor and predictor, his words were taken very seriously in New York this Wednesday. “Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” he said.

Many proven scientists have warned against the rise of the machines, including everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. But Kurzweil has faith that humanity can handle this technological double-edged sword. Much like fire can keep you warm but also burn down your house, so does technology require grasping before flipping the switch.

Perhaps more interesting is Kurzweil’s  belief that our thinking will be predominately non-biological when we step into the early 2040s. In that everything from storage to processing will be primarily handled by what we call data centers today. The benefits are immediately clear, but so are the dangers. If anything from this prediction is worth considering, it’s the latter.