BOSTON -- Inventor and provocative futurist Ray Kurzweil’s opening keynote at Bio•IT World’s Life Sciences Conference + Expo painted an expansive, optimistic vision of a world governed by exponentially growing information technologies that will inexorably transform what it means to be human, dramatically extend lifespan, and produce machines capable of modeling the human brain by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil

“It’s really remarkable to me how many otherwise thoughtful thinkers will take today’s tools and today’s pace of progress and just project that out,” said Kurzweil. “I had a debate a few months ago with a brain scientist who said, “Well, I’ve just spent 18 months modeling this one ion channel in this one type of dendrite and there’s four other types of ion channels so that’s going to be four times 18, and this other dendrite has another six ion channels, and we have all these other types of neurons. It’s going to be a century before we get through the process,” as if there’s going to be no improvement in the tools and the scanning and the modeling software and so on.”

In his most recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurweil argues that biology has become an information science. When combined with advancing nanotechnology and computer technology, the new biology, he says, will unleash a new paradigm in life science. Smart nanobots will patrol the body repairing damage and regulating processes. Artificial blood cells might enable Olympic-like performance. Virtual reality systems will interface directly with the nervous system and be able to uncouple you from external sensory input if desired.

The power behind this progress, says Kurzweil, is the exponential rate of advance by information technologies, of which Moore’s familiar law for the doubling transistor performance roughly every 18 months is but one example. If his vision of the future is startling, he says, that’s only because life is perceived linearly. When plotted on a logarithmic scale, information technology’s progress is a smooth, straight line with interruptions such as wars, recessions, and pestilence -- so prominent on a linear graph -- dropping from sight.

“[The] 20th century was not a hundred years of progress at the year 2000 rate; it was picking up to that rate, it was about 20 years of progress at the year 2000 rate, [we’ll] make about 20,000 years of progress in the 21st, 1,000 times more than we did in the 20th century,” he said.

Many regard Kurzweil’s predictions with skepticism and worry, and even fans say he sometimes gets the decade wrong, but Kurzweil wowed the Expo audience of mostly technophiles who nodded in agreement and wonder. It was a dazzling, if largely unchallenged performance for the accomplished technologist.

A prolific inventor, he is perhaps best known for the Kurzweil music synthesizer, a keyboard that could accurately reproduce of a wide variety of instruments. He has founded many companies, and just a few of his inventions and products include flat-bed scanning technology, a wide variety of speech-to-text and text-to-speech software, knowledge-based medical reports system, and even a “cybernetic poet.”

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office, received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for invention and innovation, and won the 1999 National Medal of Technology. He holds a B.S. in computer science and literature from MIT and has received 12 honorary doctorates. Among his books are The Age of Intelligent Machines; The Age of Spiritual Machines; and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

Sequencing the genome was something of a watershed, said Kurweil, turning biology into an explicit information science. Combined with other biotech technologies, we’re on the verge of being able to reprogram “23,000 software programs inside us called genes” using tools such as RNAi. This evolution, including our ability to manipulate the genome, follows an exponential growth rate, argued Kurzweil.

“[The] organization of chemistry to create in information backbone took billions of years. RNA was the first. The higher cognitive functions only took a few millions years. Homo sapiens [emerged] in just a few hundred thousands years, and there’s really just three simple changes that distinguish us from our as yet unidentified primate ancestry -- only a few genes, actually tens of thousands of bytes of information,” said Kurzweil.

He cited the emergence of a longer skull at the expense of a weakened jaw, the expansion of the brain, which permitted conducting mental “what-if” experiments, and the development of opposable thumbs enabling humans to act on those what-if experiments “to actually change the world.”

A core question is whether it will be possible to create a machine with truly human-level intelligence. Kurzweil certainly thinks so: “I’ve estimated it would take thousands of trillions of bytes of information to characterize the state of a mature brain, and that’s a lot of complexity. But the complexity of the design of the brain is a billion times simpler, [perhaps] 30 million bytes, which is less than Microsoft Word,” Kurzweil said.

He forecasted that by 2013 supercomputers reach processing speeds of 10*16th calculations per second, enough to emulate all the regions of the brain, and by 2029 will be able to model human intelligence. The toughest problem will be the software.

In Kurzweil’s vision, the blend of biology, nanotechnology, and computer technology -- all racing along at exponential rates -- will lead to well-understood and effective drugs and new drug delivery systems that promise to cure most disease and extend life. It’s a rosy view, but not without a few thorns.

All technologies have promises and peril, he conceded, and sometimes they empower destructive individuals. More control of some scientific information may be needed. But suspension or denial of technological pursuit is not the answer, he said. That was the moral of Huxley’s Brave New World. Abandoning technology drives it underground, where it’s actually much less stable, he contends.

“We are the species that goes beyond its limitations. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay within the limitations of our biology. I believe within 10 or 15 years, we will add more than a year every year to he remaining years of life expectancy, so as you go forward your remaining life expectancy will move away from you, so just hang in there another 10 or 15 years,” he said.

For technology lovers, it was thrilling ride. Let’s hope he’s right.