Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.
The 60-year-old futurist, best known for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.
"Games are a harbinger of everything," said Mr. Kurzweil in his keynote address. "In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality."
Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.
Mr. Kurzweil is what you'd call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest — he has a bachelor of science from MIT — he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.
Through his numerous companies he's invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He's the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990's The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world's chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
Mr. Kurzweil's predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.
A Persian folk tale tells of a king presented with a beautiful chessboard, and when the king offered anything in return, the craftsman asked for a grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, 16 on the fourth and so on. The king agreed, but by the time he had reached the 19th square, more than half a million grains of rice were required. The king forfeited his realm instead.
The problem, said Kurzweil, is that humans seem to be hardwired to intuit things as following a linear trend. On a linear graph, for example, the growth of the World Wide Web seems like it came out of nowhere. But when plotted as an exponential curve you see "exquisitely smooth exponential progression," said Kurzweil. Which is why, he explained, he was able to accurately predict the growth of the Internet twenty years ago.
In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the '70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore's Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.
But what does all this have to do with video games?
Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we'll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we'll have the software to do the same.
