NW: Are you currently collaborating with other celebrities?
RK: I've had a lot of interaction with quite a few musical celebrities in the course of my work with Kurzweil Music, but I wouldn't call them collaborations. There's a musical group called Our Lady Peace that has shown an interest in my work and is going to be showing the influence of my book [The Age of Spiritual Machines] in their next album. But I haven't had the level of collaboration that I've had with Stevie Wonder with any other musical stars.

NW: Are you still developing tools for musicians?
RK: I have a company called Kurzweil Cyber Art Technologies and the purpose is to create software tools to help in the creation of art in the visual, literary and musical arts. The marketing model is viral marketing over the Internet of free versions of the software and then inexpensive upgrades over the Internet to premium versions for prices like $30. We have one product up there now that is Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet that can write original poetry. But its primary purpose is to help you write poetry. You write poetry in one window and then it can give you lots of ideas based on its database of poetry from different poets. It gives you lots of suggestions [for writing original poetry] it's designed to stimulate your imagination. We're going to very shortly be introducing Harold Cohen's Aaron which is a cybernetic artist and that doesn't so much help you create art [it's] a cybernetic artist with its own personality. It's something that Harold Cohen has developed over thirty years, it's been his life's work - he's a brilliant computer scientist and artist. The output of Aaron actually hangs in museums around the world. There's going to be a version that's a free screen saver that paints paintings on your screen line by line. Every painting is different; you'll never see the same painting twice. We'll be launching that in a few months. We [also] plan to have musical technology that would enable someone with music appreciation ability but not necessarily music playing skills to create their own music by jamming with their computer and will include a software-based synthesizer.

NW: One of the things about art that's hard to duplicate is the shared experience with the artist. What's your feeling about our experience of art and technology in the future?
RK: Right now… our most complex machines are still on the order of a million times simpler than the human brain. Although we're making very strong progress in reverse engineering of the human brain - in fact we've made some very strong progress even since my book came out two years ago - we still don't have maps or reverse engineering of 99% of the human brain. We'll get there because brain scanning, our ability to reverse engineer the human brain, as well as computation, communication and miniaturization are all growing exponentially. These predictions are not just pulled out of the air. I have a detailed model that I've been developing for a couple of decades on how these particular capabilities evolve. The model has actually proved quite predictive through the nineties and [I] believe it can anticipate what kind of capabilities will be possible. One of the key features of the future that most observers, including some very thoughtful ones, don't appreciate is that the rate of progress itself is accelerating. I had a debate a few weeks ago about Bill Joy's article in Wired where this Nobel Prize winning biologist said that there's no way we're going to see self-replicating nanotechnology for at least a hundred years. I pointed out that's actually a very good estimate of the amount of technical progress required to achieve that technical capability at today's rate of progress.

But the rate of progress is not a constant. According to my model, it's doubling every decade. So we'll see one hundred years of progress at today's rate of progress in twenty-five calendar years. Most people don't really appreciate the sort of revolutionary implications in the fact that progress itself is accelerating. So we will see entities of the complexity and depth of the human brain in about thirty years. We already make use of information from the reverse engineering of the human brain. [Eventually] Machines will either be copies of the human brain, suitably modified or extended, or new systems based on our understanding of how the brain works with computer hardware that's millions, ultimately billions times more powerful than what we have today.

So, the attributes that we now associate with human intelligence - the ability to respond appropriately to emotion, to communicate in art, which is the ability to communicate philosophical and emotional ideas from an artist to an audience, will be feasible for non-biological entities. One of the key predictions of my books is that ultimately there won't be a clear distinction between biological and non-biological intelligence. We're going to be expanding our own intelligence by amplifying it, [and] merging it through intimate connection with our technology. I describe a number of scenarios where that can be done non-invasively, for example sending intelligent nanobots to the brain through the capillaries. And you can have billons of nanobots all merging their own intelligence by being on a distributed local area network, communicating wirelessly with each other, and also communicating directly with our neurons through wireless communication. That capability exists already in a crude form. Attributes we now associate with human intelligence will be ones we associate with non-biological intelligence. And there won't be a clear distinction. When you talk to a human of biological origin some portion of their thinking - deeply intertwined and merged with their biological thinking - will be non-biological.

One aspect though of non-biological intelligence is that it's growing exponentially. We have 1026 power approximately of calculations per second of biological thinking among human beings on earth today. And that's not going to change appreciably. Our non-biological thinking is at least 6 or more quarters of magnitude less than that today but growing exponentially and will surpass biological thinking before 2030, and then continue to grow exponentially. By the middle of the century the bulk of thinking on the planet will be non-biological but nonetheless derivative of human intelligence. It's really an expansion of the human civilization; kind of the next step in evolution, which is proceeding not through DNA-guided evolution but through our technology-guided evolution.

Continue reading to find out what Ray thinks he means to the Nerd community and what low-tech devices he still depends on day in and day out.