It is difficult to imagine life in a developed society without mobile communication and navigation devices, without access to the Internet and e-mail, without transportation and logistics services.
We have entrusted machines to perform routine operations for the accumulation and processing of information. But civilization is preparing to take the next step - to connect the human mind to the machine.
Planetary information
Science fiction writers have been writing for a long time that someday they will build a colossal data accumulator, which will store all the knowledge collected by humanity. Suffice it to recall the Big Planetary Information Center (BVI), invented by the Strugatsky brothers, or the Big Academic Machine (BAM), described by Sergei Snegov.
True, they believed that such a system would arise in the distant future, when humanity would solve other important problems. But it turned out that the knowledge repository is in demand right now, so the first version of it appeared even before the advent of the Internet.
In 1971, Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois, gained access to a Xerox server on which he digitally saved the United States' Declaration of Independence.
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When the capabilities of computers and networks began to expand, it turned out that it was convenient to store in digital form not only books, articles, correspondence and working documentation, but also drawings, models, images, music, films, encyclopedic information, geographical maps, video archives of surveillance systems, etc. -other-other.
Soon, the problem of storing personal and corporate data arose. If at the beginning of the information revolution in each specific case they could fit on a floppy disk, then every year the volumes grew, therefore the emergence of "cloud" technologies was inevitable, allowing personal computers to be turned into simple terminals operating through a high-speed network with external databases and computing resources.
The first such service to users was provided by Amazon.com Inc., which began as an online bookstore. Of course, "cloud" resources can have security problems, but they turned out to be so convenient that people trust them with the most private information.
Model of the world
One of the leading firms in the data provision market, including in the field of "cloud" technologies, is the American company Google Inc, founded in September 1998.
All of us have used the Google search service at least once, thanks to which it gained global distribution: at the moment it indexed 60 trillion documents in the public domain. Other Google services are well known: interactive world maps, machine translator, free mail, large file sharing.
It is clear that the company wants to remain the leader in the electronic services market, therefore it develops the most advanced technologies. For example, it was recently announced that Google has launched the Knowledge Vault project.
A special program collects information from all open spaces of the Web, identifies connections between data and builds a kind of digital model of the world, which also includes information about the people who inhabit it.
According to the official report, the "Knowledge Store" contains 1.6 billion data, with only 271 million being recognized by the system as reliable. In this case, the "Storage" is continuously replenished and updated.
The digital model of the world will expand, and it will cover not only our planet, but also near-earth space, and the nearest celestial bodies (for example, the Moon and Mars), information about which comes from spacecraft.
Numerous webcams will become her "eyes" and "ears". Transponder chips embedded in any product will allow you to track their location and status at any time. Satellite systems and points of free Internet access will help to register the activity of certain users.
Some futurists are afraid of building such a global model with the possibility of total control over the personality, but it seems that they are losing the argument with the optimists, because as a pleasant bonus, the emergence of a service of virtual personal assistants is expected, which will be so convenient and useful in handling that few will refuse them …
For example, one of these assistants will successfully fight against spam and advertising while working on the Web; the other will track the user's medical indicators and warn him about the development of diseases; the third will select the necessary purchase based on individual tastes and financial capabilities.
Of course, the concept of privacy will lose the meaning that it had in the past, but a person is very often willing to sacrifice tradition for the sake of expanding comfort.
Endless possibilities
In 2012, Google hired a new director of engineering, renowned digital visionary Ray Kurzweil, a man who is trying to imagine what the world of the near future will look like.
His forecasts are not always successful. For example, in 1999 he very accurately predicted that before 2010 there will be mobile phones controlled by voice commands. At the same time, his prediction that computers will become part of clothing has not been confirmed: engineers can already make such clothing, but the demand for it is so small that it stops the development of the idea.
Therefore, Kurzweil's predictions should be treated with caution, but it is worth listening to them, because he not only fantasizes: the list of his real inventions includes the first tablet-based scanner for the first time a device for reading text aloud.
Here is his latest forecast
2020 year. Virtual reality glasses will project the image directly onto the retina. A computer with a computing power of ten teraflops (the same as in the human brain) will cost only a thousand dollars. Most diseases will disappear thanks to the development of medical nanotechnology.
Human nutrition can also be replaced by recycling nanosystems. Self-driving cars will flood the roads, people will be prohibited from driving on their own on busy highways.
2030 year. Virtual reality can no longer be sensed from the real world. The first experiments on the digitalization of consciousness will take place. 2040. Artificial intelligence will surpass biological (that is, ours) in its capabilities by a billion times. Nanotechnology will be able to create food and any objects of the physical world from any source materials. 2045. Natural intelligence will also rise to unimaginable heights by modifying the brain and transforming the body into a nanotechnological environment. 2050. Humanity is evolving into creatures "based on software", that is, they can live in the virtual reality of networks, if necessary, projecting their consciousness into artificial beings or into a swarm of microscopic robots.
As you can see, according to Ray Kurzweil, there is very little time left before the onset of a new era. Perhaps he is wrong in terms and details, but the creation of a digital model of the world in the "cloud" space will certainly expand our capabilities for the perception and processing of data.
The emergence of a brain-computer interface seems inevitable (at present, prototypes are being tested on disabled people and show good results). And if access to the digital model and direct exchange of information with the Network become widespread, then the intellectual growth of people will go by itself.
Many futurists believe that such a process will turn us into rationally thinking crackers. Ray Kurzweil says that, on the contrary, we will become deeper and more versatile as individuals, learn to better understand each other and master fundamentally new ways of thinking, which will give incomparable pleasure. I'd like to believe that he is right.
Anton PERVUSHIN