The idea that works this year won't work next year: futurologist Ray Kurzweil on business, AI and Industry 4.0

The future of human intelligence is to have our heads in the cloud, says Kurzweil

Inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil believes that one aspect of the future is entirely predictable - the rate of change of technology. He points out that price-performance, capacity and also bandwidth have all increased at regular exponential rates for decades, predating Moore's Law and being impervious to wars and financial crashes. The author of many books on the subject of technological change, Kurzweil is so confident in the rate of advancement of biotechnology that he has set up a cryogencics company and is to have his own body frozen in full expectation that science will be able to bring it back to life within two decades.

Now director of engineering at Google where he is involved with artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Kurzweil has long been an advocate of fusing technology with the human body. Speaking at the Tibco Now conference in Las Vegas, he pointed out that "biotech is one thousand times more powerful now than when they started the Human Genome Project in 1990" and that "cloud computing is doubling in power every year".

Kurzweil argues that the next step in the evolution of the human neocortex - the outer layer of the brain which has been slowly growing in size over the millennia and which is associated with higher thinking, creativity, music, art and science - will be connectivity with the cloud. In the cloud there will be a "synthetic human neocortex" to which we will be able to connect via computers implanted in our heads. This will allow higher levels of abstraction and increased intelligence, he said.

If this seems strange, it's only because human beings are hardwired to think linearly, not exponentially, he argued.

On the rather more down-to-earth matter of how businesses should be preparing for the new era of mass interconnectivity, popularly known as Industry 4.0, he said organisations should look at every aspect of what they do in the light of rapid change.

"Every industry should look at the Law of Accelerated Returns [the exponential rate of technological change] as it effects every parameter of the business."

He gave the example of an ebook company with which he was involved a few years ago.

"We looked at what is going to happen with display resolutions, telecoms speeds, the power of mobile computing, where mobiles would go three or four years later, and because I'm human I think in a linear fashion I couldn't help thinking 'woah, mobile devices are going to be that powerful in four years?', but that's exactly what happened.

"You really need to go through this discipline to see where your business will be," he said, adding that the world will be a lot more customer centric in four years than it is today, and that interfaces will be more seamless and interactive, with natural language coming more to the fore and inconvenient online forms dying out.

Asked about what sort of companies he would invest in, Kurzweil (pictured above) said he would look for certain characteristics.

"A willingness to change, and to cannibalise your own products and technologies, not to become over-reliant on success of one product... Google's page rank algorithm was one of the greatest in history but Google realised like other bold companies they couldn't rely on one algorithm or one model."

He added: "The pace of change is faster and faster. An idea that works this year won't necessarily work next year. When I started in technology a generation of technology was about 20 years; now it's two years. It's very quick and you can't rest on your laurels."