The last invention gained him the lasting friendship and professional collaboration of musician Stevie Wonder as well as the 1998 Stevie Wonder Vision Award. A graduate of MIT and recipient of its 1988 award for Inventor of the Year, Kurzweil is also the recipient of nine honorary doctorates from leading colleges and universities. First among them is that within two decades there will be computers whose ability to reason, make decisions, and hold intelligent conversations is equal to that of a human being. The answer, says Kurzweil, lies in the exponential growth of computer intelligence. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light.
Computers can already process information for specific purposes much faster than the human brain.
As the cubes get smaller and more powerful, allowing more and more interconnections within and between them, the brain will eventually lose its processing edge. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation. But it's not a strength that will remain superior to machine intelligence for very long. In the following conversation with Ray Kurzweil, he takes on a few such questions about our increasingly intelligent machines. My field is pattern recognition, the part of artificial intelligence where we try to build computers that can recognize patterns.