Kurzweil says computing will disappear by the end of this decade. Images will be written directly on people's retinas from eyeglasses and contacts. Nanobots will also expand human intelligence by factors of thousands or millions. By 2030, nonbiological thinking will be trillions of times more powerful than biological thinking. Not long ago, Kurzweil sketched his vision for the 21st century over drinks in a Lake Tahoe bar for Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy.
Networks really give computers their potent and omnipotent future.
We are wrapping our planet in a web of land and undersea cables and wireless systems. Satellites, microwaves, and fiber-optic cables are connecting the planet at extraordinary speed. If all the optical fiber spreading around the globe could be seen as a single filament, its tip would be advancing at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, or so the engineers at Telstra Research Laboratories suggest. Each hair-fine fiber is capable of holding, at the moment, about 40 to 60 channels. Each channel can carry 10,000 or more phone calls.