With nanotech, expanding the mind to the cloud - MIT Sloan School of Management

Author, inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil has accurately predicted the rise of major technological innovations, from head-mounted displays such as Google Glass to natural language interfaces such as Siri. Speaking Feb. 20 at the annual MIT Tech Conference, Kurzweil offered a vision of 2030, one with nanorobots bolstering the immune system and also connecting to external, cloud-based neocortal modules, or groups of neurons, to access far more knowledge than can fit in the brain. "We have pretty good ideas of how this works," said Kurzweil, who detailed this process in his 2012 book, How to Create a Mind. The thought of nanorobots inside the body fighting disease and connecting to computers may seem far-fetched. But so did, at one time, the World Wide Web, the mobile phone, the 3-D printer, and the fully mapped human genome--all of which Kurzweil also foresaw.