Human brain back up in 20 years, says scientist

By Mark TuttleScientists will be able to do a backup of the human brain including memories and
thinking patterns within the next two decades, according to the computer
scientist who was the first to predict the internet.Award-winning
Raymond Kurzweil, 62, has notched up a string of pioneering computer inventions
including voice recognition technology during his career. At the age of 15 he
created a programme that could recreate music in the style of the great
composers, which earned him a visit to the White House and a chat with President
Lyndon B. Johnson. He also built the first machine that could read written
speech for the blind for his pal Stevie Wonder – for whom he also later made a
revolutionary musical synthesizer capable of recreating real
instruments.Kurzweil told 500 guests at the Telekom Austria Group
sponsored “future talk” event in Vienna, Austria, that the human brain backup
was now already technically possible.He said: “I believe that within the
next 20 years we will have thousands of nanobot computer machines in our blood
that will heal our bodies, improve our performance, and even be able to back up
all the contents of our brains, just as you backup your files on a computer.
That means they would back up every thought, every experience, everything that
makes us an individual.””It may sound far-fetched but in the early
1980s, people thought I was crazy for predicting the emergence of the world wide
web by the middle of the 1990s; but it happened, and on the schedule I
predicted.”Kurzweil has 19 honorary doctorates in addition to the
extensive patents he holds and the books he has written – and now advises
governments, scientists, military and business people across the world on a
variety of issues.He is currently working with Google on a project about
how to solve the world’s energy problems.Kurzweil, who was born in
America to Jewish parents who fled Austria before the war, said solutions were
available for many problems. He said: “Last month I was meeting with the prime
minster of Israel on the question of solar power as a solution. The prime
minister asked if there was actually enough sun to power the world?”I
responded by saying it would only take 1 tenthousanths of the sun`s energy
hitting the earth to power everything we use today.”Hannes Ametsreiter,
the CEO of the Telekom Austria Group that hosted the event at the Vienna Tram
Museum, said: “These kinds of controversial and thought inspiring discussions
are exactly what we need to move into the future.”