Robots in your veins

A central conviction held by artificial intelligence (AI) boosters, but largely ignored in public discussions of the technology, is that the ultimate fulfillment of the AI revolution will require the deployment of microscopic robots into our veins.

- NATHANIEL RICH

In the short term, AI may help us print clothing on demand, help prevent cancer and liberate half of the workforce. But to achieve its greatest aims-immortality, superhuman intelligence, the elimination of all our social ills-we must infuse our blood with millions of self-replicating diamondoid robots.

Why don't we hear more about the blood robots? Their arrival is only a few years away at least according to Ray Kurzweil, agodfather of AI, our foremost technological prophet and a "principal researcher and AI visionary" at Google.

The Singularity Is Nearer follows Kurzweil's 2005 The Singularity Is Near, and several other heraldic works of tech futurism that have become sacred texts to the current generation of AI utopians. In his latest, Kurzweil boasts of his greatest hits: His prediction, in the late 1980s, that a global information network would be universally accessible by the late 1990s, and that mobile devices linked to this network would appear by the turn of the century; his 2018 prediction that, within two years, a neural net would be able to analyse radiology images as well as human doctors, a feat accomplished by Stanford researchers two weeks later; and his 1999 prediction that an AI capable of convincingly impersonating a human being would appear by 2029-which now may seem conservative.