Our brains are wired to predict the future — but it might be holding us back
Tech Insider
According to computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, humans struggle to comprehend a fundamental part of the modern world because of one major hangup.
Although our brains are hardwired to predict the future, we're not pre-programmed to think exponentially.
Kurzweil brought this up in a talk with astrophysicist and StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson as part of Tech Insider's Innovators series.
A major principle of Kurzweil's controversial idea is based on exponential growth in technology.
Computers are getting more powerful and cheaper, for example, and doing so at an ever-increasing rate. And he claims the same is going to be true for tech that interacts with the brain, like communication and biological technologies.
"They follow these very predictable trajectories," he told Tyson. But Kurzweil noted applying this sort of trajectory to the brain itself is much harder.
The human brain can certainly see what lies ahead, and our ability to do so helped make us successful in prehistory.
"If you wonder why we have a brain, it's to predict the future," Kurzweil said. "But the kind of challenges we had 50,000 years ago, when our brains were evolving, were linear."
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Humans weren't flying jets and building microprocessors when our brains were first developing. Instead, our minds were focused on more fundamental challenges, like hunting game.
"We can track an animal in the field and we don't expect it to speed up as it goes along, we expect it to go at a constant pace," Kurzweil said. "That worked very well, and that became hardwired in our brains."
Today, argues Kurzweil, our brains are still hardwired for mammoth hunts. Yet our world has progressed to bigger, more complex, and more exponential challenges and achievements.
How can we overcome the limitations of our caveman mindsets? Kurzweil, a member of the "transhumanist" movement, suggests that we can augment our brains with technology to reach superhuman intelligence. And as Tyson comments in his interview with Kurzweil, we've already achieved that to an extent with the smartphones in our pockets.
Watch Tyson's full interview with Kurzweil below.
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