Technological advance: Between dream and despair

What India still misses is an overall and long-term strategy aimed at creating a technologically advanced and knowledge-based society

The celebrated futurologist, Ray Kurzweil, has predicted that by the year 2029 advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would bring us to the point where a $1,000 computing device may be able to replicate the full range of capacities and functioning of the human brain. Thereafter, an exponential increase in AI would begin to take place because theoretically there would be no biological constraint on the augmentation of knowledge through machine learning. Non-biological intelligence will greatly surpass biological intelligence. Mr Kurzweil says that by mid-century we would have reached the point of technological “singularity” when capabilities would multiply billion fold beyond