Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029

Tiny machines could roam the body curing diseases
Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.

The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained.

"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

Man versus machine

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,"

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.

UK scientists developing a "bioactive scaffold" to protect the stem cells and encourage them to grow into bone or cartilage

UK scientists hope to mend shattered bones and damaged cartilage using a patient's own stem cells.
They are developing a "bioactive scaffold" to protect the stem cells and encourage them to grow into bone or cartilage when placed in the body.

The Edinburgh University team hope the technique, which uses stem cells from blood and bone marrow, will be tested in patients within two years.

Surgeons said it could help repair trauma injuries too severe to heal.

The £1.4m project could also eventually have an impact on treating conditions such as osteoarthritis.

Dr Brendon Noble, who works in the University of Edinburgh's MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine said initially they would look at mending cartilage injuries which do not tend to heal well or bone fractures caused by severe trauma such as motorbike accidents.

Elderly patients with fractures also tend to heal less well, he said.

'Recipe'

The key to success would be to get the "recipe" right for encouraging the stem cells to grow in what are effectively harsh environments, he explained.

"A lot of research that has gone before is working out what will drive them down the route to become a specific cell type.

"The next stage is trying to think of innovative ways to encourage them to do that in the body - often we can do things in the laboratory and that's easy but we tend to forget that the cells in the patient were not happy in the first place."

The scaffold consists of a fairly rigid mesh structure, coated or impregnated with a drug that helps the stem cells take hold.

As well as using stem cells from bone marrow, Dr Noble's team is working with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service to culture bone forming cells from blood.

This would mean the patient does not have to undergo surgery to harvest the cells.

Dr Noble added: "Half of us will have orthopaedic surgery in our lifetime.

"We are also living longer and want to remain more active in later life so such problems are going to become more prominent and more expensive."

Professor Chris Moran, member of the British Orthopaedic Association and expert in trauma surgery at the University of Nottingham, said this kind of research meant in the future surgeons might be able to repair trauma injuries too severe to heal by current techniques and even replace bone lost to cancer.

But he added: "In order to move this technology from the laboratory to the operating theatre, the scaffold will need to be compatible with the human body and resist rejection."