How cool would it be to have “Futurist” as your job description? Ray Kurzweil, Inventor and Futurist, certainly deserves the title, so he was a good choice for keynote speaker on “The Next 20 Years of Gaming.”

Turns out Kurzweil didn’t really have any specific predictions about the future of gaming, though. In fact, a more appropriate title for his speech would have been simply “The Next 20 Years.” But it was still fascinating to be offered a glimpse of the future as seen through the eyes of a futurist as brilliant as Ray Kurzweil. Many of the technologies Kurzweil discussed have obvious applications for gaming, though, and he himself acknowledged that “the gaming industry really fits in with the acceleration of progress, nowhere is that more evident.”

At one point in his presentation, Kurzweil said that hardware technology is certainly coming along apace, and the real question is whether the software will be ready. In some of his most direct discussion of the future of gaming, Kurzweil said the major challenge will be getting past “The Uncanny Valley” – that point where digital animations are close enough to reality to seem real, but still slightly off, giving you what appear to be “demented humans.”

Using his own methods of plotting and predicting “the acceleration of progress,” Kurzweil’s main arguments were that technological progress is exponential, and “Everything will be information technology by the 2020s.” The cracking of the DNA code, for instance, has turned biology and medicine into an information technology. Whereas in the past pharmaceuticals development was a matter of “drug discovery” – searching, sometimes blindly, for chemical compounds that have some human benefit – scientists today are testing nano-technologies that can turn off the vestigial or bad genes that cause all kinds of modern maladies, from disease to obesity. “Biology is sub-optimal compared to what we can build with information technologies,” Kurzweil says.

Here are some of the specific predictions Kurzweil is making about the future of technological progress, many of which have obvious and exciting implications for gaming:

By 2010:
•    We'll have electronics so tiny they are “embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses.”
•    Images and video will be “written directly to our retinas.”
•    We will all enjoy a “Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times.”

Looking further ahead is even more of a trip:

By 2029:
•    We will have developed a human-level non-biological intelligence (Kurzweil does not like the term “artificial intelligence;” he also doesn’t like “gaming” or “virtual reality;” he calls all three terms “unfortunate,” arguing that there is nothing virtual about the experiences you have or the money you spend online, and nothing artificial about machine intelligence).
•    “$1,000 worth of computation = 1000 times the human brain”
•    While biological intelligence is in essence “fixed,” non-biological intelligence will continue increasing exponentially, and will combine “the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence with the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.”