| 1985 | 1995 | 2000 | |
| Price | $5,000 | $500 | $50 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary Size (number of words) | 1,000 | 10,000 | 100,000 |
| Continuous Speech? | No | No | Yes |
| User Training Required (minutes) | 180 | 60 | 5 |
| Accuracy | Poor | Fair | Good |
Unenhanced humans may become increasingly hard to find.p. 203
Ray: The word “virtual” is somewhat unfortunate. It implies “not real”, but the reality is that a virtual body is just as real as a physical body in all the ways that matter. Consider that the telephone is auditory virtual reality.
The first half of the twenty-first century will be characterized by three overlapping revolutions—in Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics.
Cloning technologies even offer a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat and other protein sources in a factory without animals by cloning animal muscle tissue.
Although artificial hearts are beginning to be feasible replacements, a more effective approach will be to get rid of the heart altogether. Among Freitas's designs are nanorobotic blood cells that provide their own mobility. If the blood moves autonomously, the engineering issues of the extreme pressures required for centralized pumping can be eliminated.
The only things you can be sure of, so the saying goes, are death and taxes—but don't be too sure about death.—Joseph Strout, Neuroscientist
Our bodies are governed by obsolete genetic programs that evolved in a bygone era, so we need to overcome our genetic heritage. [...]My body is temporary. Its particles turn over almost completely every month. Only the pattern of my body and brain have continuity.
A nanocomputer would augment or replace the nucleus in every cell and provide the DNA codes. A nanobot that incorporated molecular machinery similar to ribosomes [...] would take the codes and produce the strings of amino acids.
Millions of people desperately need the advances promised by gene therapy and other breakthrough biotechnology advances, but they appear to carry little political weight against a handful of well-publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of progress.
[The] ratio of the apparent complexity of the brain to the design information is at least one hundred million to one.
As reported in chapter 5, scientists have recently demonstrated the ability to reprogram skin cells into several other cell types.p. 472
In the 2020's we will routinely have nanobots in our bloodstream keeping us healthy and augmenting our mental capabilities.