Microscopic computers may be managing human health by 2033

London, February 22 : Celebrated inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that it will be possible by 2033 to fix microscopic computers, as small as blood cells, inside human bodies to manage health.

"We will see a billion-fold increase in the price-performance of computers in the next 25 years. Virtual will compete with reality," the BBC quoted him as telling the Game Developers Conference.

Kurzweil said that looking at the way computers had been developing for the last 50 years, it seemed possible to accurately predict the growth and change in computing power.

"There will be a 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology over the next 25 years," he said.

"Today you can put a pea-sized computer inside your brain, if you have Parkinson's disease and want to replace the biological neurons that were destroyed by the disease," he added.

According to him, such a shrinking would lead to "blood cell-size devices... that can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy and inside our brain and expand our intelligence."

He said that such computers would be able to "produce full immersion virtual reality from inside the nervous system".

Kurzweil, who invented the flat bed scanner and text-to-speech synthesis, also said that he considered the term 'virtual world' to be a misnomer.

"In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality," he said.

ANI