Artificial intelligence will match the human intellect within a couple of decades, according to an inventor who predicts a technological revolution in which intelligent “nano-robots” work inside the body to stave off ageing and enhance the capacity of our minds.

Ray Kurzweil, a software engineer and futurologist, said yesterday that technology was advancing so fast that it would transform the way that people lived by the middle of the century, extending life spans, protecting against disease and even improving the biological hardware of the human body and brain.

Mr Kurzweil, a member of a panel that published a report yesterday detailing the great engineering challenges of the 21st century, said that the rate at which science and technology moved forward was doubling every two decades. This suggested that there would be 32 times more technical progress over the next half-century than in the last.

The rapid rate of progress would lead to artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing the power of the human mind and to nanotechnology allowing this to be incorporated in machines that could fight disease and reverse the ageing process, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Boston.

Set to work in the brain, these nano-robots would produce virtual realities so compelling that they would match the real thing and enhance human intelligence.

“Intelligent nano-robots will be deeply integrated in the environment, our bodies and our brains, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all the senses, experience ‘beaming’, and enhanced human intelligence,” he said.

The ideas of Mr Kurzweil, who in the 1970s developed the first optical text-recognition software for computers, are controversial among scientists and engineers. Many consider that he overstates the potential of technology to solve problems and to enhance life, while underplaying the threats of issues such as global warming, emerging infectious diseases and overpopulation.

He is taken sufficiently seriously by his peers to have been included on the panel of 18 leading engineers convened by the US National Academy of Engineering. The group, which published its report at the Boston meeting, included Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, the geneticist, who is seeking to create synthetic life, and Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

It stopped well short of endorsing Mr Kurzweil’s visions, which will be set out this year in a film entitled The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future, focusing on the need for technology to address threats to humanity and the environment.

The priority for engineering, the report said, was to solve the energy crisis by harnessing the power of the Sun. “Sunshine has long offered a tantalising source of environmentally friendly power, bathing the Earth with more energy each hour than the planet’s population consumes in a year,” it said. “But capturing that power, converting it into useful forms, and especially storing it, poses provocative engineering challenges.

“Another popular proposal for long-term energy supplies is nuclear fusion, the artificial recreation of the Sun’s source of power on Earth. The quest for fusion has stretched the limits of engineering ingenuity, but hopeful developments suggest the goal of practical fusion power may yet be attainable.”

Mr Kurzweil believes that the solar energy challenge will be solved through nanotechnology. “We only need to capture one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth to meet 100 per cent of our energy needs,” he said.

The report highlighted the importance of developing carbon sequestration and storage systems to halt and even undo the climate damage caused by burning fossil fuels. Another key goal was improving access to clean water. Biomedical engineering should seek to develop technologies that enable personalised medicine.

Mr Kurzweil highlighted the importance of technologies such as gene therapy and ribonucleic acid (RNA) interference, which can correct genes and turn them on and off.

“Within one to two decades we will be in a position to stop and reverse the progression of ageing, resulting in dramatic gains in health and longevity,” he said.

Although the panel acknowledged the potential of medical technology, it said that it was matched by threats such as pandemic flu. Another challenge would be to “reverse-engineer” the brain, which could lead to improvements in artificial intelligence of the sort that Mr Kurzweil predicted.

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