“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view,” writes Kurzweil, an American computer scientist and inventor whose work has led to the development of everything from checkout scanners at supermarkets to text-reading machines for the blind.“So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”

GENETIC EDITING AND ENGINEERING

In the field of biotechnology, a big milestone occurred in 1953, when American biologist James Watson and British physicist Francis Crick discovered the molecular structure of DNA – the famed double helix – that is the genetic blueprint for life.Almost 50 years later, in 2003, two international teams of researchers led by American biologists Francis Collins and Craig Venter succeeded in decoding and reading that blueprint by identifying all of the chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.Finding the blueprint for life, and successfully decoding and reading it, has given researchers an opportunity to alter human physiology at its most fundamental level.