If I could meet any person alive today, it would undoubtedly be Raymond Kurzweil. One of the most brilliant thinkers on the planet, he is a distinguished scientist, inventor, author and futurist.

His inventions include:

• optical character recognition (OCR)
• text-to-speech synthesis
• speech recognition technology
• sampling musical keyboards

If that weren’t enough, Kurzweil accurately predicted:

• the collapse of the Soviet Union
• the defeat of the best human chess player by a computer
• the rapid growth of the Internet, and its move to a wireless format
• the increase in popularity of cell phones, and their shrinking size
• the move of documentation from paper form to computers and the Internet
• the ability to add sound, animations, and video to documentation

Because of his track record, Kurzweil’s other predictions are worth paying attention to. They are based on the Law of Accelerating Returns. This law stems from Moore’s Law stating that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years. As a result, computing power is increasing exponentially and will have an enormous impact on science, including nanotechnology and biotechnology. He predicts it will be only a few decades before some astounding achievements are made, including:

• the “source code” of DNA will be hacked, enabling human life to be extended using nanobots: small programmable robots that repair the human body at the molecular level; whenever we need to heal ourselves, we simply download the latest update into our bodies
• a computer that fully simulates the complexity of the human brain, allowing a person’s mind to be uploaded to a machine, thereby achieving immortality
• artificial intelligence systems that make moral decisions and interact fully with humans
• the ability to send and receive physical objects electronically

Looking further into the future, Kurzweil predicts:

1. The line between people and machines will blur as machines become more human and humans add more technology to their bodies.
2. Machines will grow to be billions of times more intelligent than they currently are.
3. Machines will eventually become smarter than people in a history-shattering event called The Singularity.
4. Human-machine hybrids will create giant supercomputers from asteroids, planets, stars and whatever other matter they can get their hands on (if they still have hands).
5. Computers the size of planets will be built; Earth itself will be transformed into a giant computer.
6. The entire universe will eventually evolve into a new life form: a massive super-computer, transforming matter and energy into a giant thinking machine.

Kurzweil explores this vision of the future in the documentary Transcendent Man. When asked if god exists, he sublimely says,”Not yet.” However, I would say that the Singularity has already arrived; well, at least a portion of it has.

Writers are instructed to write what they know. This applies especially to technical writers. If we don’t know what we’re writing about, the result is a document where the reader doesn’t know what we’re saying.

Beyond writing what we know, we write what we are. We create documentation based on how we perceive it would be best understood. Because everyone’s perceptions are different, no two writers use the exact same text to describe the same thing. All writing is a reflection of the writer.

If we write what we are, then we are what we write. Our writing needs to be clear, logical, organized and methodical; so do we. But if we are what we write, then what are we?

We are, or at least are connected to, the very documentation that we create. All the material that we have ever written, whether personal or professional, is a part of us, and we are a part of it. The merging of people and machines has already occurred: it is called documentation. It is the product of a human mind in electronic form. We live forever through our writings, as long as there is a computer to host them.

We have seen our documentation, and it is us. But will there ever be a time where technical communicators are no longer needed?

Not yet…

No, this article is not about how my computer has been infected. Many younger people today may find this hard to believe, but before there were computer viruses, there were biological ones.

A virus is a machine more perfect and efficient than anything mankind could manufacture. It is a difficult beast to describe; scientists aren’t even sure whether it is “alive” in any sense of the word. That’s because viruses contain genes but no cell structure or metabolism, considered critical to life.

Whatever viruses are, they have a somewhat poor reputation, because they have probably killed more people than all wars and murders combined; not millions, or even tens of millions, but hundreds of millions have been slain by something the poor victims couldn’t even see.

Viruses come in essentially three different flavours: the good, the bad and the ugly, and the ugliest one of all is Ebola. This monster can kill within several days, and it does it in a most horrific way: it essentially liquefies your organs from the inside. Victims bleed to death from the inside out.

What’s interesting is that Ebola, like all deadly viruses, does not actually intend to kill its host. It’s simply making copies of itself, because that’s what it is programmed to do. Essentially, it is trying to turn its host (a person) into a giant copy of itself. In the process, it destroys the host. Hence, their nasty reputation.

But what if you could make a good virus? In fact, such viruses have been developed. Years ago it was discovered that milkmaids who had been infected with the relatively mild cowpox virus were immune to the much deadlier smallpox virus. This led to smallpox vaccination. In fact, most vaccines today contain weakened versions of viruses that protect you against the nastier ones. In genetic medicine experiments, harmless viruses carry useful genes into cells. For example, scientists have tried treating a genetic disease by letting a virus insert a crucial gene into liver cells that protects against harmful cholesterol.

Therefore, we should not always fear the virus. In fact, we can learn much from it. Earlier I said how viruses are simply trying to make their hosts into copies of themselves. That is precisely what an information developer is trying to do to the reader. A successful information developer infects the host agent (the reader) with the knowledge already contained in the information developer’s mind. In doing so, the developer is creating copying the information into the reader’s brain. The more efficiently and accurately the information developer can do this, the better the infection.

And the best part is, that, unlike the Ebola virus, the reader’s brain won’t be liquefied in the process. Unless you are a really, really poor writer. Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine for that.

A remarkable event occurred in Cleveland a few weeks ago. In a marathon surgical procedure, a team of eight doctors worked 22 hours to transplant a woman’s face, moving bone, teeth, muscle and nerves. It was the first facial transplant in the United States, and only the fourth in history.

One of the doctors vividly described the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” These incredible technical craftsmen have truly “saved face”.

I remember the 1997 action science-fiction film Face/Off. In it, a policeman and a criminal mastermind switch identities through a facial transplant, with rather unexpected results. Science fiction has become science fact.

Now, if these doctors can transform a person’s face, it obliterates all excuses for not transforming the way we create documentation. Converting thousands of pages of legacy documentation to a structured format is very difficult. But impossible? Impossible occurs when you lack either the will or the means to accomplish something. Let this event in Cleveland inspire us all.