During his keynote titled "The Next 20 Years of Gaming," technologist Ray Kurzweil talked about how vital games are in checking the progress of technology. No other industry demonstrates the acceleration of technology better, he said.

Kurzweil said that the term "game" is regrettable because it implies it's not real. In the same vein, he also opined that artificial intelligence (AI) is an unfortunate term since that implies that it's fake or ersatz intelligence, whereas he sees it as a real intelligence. Along those same lines, he portends that virtual reality will become very comparable to 'real reality' in the near future.

As Kurzweil sees it, it is vital to look at technology trends relating to the acceleration of technology. Using the first computer as an example, we've had a billion fold increase in the first forty years of computing. He predicts that in the next 20 or so years, we will see another billion-fold increase.

Miniaturization and "Moore's Law" were cited for their great impact on the progress of technology. Kurzweil commented that chips nowadays are "practically in the second dimension" but that they will soon become 3-D in the sense of simulating full immersion that's practically indistinguishable from reality. As he sees it, it is part of the next stage of evolution -- a technological one. You're going to see blood cell devices that will accelerate our growth intellectually and monitor/improve our health, he ventured.