What the Future Holds
Brian got me hooked on Ray Kurzweil a couple of months ago. Now I see his name everywhere.
On the way back from lunch today, NPR broadcasted an interview with him on Talk of the Nation. The interview was a response to an article he wrote earlier.
He sounded very enthusiastic and optimistic of what the future holds for mankind and what technology will ultimately do for us — cures of the worst diseases we experience today, super-smart “beings” that are part organic and part machine… etc. In light of how fast human genes are being patented for corporate profit today, I am not so sure just how quickly his vision can materialize even if technology progresses as quickly as he predicts. As long as there’s profit to be made out of anything from major corporations, these changes will be slow in manifestation. Why would a pharmaceutical company release a cure to cancer when it can milk billions more out of dying patients by slowly “upgrading” cancer therapies and treatments? Then again, maybe it’s just the drug companies that are evil. And he’s right about technologies being increasingly more affordable and accessible over time. Maybe in the future, we won’t be so caught up with the things we are so worried about today… Maybe it will be genetic terrorism, knowledge-based diseases and some other ingenious ideas future ultra-humans will come up with to kill off each other. But then again, according to Kurzweil, everyone’s supposed to know everything about everything… So it will be a battle of Spy v.s. Spy.
Anyway, Kurzweil’s interview is wicked cool.
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July 17th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
Hmm, I’m a little skeptic.
Oh come on, this is like saying “According to my one child, that has grown from 20cm at his birth to 2 meters in height at his 20th birthday, I predict that he will be 200 meters tall when he is 60″.
The progress doesn’t have to be linear, and usually there are barriers and slow-downs. Especially when technology comes closer to biology.
I can understand that people get excited about how much we changed the world in the last 50 years, but we still know surprisingly little about the most important things, e.g. the human brain.
July 18th, 2006 at 12:07 am
Actually, you should check out his book (”Singularity is Near”) if it’s available in Germany. At least read the first two chapters where he presents his arguments with pretty good research to back them up. I was also a skeptic going into the whole concept of “singularity”. But technology heavyweights don’t call him a genius for nothing…