January 21, 2010
The Futurist
From a NewsWeek profile of Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist who believes the next step in human evolution is a merge with technology he’s calling The Singularity:
Kurzweil took some serious heat on this last point during a panel discussion after the premiere of Transcendent Man at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. Some leading artificial-intelligence experts were in the audience, and they think we are racing toward a dystopian future. But Kurzweil is having none of that—he thinks the “man-machine civilization” is going to be wonderful. He doesn’t argue. He just sits there, smiling. Ask him a pointed question and he just dodges it and launches into another monologue. He has no doubt. None. He is utterly, completely, 100 percent sure that he is going to live forever. He will be reunited with his beloved father, and they will become immortal and spend eternity together. He is absolutely certain about this. Nothing can talk him out of it. And that, at the end of the day, may be the scariest, or saddest, thing of all.
The article is fascinating, not necessarily because his ideas are too grandiose, but because he’s such a serious man.
(via)
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