This is what happens when you skimp on liberal arts and humanities education. Humanities? WTF am I saying? No need for something so passe. Looked into his biographical sketches and interviews online (they are numerous) and he plainly states that he never had any interest in that stuff, unless it was sci-fi.

Only going to get worse, and much more dangerous I predict. He’s 60 now and look at how his utopia is already distorted and self-centered. Imagine how it will be when he’s 75? Reality of death REALLY knocking on his door, disillusioning results on the nanotech and AI fronts, doctors and pharmacists still have no idea what life is, and Ray is in charge of an institute and 100s of young minds he’s been inculcating — imagine what he’ll have them up to? MAKE ME RAMONA NOW YOU SELFISH TURDS!!!

Problem is this: you can get away with 90% mentation and 10% heart and soul when you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, even 50s if you are talented and self-deceiving enough. But come late in life the awake mature individual realizes life is really 90% about soul and heart. But no room for that in Ray’s worldview… cannot be explained or grasped on the basis of physical substance alone; therefore only a romantic notion which doesn’t exist. He’s a genius, so he he should have it right.

The future of longevity
POSTED: 11:49 a.m. EDT, May 9, 2007
By David S. Martin
CNN

(CNN) — Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil pops a couple hundred supplements a day, eats an extremely healthy diet and exercises. Kurzweil says he plans to live long enough to live forever.

Kurzweil’s strategy for immortality is based on the premise that science moves forward exponentially, with breakthroughs building on each other and coming at a faster and faster rate. As a result, he thinks life expectancy will start extending to the point where he can live indefinitely.

Kurzweil is dead serious about this.

“It’s going to be very different situation 10 or 15 years from now,” says Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.”

“We have very sharply designed interventions that can stop disease. So for baby boomers, we’d like to be in good shape 10 or 15 years from now when we have the sort of full flowering of the biotechnology revolution.”

Kurzweil’s quest for immortality is nothing new. The search for eternal youth has been around for thousands of years. Scientists, explorers, doctors and dreamers have tried potions, special diets, “magical” waters and some more unusual recipes for immortality.

More than 2,000 years ago, Chinese emperors sent maritime expeditions for the Isles of the Eastern Sea, where immortals were said to possess a drug that prevented death.

Some in China ate very long-lived plants or animals, believing their longevity would be passed on, making crane’s eggs and tortoise soup desirable foods.

In ancient Greece, a common belief held that Hyperboreans, a people free of all natural ills with a lifespan of 1,000 years, lived in a remote part of the world.

Juan Ponce de Leon set out looking for the fountain of youth but discovered Florida instead, by accident, in 1513. Ancient Hebrew and Hindu tales also told of bodies of water capable of conferring eternal life.

Several more recent strategies are even more bizarre: Dog testicles, a stag’s heart, the breath of a virgin, according to “The Quest for Immortality” by S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes.

History is filled with exotic elixirs offering the false promise of eternal youth, and the allure does not seem to get old.

Kurzweil sees the modern quest as different from the failed attempts of the past because it is based on science. In the next 15 or 20 years, he says, human biology will be so well understood we’ll be able to repair the human body in the same way we make repairs to a house or car.

“There will be no sort of natural limit. I mean, how long does a house last?” Kurzweil asks.

The Kurzweil Singularity nonsense is no better than Scientology, the Raelian movement and the 2012 Eschaton.

DDD: some guy just flew across the English channel in a jet pack. Only got a couple more years to wait, son.

Margo: Kurzweil is making his predictions based on the amount of computer power we will have at our disposal and the pace of technological change we’ll be able to achieve with this.

Dan C: Kurzweil is a polymath inventor. He invented the first text-to-speech synthesizers, founded a music synthesis company (my ten year old Kurzweil keyboard synth STILL tears ass compared to almost everything that’s come after it), and has written and studied many things extensively. He may talk a lot, but he has also done and will do again. Every time I read about him, I learn something new.

HHL: Doctors just discovered the enzyme that allows cancer to metastasize. Twenty years ago cancer was a death sentence. Cancer is now just an expensive inconvenience 80% of the time, and the price and inconvenience levels are going down and the survivability is going up. Also, cancer cells ARE functionally immortal. Also, we have successfully grown new organs for people, successfully implanted without immunosuppresive drugs. If you had talked about this in the 80s, you had better have been a sci-fi author or you would have been laughed out of your doctoral research field. Now it’s commonplace. What’s the world gonna look like after 2020? F-bomb if I know, but it’s gonna be beyond some paradigm shifts in medical and computing technology.

Kurzweil predicted, based on Moore’s law, that we’d have supercomputers on the order of 10^29 flops, or about the amount of ‘calculations’ a human brain can accomplish at once (even though computation is a pitiful metaphor for brains). But he appears to have been wrong, because, as I mentioned in comments above, IBM has been threatening to break Moore’s law, but in the opposite way that everyone else has been predicting. Everyone’s been crowing about the end to silicon, the physical limits of space and size and heat and what-not, and IBM is quietly destroying their nay-saying.

Heck, IBM just invented a MRI machine for microscopes that has the capability for a million times finer resolution than today’s body and brain scanning MRI (or NMR – nuclear magnetic resonance, to give it it’s proper everyone-is-scared-of-nuclear-things name). People have been chasing this technology for the past ten years or so, IBM just announced they have resolution down to some crazy scale like 4 nanometers (only 20 times larger than an ‘average’ atomic electron cloud) that not only images the surface in 3d (tomographic) but can image the INSIDES of whatever it’s looking at too, in full 3d, non-destructively (well, except to get a sample small enough to be looked at). They’re 3d mapping viruses now.

3D mapping viruses. 30 years ago this would have been ground-breaking science fiction, today it’s someone’s boring-ass lab job.

And to everyone bitching about government – governing is a slow process that is often behind the times, kind of like your parents’ parents trying to play a gameboy or use an iPhone. But that doesn’t mean new technology can’t make an end-run around things. Railroads used to be a government sponsored monopoly. They LAUGHED at the automobile. They said the world would never need more than 5 (this is a joke) cars, that they would only be the toys of the rich. So um, how well are those railroads doing nowdays?

Kurzweil’s predictions are welcome, but it takes more than technology to solve major climate and economic problems.