This Ray Kurzweil fellow has some dangerous, and very ungodly, ideas. He is
basically saying that within another forty years or so, he believes that we
humans will become our own gods, overcoming death, disease, etc., through
technology such as nanobots, which will travel throughout our bodies, making
repairs as needed. He is not the only one who has made these kinds of
statements.

Following is an article that I just read online. It is basically the
transcript for a four-part Shockwave Flash movie that I downloaded to my
computer. If anyone wants a copy of the four parts, I have it zipped up in a
101 MB file. Just let me know.


RAY KURZWEIL - That Singularity Guy

By Rocco Castoro - Vice Magazine


In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be
zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological
humans. We will be able to absorb and retain the entirety of the universe's
knowledge, eat as much as we want without gaining weight, shape-shift into
just about any physical form imaginable, live free from disease, and die at
the time of our choosing. All of this will be thrust on us by something that
Kurzweil calls the Singularity, a theorized point in time in the
not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in
every way, aka the emergence of true artificial intelligence. Computers will
be able to improve their own source codes and hardware in ways we puny
humans could never conceive. This will result in a paradigm shift that sees
mankind coalescing with its own creations: man and machine, merging into
one.

These grand-scale premonitions are largely based on Kurzweil's law of
accelerating returns, which states that the development of technology has
been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. That concept
isn't really compelling to anyone but science nerds until you focus on the
"knee" of this exponential curve--the point where the perpetual doubling of
technological growth skyrockets and negates the linear models of progress
that people like economists have relied on for so long. Kurzweil says we're
just about to start rounding this bend and that the rate of progress will be
so great it will "appear to rupture the fabric of human history." In other
words, we will trump nature and take control of our own evolution. In your
face, God.

Kurzweil's magnum opus, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend
Biology, outlines the implications of this transition in a way that is
simultaneously believable, terrifying, meticulous, and mind-bendingly
absurd. It was published in 2005. That may seem like a short time ago, but
an incoming technological explosion of nuclear proportions isn't so
far-fetched when you consider everything that's changed just between then
and now. Twitter, iPhones, the comment on the Facebook wall as the new
pickup line? The things we were using four years ago already seem like crap
from The Flintstones in comparison. Tech is moving faster all the time, and
even if a third of Kurzweil's predictions about the future are realized, we
will soon be living in a world that makes Back to the Future II look like
Planet of the Apes.

People like to tag Kurzweil as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and
that's not a stretch considering he's responsible for some of the most
useful inventions of the past century: An optical-character-recognition
machine for the blind that's capable of reading most types of printed text
aloud, the CCD flatbed scanner, speech-recognition software, the first
synthesizer that created sounds virtually indistinguishable from those
produced by their acoustic counterparts, and a whole bunch of other nifty
things we can barely comprehend came from Ray's brain. You might imagine
that this guy works in some futuristic, zero-gravity hidden laboratory with
a staff of cyborgs. But his office, just outside Boston in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, is modest. It looks like it hasn't seen a new piece of
furniture since the late 80s. When Kurzweil, dressed in a slightly crumpled
navy suit jacket and slacks, emerged from the columns of books surrounding
his desk, he seemed almost meek and startled even though he had postponed
our interview by over half an hour. One immediately notices his lustrous and
almost plastic-looking skin--a byproduct of supplementing his diet with
phosphatidylcholine, a major component of cell membranes that depletes with
age. It's just one of the 100-plus vitamins, minerals, and other supplements
he ingests on a daily basis to combat the ravages of time. The goal is to
live long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled. And it seems to be
working--the guy is a machine. Toward the end of our conversation, he got up
from his seat to take a break. He returned ten minutes later, did this
shifty rolling maneuver with his eyes that looked as if he were computing
some complex theorem, and then promptly picked up exactly where he left off
(like, literally the same word). It wouldn't be surprising if Kurzweil
announced that he has already received artificial neural enhancements and
other biological upgrades. In fact, it would make most of us feel better
about the discrepancy between his brainpower and ours. Regardless, Kurzweil
knows more than a few things that the majority of us don't, and we'd be
really foolish not to listen as closely as possible.

Beginning of Interview:

Vice Magazine: The Singularity sounds neat and all, but right now the global
economy is a ruptured septic tank and people could care less about what's 30
years down the road. In 2005 you wrote that deflation was just a niggling
concern and we'd be in good shape for years to come. How do you reconcile
this?

Ray Kurzweil: The exponential growth of information technologies is going to
continue completely unaffected by this current recession, or whatever you
want to call it, just as it has through every other recession, including the
Great Depression. There's a new iPhone that's twice as powerful as last
year's for half the money, and that's not just because Apple is so
brilliant. It's true of all electronics, and in fact it's not just
electronics. It's true of anything where we have information, whether it's
brain scanning or biological technologies. Ultimately, these things start
out unaffordable and don't work very well, and eventually they're almost
free and work extremely well. For instance, half the world now has cell
phones though they used to be a real luxury item. So that's actually the
deflationary force that's keeping inflation in check. That's why we don't
have rampant inflation.

Vice Magazine: Sure, but most of the folks I know who've been laid off in
the past six months won't be able to afford the next iPhone. They're just
thinking about the necessities.

Ray Kurzweil: People say, "Well, information technology, that's just part of
what I need. I also need bread and I need housing." But those things will
eventually become information technologies as well as we transform from a
pre-information era to a post-information era. A very important industry
that's doing that now is health and medicine. We've mapped the genome, we
can design interventions on computers and test them out in biological
simulators, we can turn genes off, we can add new genes in a mature
individual, not just a baby. Ultimately, we will have full-scale
nanotechnology, which is just reorganizing matter and energy at the
molecular level using information processes. That's when I will be able to
email you a toaster or toast or a blouse or a solar panel or a module to
build housing or transportation. What we now consider physical products will
become information files--email attachments. That's already true today with
some categories. Ten years ago, if I wanted to send you a movie, I would
have sent you a FedEx package. I can now send you an email attachment. The
same goes for a music file or a book. What used to be physical products can
now be sent as files of information.

Vice Magazine: That kind of correspondence will only be possible if we
develop advanced artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. How long will
it take for computers to surpass our own intellect?

Ray Kurzweil: Today's machines don't have the full range and supple
flexibility of human intelligence, but the key to achieving that is going to
be understanding how the human brain works, and we're making exponential
progress on that as well. We'll have all the models and simulations of brain
regions by 2029. They will give us the templates of the software, the
algorithms of human intelligence. It will allow machines to have access to
their own source codes and redesign themselves to be smarter.
[Continued in part two]


Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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