Start Slapping My Face and Bring On Buckets of Cold Water
Last Update: September 03, 2011


Now I'm scared to distraction and freaked beyond sensibility. It's much worse than the ghost stories we were telling during the power outage.

Saw a documentary film last night that blew my mind. It was a 2009 film called "Transcendent Man" about Ray Kurzweil's ideas and predictions for the future.

Kurzweil is a futurist, inventor who has some pretty terrifying predictions about where we are headed technologically.  He believes  we are advancing rapidly to a time when we won't be able to keep up with our technological advances, and we will have to "enhance" ourselves with artificial intelligence. That means that man and machine will merge and there will be no difference between man and machine, real and virtual. According to him, the machine (AI) will take over, and "enhanced" man will be hanging out at the farm or at the local pub, while AI rules the world.

He believes computer technology is increasing not linearly, but exponentially, described in his "Law of Accelerating Returns."

Science fiction? Genius? Mad genius? Just plain mad?

Is Kurzweil the next Thomas Edison?

Kurzweil believes we will cure death. No one ever dies in the future. He wants to bring his father back and believes it will be possible in the future using just his father's vibrations. Where he gets those vibrations,  I don't know, maybe from his father's ring or wristwatch. He seems afraid of death and takes gobs of supplements a day. You'll see him chugging down pills and capsules. Well, he's entitled to some eccentricity. It would choke me.

The film gets into the futurist and transhumanist movements. Folks, we're going to be super intelligent cyborgs.  I like us just the way we are, thank you very much.

Kurzweil is a graduate of MIT, holds 24 patents, has created lots of inventions, including optical character recognition and the text to speech synthesizer.  He's also a mega millionaire. To say this guy is impressive is an understatement.

Inventions that help humanity have my vote. But cyborgs taking over the world?  No way!!!

I'm going to watch it again tonight to make sure I didn't miss anything.

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klrrider Premium
Not ever going to happen... don't care how "smart" this guy is. If life is extended to 150 years or more it will be only for the privileged few... the rest of us don't have the $$$ it will cost and I am sure health insurance co.s will not cover it! lol As far as machines... not a chance. However I do see them being used for various things we are unable to physically do... a friend of mine just had two knee implants done... all by robot... with doctors overseeing the operation. She is doing well! Law enforcement and the Military is already employing machines... God help us!
jatdebeaune Premium
Haha, maybe we'll be able to sell more products that way. They won't be able to get away from you. Google can drive everyone mad. I don't like the idea of chips being implanted.
aem888 Premium
An intriguing prognostication from a couple of the brainiacs in the movie was the eventual implantation of all the Google content in everyone's frontal lobe,,,,that would undoubtedly signal the demise of IM as we know it. lol :) !!
jatdebeaune Premium
"Only if we can instill conscience and morality into these machines !" They will be able to instill consciousness, but I don't know about conscience or morality. Wouldn't it be something if we were someone else's cyborgs and just don't know it?
aem888 Premium
"That means that man and machine will merge and there will be no difference between man and machine, real and virtual" Only if we can instill conscience and morality into these machines !
"No one ever dies in the future" A geneticist from Cambridge University thinks that the person to live to 150 years ia already alive and is probably about 60 years old right now. And the first human to live to around 1000 is probably alive right now. We will still die from accidents, snake bites and mutant viruses. True, advances in cellular and molecular biology have grown exponentially. Kurzweil is a genius but not infallible. I do love his story. Thanks for your thought-provoking article, Joan ! :)
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