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Ray Kurzweil: This is your future
CNN ^ | December 10, 2013 | Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Special to CNN

Posted on 12/11/2013 3:11:47 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.

Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s.

We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.

We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.

RNA interference, for example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune system, have the ability to add new genes.

Stem cell therapies, including the recently developed method to create "induced pluripotent cells" (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch....

(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: 3dprinters; 3dprinting; cnn; energy; future; illness; medicine; raykurzweil; science; solarenergy
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Editor's note: Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." Ray has written five national best-selling books. He is Director of Engineering at Google.
1 posted on 12/11/2013 3:11:47 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Oh, I get it now... Because of these new technologies becoming available to the masses, we need to ‘remove’ as many of them, (the masses), as we can before this technology does become available.

So they introduced Obamacare...


2 posted on 12/11/2013 3:14:39 AM PST by The Working Man
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

He claims that by 2030 solar energy will meet all our energy needs.

He is clueless.


3 posted on 12/11/2013 3:19:33 AM PST by prisoner6 ( FREEDOM)
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To: The Working Man
He is Director of Engineering at Google.

Too bad he didn't get to do the Obamacare web site.

4 posted on 12/11/2013 3:22:54 AM PST by spokeshave (OMG.......Schadenfreude overload is not covered under Obamacare :-()
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To: The Working Man
I think there is a lot to that. If they can get the world population down to 100 million, and if disease and aging are practically eliminated, and if automation reduces the need for labor to practically nothing ... then the earth will become a Garden of Eden for the special few who remain.

That seems to be their hope. All of their policies are pointed in that direction.

For myself, I have a greater hope, and it does not involve immanentizing the eschaton.

5 posted on 12/11/2013 3:24:07 AM PST by ClearCase_guy
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To: prisoner6
He claims that by 2030 solar energy will meet all our energy needs.

Good luck with that....when the next ice age kicks in around 2016 and all the solar panels are covered in frozen snow.

6 posted on 12/11/2013 3:25:53 AM PST by spokeshave (OMG.......Schadenfreude overload is not covered under Obamacare :-()
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

bump for later


7 posted on 12/11/2013 3:49:54 AM PST by gattaca ("If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Mark Twain)
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To: prisoner6
He is clueless.

Read his books. You will change your mind.

8 posted on 12/11/2013 3:53:48 AM PST by InterceptPoint
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To: InterceptPoint

I have read sme them. Did not impress.


9 posted on 12/11/2013 4:01:20 AM PST by prisoner6 ( FREEDOM)
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To: prisoner6
He claims that by 2030 solar energy will meet all our energy needs.

He is clueless.

He is probably right about the biology thing, but you are absolutely right about the solar energy. He has no concept of the physics of how much energy is required to run the world. None whatsoever. His statement is just so much wishful thinking, apparently to make him sound like a good guy.

10 posted on 12/11/2013 4:25:47 AM PST by Hardastarboard (The question of our age is whether a majority of Americans can and will vote us all into slavery.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

It is always amusing to read speculations by someone whose entire knowledge of life science is limited to what he reads in heavily hyped mainstream media articles.

We are a *long* way from many of the things he is looking forward to—if they even become possible at some time.

And his pipe dream of immortality—I can see so many problems with that, both biological and societal, that I think it is as feasible as the utopia on earth that socialists are always trying to impose with their unworkable redistributionist schemes.


11 posted on 12/11/2013 4:41:31 AM PST by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: InterceptPoint; prisoner6
Kurzweil is a brilliant engineer who has come up with some amazing technology.

That being said, he is also an individual who has enormous faith in government omnicompetence.

He is on the record stating that unchecked nanobot replication could destroy the world, but it won't happen as long as nanotechnology is properly regulated.

12 posted on 12/11/2013 4:47:48 AM PST by wideawake
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To: ClearCase_guy
"...then the earth will become a Garden of Eden..."

Complete with serpent!

13 posted on 12/11/2013 4:53:14 AM PST by Joe 6-pack (Qui me amat, amat et canem meum.)
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To: Hardastarboard
The counterargument made by solar advocates is that less power will be needed in the future because it will be more efficiently managed - that enormous amounts of energy are inefficiently expended today.

There are irreducible limits however, and environmentalists are already getting upset about large, ecologically disruptive panel arrays.

14 posted on 12/11/2013 4:57:42 AM PST by wideawake
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

One question: WHEN DO I GET MY HAIR BACK?!?!


15 posted on 12/11/2013 5:28:51 AM PST by Wolfie
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To: Wolfie
I was hoping to trade in my pancreas...
16 posted on 12/11/2013 5:57:10 AM PST by Eric in the Ozarks ("Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

When I was young living forever sounded like a good idea. Now.. I am not so sure. I just want to live long enough to get to know my grandchildren before they grow up. Then I am done here.


17 posted on 12/11/2013 6:12:41 AM PST by TexasFreeper2009 (Obama lied .. the economy died.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I’m ready for a full body rebuild...gonna go full cyborg!


18 posted on 12/11/2013 6:16:46 AM PST by 6ppc (It's torch and pitchfork time)
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To: Eric in the Ozarks

You win.


19 posted on 12/11/2013 7:01:23 AM PST by Wolfie
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

My opinion... Ray is beyond brilliant, but beyond optimistic, too.

I think his timetable is too accelerated, his faith in government too great, and his appreciation of the dark, nihilistic tendencies of mankind lacking.

I could well imagine a science-fiction dystopia where some of these things—immortality, effectively— come to pass for some minority, but they have to be held secret because the masses at large would kill the beneficiaries in the name of fairness.


20 posted on 12/11/2013 7:13:02 AM PST by Pearls Before Swine
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