Posted on 12/11/2013 3:11:47 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Apparently Kurweil is on some crazy super-duper health diet, trying to live long enough for anti-aging breakthroughs to make him “immortal”. I doubt he makes it. If not, I assume he’ll have himself frozen in hopes of being revived later.
Most people will agree almost nothing that's complex gets deployed on schedule. And here, he's discussing the entire unfolding of the future of technology, a very complex process. This reminds me of William Gibson's quote, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed". So, although it may be possible to create certain technologies in the future, economics will determine their adoption rate.
But, overall I agree with Kurzweil. The world will be a very different place in 20 years. And, it will probably be a bumpy ride. Medicine will change more in the next 20 years than in all previous years. In 10 years, robots will be everywhere, doing a significant portion of the labor that's done today by humans. In 10 years(2024), most new cars sold will have the capability to drive themselves. the list goes on and on.
bkmk
The problem with such predictions is that we perceive things moving linearly, even when they aren't. Kurzweil is aware of that, but that awareness doesn't make his predictions more accurate.
Try this game: It's 1960, you are given a vision of the future, and what you see is now, with smart phones in every third hand and a cell phone in every pocket. Your problem is that you don't know what year you're seeing. So given what 1960 was like, how many years until now?
And try to be honest. Keep in mind that in 1960, most men still wore hats!
And try to be honest. Keep in mind that in 1960, most men still wore hats!
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Actually most men still do. Childish hats but still hats
As long as there is a bald spot or a receedng hairline there will be men in hats.
That's just a little too weird.
I wear a hat in these days of Global Warming....
Possibly closer to the reality of it all than we can imagine.
“...immanentizing the eschaton.”
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Been thinkin’ that might be the thing to do right after the first of the year. Maybe try to get in a little fishin’ too.
A tremendous extension in lifespan may be possible. There are many theories, at least one I read said that aging is a “mistake of the intellect”, that the only reason we can’t live for hundreds of years as related in the Bible is that we have forgotten how to do so. One oddsmaker said that immortality would never be achieved because the law of averages says that if you removed all natural causes of death the longest anyone could avoid accidental death would be around 600 years with the average lifespan being around 300. It seems reasonable to believe that plans for this are already laid.
Factors other than biological ones may be the real limiting factor, I don’t know just how long a person could keep on WANTING to live another year. A lot of the young people I see already act as if they are tired of living. Imagine the generation gap between someone 300 years old and one who is 30. At my current age of 69 a person would be considered a snotty nose brat by someone who is 300. On the other hand I find that I myself find life in many ways more interesting than I often did at younger ages. I appreciate little things more. A good cup of coffee after a good nights sleep is amazingly enjoyable now. Maybe life for me would be more enjoyable and interesting at 169 than it is at 69.
I do feel fairly certain of one thing. If a great extension of lifespan becomes possible it will be made available only to a very tiny percentage of people, the rest will be expected to die as soon as possible, encouraged and assisted in doing so. I don’t think we will reach the “Soylent Green” level of population, I expect the population to be drastically reduced one way or another.
“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.”
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Sounds like a real genius, that one does. Who does he think should regulate it, Joe Biden?
Or we could regress a very, very long way back if we don’t get control of the criminally insane who are running the governments of the world. In ten or twenty years we could be remembering movies like “The Road Warrior” and wishing things had turned out that well.
Zardoz!
You don't. You just get back hair.
Great post. That’s thinking out of the box. I don’t think you could easily determine how rapidly the world had progressed if you could see from 1960 to today, although a lot of the elements of today existed then.
Exactly! Who would have thought that the cell phone, which anyone could have predicted, would also replace the camera, the portable radio, the pocket calculator, game console, the compass and map, and the notebook?
That's Kurzweil's point; these things surprise us.
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