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I think a lot of Kurzweil's predictions are self-serving. He wants to live forever so bad, that he has:

1. Convinced himself it's possible

2. Convinced himself it's possible in his lifetime

3. Made arrangements to cryogenically freeze himself in the event he dies before it happens

It's just silly. We're nowhere near the ability to live forever and anyone who thinks we are has delusions of grandeur. And you can't freeze yourself to escape this reality. A planet with 7 billion people that live forever and are still actively procreating is likely to quickly have overpopulation issues. Are they really going to be looking to bring people back from the dead?

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Health_and_aging

> A planet with 7 billion people that live forever and are still actively procreating is likely to quickly have overpopulation issues.

The weird part is that it might not make us slam into the inevitable planetary population limit much faster than we otherwise would. Somebody (one of the senescence nuts, maybe - sorry, I don't have a link) did a pretty convincing study indicating the average lifetime might not even double if we get rid of sickness and cellular aging.

You can see the logic: take into account all the things that kill people and aren't related to disease and aging and model around that. Accidents, crime, and war are still going to exist.

The mathematical model isn't perfect. It's interesting to speculate as to whether we as a race would become greater or lesser risk-takers after finding out aging wasn't a problem.

Is this the Maes-Garreau 'law' in effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes-Garreau_law

(i.e. the possible bias that people like to predict events will happen in their lifetime)

Also fear of death. You don't see many young scientists working on anti-aging....

The development of smarter than human AI, or Kurzweil's belief in exponential progress would change that estimate drastically. It's entirely plausible we could have immortality in our lifetimes if you consider those things (not to mention cryonics which is available today.) Accusing him of believing it only out of self-interest is a needless ad hominem.

I wouldn't worry about 7 billion people living forever. Cryogenic technology, nanobots and whatever else will probably remain a bit pricy for a while, so poor people need not apply.

What is most unfortunate about Kurzweil is he doesn't speak about possible social or culture improvements. Technology is his crutch and bandaid to what ails the world, and technology drives Google's profits.

Vilém Flusser's essay on the Object: 'Design: Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles'

> An 'object' is what gets in the way, a problem thrown in your path like a projectile(coming as it does from the Latin Obiectum, Greek problema). The world is objective, substantial, problematic as long as it obstructs. An 'object of use' is an object which one uses and needs to get other objects out the way. ... > I overturn some of the obstacles (transform them into objects of use, into culture) in order to continue, and the objects thus overturned prove to be obstacles themselves.

– page 58 http://books.google.com/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&printsec=front...

The bigger the techno solution, the bigger the side effect. Technology offers fast benefits, the side effects take a long time to be noticed or materialize.

I am interested in folks looking at social, philosophic and non-objective improvements and solutions to our big problems, particularly those of a more conservative and less progressive nature.

What might happen is what I heard recently being called the "morality apocalypse" [1], i.e. technology is improving so fast, but we're not going to use it properly, probably not unlike when US used the atomic bomb on Japan the first time. It was a time when discovering the atomic bomb surpassed our morality by a long shot, and it took quite a few decades for our morality to catch-up to the technology, and understand that countries must not use atomic bombs against each other.

I fear the same will happen when we start using autonomous killer robots [2] (whether drones, or real Terminator-like robots), or when we learn how to make killer mosquito-sized drones that can assassinate anyone in the world anonymously, or when we learn how to use nanotechnology as a weapon. I think NSA doing mass surveillance of the whole planet "just because they can", also fits in this category.

I welcome all such neutral technological progress since I'm not a Luddite, but I also fear our governments hungry for more power or protecting their power and influence will use these technologies nefariously, probably long before we find out about them, in secret. And even if they get public, I fear most people will be too complacent to it, and won't revolt too much against it (US still keeps Guantanamo open, for how many years now? It's not a matter of technology, but the same point applies).

[1] - http://blog.joellehman.com/index.php/2014/01/morality-apocal...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/arms1112ForUp...

The entire notion of technology outpacing morality is itself a moral innovation.

Agree with your first paragraph. This is highlighted most by the whacky idea to "Switch off our fat cells".

It is perfectly possible to not get fat and enjoy delicious healthy food in a sustainable, affordable manner, but this appears to be quite outside the realm of possibility already.

(Mr. Kurzweil aparently lives quite healthy and probably fully understand all of that, but still advocates a technological solution. I remember fondly the old Civilization game, in which you could research mathematics and gunpowder, but also democracy and women's suffrage - cultural improvements equally valued as technological improvements).

That's debatable, but even so, what's wrong with that?

I'm much more interested in how we'll deal with Gibson's version of the future...

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." -Count Zero

...than with how we'll achieve flying cars, curing cancer, or immortality.

You can only judge these people if you have a big list of all the predictions that they make. Highlighting the ones that came true is of no use if they made 1000s of other predictions that turned out to be rubbish.

Also, beware of all the predictions that don't have good timelines. Predicting a stock market crash is easy; there's bound to be one at some point or other. Predicting when the next crash might be is much much harder.

You may find this interesting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/diz/kurzweils_predictions_good_accur...

Predicting when the next crash will be is also easy. Once you have hundreds of "experts" doing it, someone will certainly guess correctly.

Here's a list of some of his predictions for 2009 along with commentary on whether they came true or not:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...

>Predicting when the next crash might be is much much harder.

Predicting when is just a stunt. Predicting why is more important. Predicting why can end up giving you when if the event is contingent on a few things falling into place that are being observed falling into place.

Rubbish, imo. We can't agree on the why of past crashes, let alone make good predictions about future ones. How can such a prediction ever be proved right or wrong?

>>Highlighting the ones that came true is of no use if they made 1000s of other predictions that turned out to be rubbish.

Well that's the whole point in 'predictions'. They are supposed to be a large number of them which have to come false. Predictions are a way of extrapolating the future based on current trends. They are bound to be wrong. And they are also bound to be true.

Anything else and we would be asking oracles gazing in crystal balls to narrate us the future.

If you were correct, jetpacks and flying cars would be common. Kurzweil's main prediction is that human-level intelligence is essentially just a matter of having similar processing power to the human brain available, and then guessing when that will be based on current trends. It so happens that our current level of computing was possible with the amount of effort put in, but I don't think it was possible to predict that the amount of effort that could be devoted could produce the results we have, in the 1970s. In fact, I think the conventional wisdom of the time was that it was not possible to get to this level of computing power so quickly.

Strong AI is not a matter of "processing power". These pop-compu-sci guys are selling the 50s AI project which was already dead in the water upon invention (cf. Hubert Dreyfus' critique) but has since been realised by the compu/cog-sci people to be irrevocably flawed.

Today the thesis that Strong AI is a function of processing power is snake oil or a result of a serious lack of knowledge of this area. The latter is OK for a layman, not for this kind of "expert".

To be fair, Kurzweil has always said it will take about 10 years to develop the software for strong AI, after we have the hardware/processing power necessary.

True, however his prediction of computers being a million times larger and several times faster would be a massive improvement for current AI algorithms, not to mention what we will have by that time.

There were some pretty upbeat predictions for the future of computing in the 1970s - here is a quote from a contemporary review of The Mighty Micro from 1979:

"Some of his guesses seem based on other popular books: he thought 'ultra intelligent machines could prolong life to age 1000' - ie things which might measure blood or neoplasms, and even repair them."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mighty-Micro-Microchip-Revolutio...

[The Mighty Micro was definitely one of the things that motivated me to get into computing and AI research]

Here's a good (rather snarky) talk by Norvig about all these experts and their futuristic predictions.

http://vimeo.com/33961355

Kurzweil is someone who sets crazy goals and actually delivers on them from time to time. Even if his predictions are 1% accurate, I'm inclined to see that as a sign that there's a deficit of Ray Kurzweils to implement them, as well as a surplus of people on the Internet shooting down cool ideas without contributing anything.

If someone wants to make predications, it would be more helpful if someone went to the effort to predict where to best put our resources now so that it will have the most impact in 50 years.

For example, consider that the CERN Supercollider could have been built 20 years ago but the US canceled the project because it only wanted to fund one big science project and the Hubble won.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

Of course, maybe it's better to put more time and money into all research. Picking winners isn't always a good idea either.

> I think Kurzweil is a total blow-hard, along with the Mathematica guy. All these great 'predictions' don't take a lot of intellectual depth to make, to be fair .. all you had to do was read a bit of sci-fi in the 60's and 70's, and try to understand that your fellow engineers were reading the same (mostly Vernor Vinge) stories, on the basis of a few top-10 lists .. and oila: you can see what is going to happen.

>Big Sci-Fi has been driving technology - and thus, our modern culture - for decades now. There's not a single advance in our modern lives that wasn't speculated first, by some sci-fi author.

Oh wow. If I judge by the stuff my generation grew up with, my children and grandchildren are going to see their parents trying to invent some really cool/weird stuff.

I mean, sure, string-theoretic worldgates for interstellar transport will never actually work, but apparently by 2040 we should have futurists predicting them for 2065, and by then God only knows. I mean, giant mecha are already in the works, so things'll be pretty cool then.