futurism
Articles about futurism:
Newsweek has published a fascinating profile of Raymond Kurzweil, looking at his inventions and his predictions for the future.
Kurzweil is best known to musicians for creating the Kurzweil keyboard – but he’s also a pioneer in the world of optical character recognition and text-to-speech software, and has created a new career for himself as a futurist:
Kurzweil believes computer intelligence is advancing so rapidly that in a couple of decades, machines will be as intelligent as humans. Soon after that they will surpass humans and start creating even smarter technology.
He also thinks we’ll be able to embed our consciousness into silicon, which means we can live on, inside machines, forever and ever, amen.
Kurzweil calls this moment “The Singularity,” and says it represents the next great leap in human evolution, when humans will transcend biology by merging with technology. Kurzweil truly believes this is going to happen—and he can’t wait to be part of it. All he has to do is stay alive until 2045, when he believes the necessary technologies will be available. So he lives on a strict diet, and every day he swallows 150 dietary supplements in order to “reprogram” his body’s biochemistry.
He also has a female virtual alter-ego, Ramona, above right, who’s the Barbie of futurism.
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15 years ago, Kevin Kelly (Editor of Wired magazine) and Brian Eno (ambient music guru and super-producer) published a list of “unthinkable futures” – probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking – in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review.
Their intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.
According to Kelly:
Improbability is still a strong bias to overcome. Much that is happening today would have been dismissed as unbelievably bad science fiction only 15 years ago. The US with secret prisons torturing Muslims? Street sweepers in India with their own cell phones? Obesity a contagious disease? A trusted encyclopedia written by anyone? Yeah, right, give me a break.
They’re interesting to ponder, and probably more so today than when they were published. And anything that Eno writes is generally worth considering.
My favorite – “A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.”
Would that be bloggers? Read more…
