Seldom do technologists gain prominence for their prophesies. Our field, you see, values doing over thinking. You believe we'll be Tom Cruising over our Minority Report-esque holograms in 2020? Great. Now build it.
But Ray Kurzweil is an exception. He's a man whose words do indeed speak louder than his actions. He famously predicted the year a computer will finally beat the best human chess players, among many other things (89 of his 109 predictions from 1999 have so far been proved right.) His actions haven't been too unimpressive either — he built a computer at age 17 (in 1965 no less) and invented a reading machine for the blind.
So we've established he's an Important Man. Now let's see what makes him Transcendent.
In Transcendent Man, Mr. Kurzweil gives us a lowdown of what we are to expect from the next couple decades. Namely: robots will take over us, we'll start planting chips made of nanotechnology into our bodies, genetic modification will make us immortal, and soon enough, singularity. Whatever that means.
The documentary follows Kurzweil in his daily life as he meets with smart people in lab courts, and William Shatner, to whom he successfully sells the idea of taking 150 pills a day (after all, we do want to see Captain Kirk witness the launch of the real Enterprise someday, no?)
We get a glimpse of the labs and institutions where the apparent future of mankind (or the beginning of the apocalypse to some) is being initiated. They all utter the same phrases, and even the naysers appear to be cheer leaders of human triumph. Did I mention? Robots. Genetics. Nanotech. Immortality. Singularity.
BOOM.
If you ask me, he's being optimistic. But then again, he knows something the rest of us don't — the true power of the exponential curve. All technology, you see, advances exponentially. Moore's Law told us the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Thirty two years after the first personal computer, we had one that sits in our pocket and lets us FaceTime our grandparents. Mark Zuckerberg recently made the claim that we're individually sharing double of everything year after year. I don't want to think about what this means for the pornography industry in 2020.
And lest you forget? Four years ago, Twitter was a seven letter word in the dictionary. Three years before that, "Facebook" referred to a book with pictures you wouldn't want your kids to see. Today, these terms are something most of us live and die by everyday.
Keeping this in mind, I guess it's possible that Mr. Kurzweil's predictions may not end up too far from the truth. Who knows what we'll be verbing in 2020?
Ask Ray Kurzweil.
But Ray Kurzweil is an exception. He's a man whose words do indeed speak louder than his actions. He famously predicted the year a computer will finally beat the best human chess players, among many other things (89 of his 109 predictions from 1999 have so far been proved right.) His actions haven't been too unimpressive either — he built a computer at age 17 (in 1965 no less) and invented a reading machine for the blind.
So we've established he's an Important Man. Now let's see what makes him Transcendent.
In Transcendent Man, Mr. Kurzweil gives us a lowdown of what we are to expect from the next couple decades. Namely: robots will take over us, we'll start planting chips made of nanotechnology into our bodies, genetic modification will make us immortal, and soon enough, singularity. Whatever that means.
The documentary follows Kurzweil in his daily life as he meets with smart people in lab courts, and William Shatner, to whom he successfully sells the idea of taking 150 pills a day (after all, we do want to see Captain Kirk witness the launch of the real Enterprise someday, no?)
We get a glimpse of the labs and institutions where the apparent future of mankind (or the beginning of the apocalypse to some) is being initiated. They all utter the same phrases, and even the naysers appear to be cheer leaders of human triumph. Did I mention? Robots. Genetics. Nanotech. Immortality. Singularity.
BOOM.
If you ask me, he's being optimistic. But then again, he knows something the rest of us don't — the true power of the exponential curve. All technology, you see, advances exponentially. Moore's Law told us the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Thirty two years after the first personal computer, we had one that sits in our pocket and lets us FaceTime our grandparents. Mark Zuckerberg recently made the claim that we're individually sharing double of everything year after year. I don't want to think about what this means for the pornography industry in 2020.
And lest you forget? Four years ago, Twitter was a seven letter word in the dictionary. Three years before that, "Facebook" referred to a book with pictures you wouldn't want your kids to see. Today, these terms are something most of us live and die by everyday.
Keeping this in mind, I guess it's possible that Mr. Kurzweil's predictions may not end up too far from the truth. Who knows what we'll be verbing in 2020?
Ask Ray Kurzweil.