Where is the Puck?

In the most recent issue of Fortune Magazine (May 14, 2007), Ray Kurzwell, visionary thinker and futurist, inventor of flatbed scanner, electric piano, large vocabulary speech recognition software and man who successfully predicted that the computer will beat men in chess (it happened in 1997, one year before his prediction!), says that we are the species that go beyond our potential.. According to Kurzwell, merging with technology is the next stage in our evolution… Here are some of Kurzwell’s thoughts, as presented in Fortune:

- Mankind is on the cusp of radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen and almost more extreme than we can imagine
- The Law of Accelerating Returns: don’t underestimate the power of technological change. Information technologies are doubling in power every year. Doubling every year is multiplying it 1000 in ten years. It is remarkable how scientists miss this basic trend… We are stuck in the intuitive linear view
- By the time a child born today graduates from college, poverty, disease and reliance on fossil fuels should be a thing of past
- By 2027 computers will surpass humans in intelligence. By 2045 we will reach the Singularity, a moment when technology is advancing so rapidly that “strictly biological” humans will be unable to comprehend it. Everything is ultimately becoming information technology
- In a couple of decades we will have cell-seized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our blood stream

Not enough? OK, Kurzwell also believes that the advances in technology will allow him to live forever, if he takes care of himself now.