I've been too harsh on technology lately. Here's a fun-to-watch interview with the inventive and optimistic Ray Kurzweil, author of (most recently) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil predicts with a straight face that human beings will, in the next fifteen years or so, possess the technology to slow, stop, and even reverse the aging process--in other words, average lifespans will begin to increase by more than one year per year (with me still?). In the future, "full immersion" into virtual realities of our choosing will become the norm, and expansion of human civilization throughout the solar system may happen within our lifetimes (assuming we live to be 150-years old or so).

Most of what Kurzweil says is, in my skeptical judgment, probably little more than well-written sci-fi. For example, Kurzweil says that the exponential growth curves of technological innovation mean that we cannot predict the next fifty years of technological progress by looking at the past fifty years; instead, it would be more accurate to look at the last fify years of technological advancement as symmetrical to the next five years' potential. So maybe this kind of thinking is for suckers afraid to die--but it sure is intriguing!

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