Lifeboat Foundation

Another futurist, Dave Evans, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley stealth startup Stringify, gave his thoughts about Kurzweil’s nanobot idea in an interview with James Bedsole on February.

Evans explained that he thinks such a merging of technology and biology isn’t at all farfetched. In fact, he described three stages as to how this will occur: the wearable phase (where we are today), the embeddable phase (where we’re headed, with neural implants and such), and the replaceable phase.

Continue reading “Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies” »

You’ve probably heard about billionaires’ Plan B for when the end of the world comes, much of it centering around property in New Zealand. It’s not exactly a bad plan as far as doomsday prepping goes; buy a nice bunker somewhere in Middle Earth and wait out the chaos in luxury on one of two fairly isolated islands. Now, you may have noticed that front and center for such planning is Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel of the pay-to-sue-Gawker-into-oblivion fame to the public at large, and ultra-libertarian venture capitalist with some crazy ideas about the future to the techies who know him. His backing of seasteading and support for Trump just because he got bored with Obama, are but a warmup to what he really has in mind for the future: immortality as a sentient super-AI.

No, you didn’t read that wrong, and no, this is not hyperbole. In fact, yours truly was once invited to an event where Thiel was a featured speaker after a rather public spat with the president of the Singularity Institute. I did not take up the offer because I had to be in class to learn how to build actual AI systems. And for full disclosure, I was invited to join an advisory board for a group of futurists called The Lifeboat Foundation, but like Groucho Marx, I didn’t want to be involved in a club that would accept someone like me as a member, much less as an advisor based on little more than me being a grad student at the time. So Thiel’s involvement with a group of futurists and an occasional computer scientist who thinks we’re on the verge of something a lot like the plot of Transcendence, is extremely well known in tech.

In fact, the belief that at some point, artificial intelligence and the march of technology will create a singularity that will alter humanity forever, has an alarming number of adherents in Silicon Valley. The face of the Singularity today, Ray Kurzweil, works at Google and runs Singularity University where it’s preached thanks to a multimillion commitment from his employer. And the fact that this belief is so popular in the world’s biggest tech hub isn’t all that surprising if we consider its followers. They’re told that their code and the technology they’re developing is changing the world, or they’re devoted followers of popular science news ready for the incredible future promised to us by the glossy magazines and sci-fi movies to arrive. To be told that by 2035 or 2045 we may become immortal through technology is appealing to say the least, and empowering for those who think they can help.

Continue reading “Why Silicon Valley Can’t ‘Disruptively’ Vote Its Way To Digital Immortality” »

Unimaginable Radical Abundance:

Yesterday I took the time to read chapter 11 of Eric Drexler’s book Radical Abundance as to get a glimpse of what might be possible with Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM). I highly recommend the book.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil interviews the Father of Nanotechnology Eric Drexler” »

Ray is not worried about A.I. though he does not dismiss the dangers.

James Bedsol interviewed Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism, in his Google office in Mountain View, CA, February 15, 2017.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil responds to fears” »

Ray Kurzweil is probably the most qualified individual to talk about the future of technology. He does it at CeBIT in a captivating presentation about technologies that will be as important as the internet. Ray is an Inventor, Entrepreneur, Futurist, Writer, founder of the Singularity University and now at Google. (Intro is temporally missing). March 2017.

The end of the world as we know it is near. And that’s a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of what’s been called the technological singularity.

The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late.

Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045). That’s two years before SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s prediction of 2047, made at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year.

Continue reading “Can Futurists Predict the Year of the Singularity?” »

3 Christian articles/sites w/ #transhumanism in it: http://www.christianpost.com/news/google-directors-hope-for-…in-177809/ & http://straightoutthegate.com/tech-savings-gate/zoltan-istva…has-to-go/ & https://blogs.lcms.org/2017/storming-gates-paradise

Google’s director of engineering is saying implanting computers “inside our brains” is upon us, words theologians and Christian bioethicists consider a “slap in the face” to Christ and would result in horrific human rights violations.

According to the Daily Mail, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who works on Google’s machine learning project, said at the South by Southwest conference taking place this week in Austin, Texas, that by the year 2029, technological “singularity” will be achieved, the complete merging of human and computer intelligence.

Continue reading “Google Director’s Push for Computers Inside Human Brains Is ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘Human Rights Abuse,’ Theologians Explain” »

Ray Kurzweil a futurist who works on Google’s machine learning project predicted that singularity would happen in the next twelve years at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.

I thought this interesting enough to share:

Zoltan Istvan was my favorite presidential candidate in 2016. He toured the country in a bus modeled to look like a coffin, with the message that death is a curable disease.

Continue reading “Our Dystopian Future as Immortals” »