Are You Ready To Live Forever?
An American scientist predicts that within 20 years we will be able to replace broken body part, enabling us to live forever.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (Wikipedia) predicts that developments in nanotechnology may soon enable us to replace vital body parts.
Kurzweil's vision sees us being able to redesign the human body in profound ways, empowering us to achieve physical feats unimaginable today.
Kurzweil's bold predictions arise out of his theory The Law of Accelerating Returns, which proposes that technological change is not linear, but exponential. From this premise, he predicts that the rate of change in the 21st century will be dramatically faster than it was in the 20th century.
Kurzweil appears to be an interesting fellow indeed, and I look forward to learning more about his work.
Kurzweil seems to feel that we will be able to keep up with exponential change by making ourselves more intelligent. I must admit to deep doubt.
As example, the idea of celebrating eternal life illustrates to me that we simply don't have the wisdom to handle exponential change, however technically clever we may become.
As I see it, we are being swept along in a race between two kinds of data, knowledge and wisdom.
Knowledge does indeed increase exponentially, but wisdom pretty much has to be rebuilt from the ground up in the life of each human being. There simply is no evidence that wisdom can grow exponentially.
Thus, as the gap between knowledge and wisdom continues to grow, human society is ever more like a 13 year old boy who has just been given a gun, the keys to the car, and a case of scotch.
My prediction is that we don't have enough sense to realize that exponential change is in fact the greatest threat to our civilization, and that it's only a matter of time until we lose control of the car, and crash and burn.
And when that happens, nature will take a quick rest for a million years or so, and then try again.
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Are You Ready To Live Forever?
An American scientist predicts that within 20 years we will be able to replace broken body part, enabling us to live forever.
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