Moving this video to Trancecoach's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Oh great. First gays get the right to marry, and now THIS!

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 10:41am PDT - promote requested by gwiz665.

I don't know the man, don't know his works, but from this trailer, I would say what he says has little basis in reality.

This trailer is the worst sort of emotionalism, sensationalism and just plain boulderdash. And being that it's presenting the film, I'd say the film, and therefore the person are similar.

If you're using Tony Fricken Robbins as any sort of spokesman for yourself in a trailer, you KNOW you're full of shit. Come on.

Drivel.

Sensationalist drivel

Do a little googling on Kurzweil, and you will quickly discover the man is probably one of the smartest guys on the planet. Hes been making predictions on technology and society for 30 years, and every single one of them has come true, some even sooner than his estimates.

Look up geriontology, Aubrey De'Grey specifically. Theres a TED video around where he mentions that they have already acheived the first major life expanding therapy for mice, increasing their life-span by 100%, doubling their life by some fairly complex bio-engineering.

They are currently working on transfering that to humans, has something to do with the way the body cleans and repairs broken proteins.

Absolutely mind blowing stuff.

Kurzweil does have a decent track record of predictions for advancements in the last couple of decades (certainly better than people who didn't have any models for what advancements would occur), so I think his arguments can't reasonably be blanketly dismissed.

I think predictions on way far-off topics (like the "singularity") are more difficult and less useful, and his emphasis on them weakens his rhetorical position. But things like organ regeneration have already been around for a while. (It was front-page news last fall when a woman's trachea was re-grown for her, but over the last couple of years, scientists had already grown other organs like bladders from patients' own cells.)

When you combine organ regeneration/stem cells with things like the exponential rate of advancement of genomics and the general automation/industrialization of science**, it starts to look like there's a lot going on in medicine. The opinion that old age for baby boomers won't look the same as old age for previous generations seems to have broad support in the medical community.

*http://www.videosift.com/video/Robot-scientist-makes-discoveries-without-human-help
*http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_brainatlas

Look, good luck to him, and he is undoubtedly a smart man... but with things like "...he expresses a need for a new religion based on the principle of mutual respect between sentient life forms, and on the principle of respecting knowledge. This religion would not have a leader, instead being purely personal to adherents. Kurzweil expects that, once the human/machine race has converted all of the matter in the universe into a giant, sentient supercomputer it will have created a supremely powerful and intelligent being which will be Godlike in itself." I don't know how you can just accept everything he says.

People, almost all people, have some good ideas and some bad.

He seems to have had many good ideas, but I think the ones shown in this trailer, especially when presented as this trailer does, are bad.

This film just debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival at the end of April. The trailer is a bit "emotional", but from the reviews I've read the movie itself is very balanced.


Kurzweil is a very smart man. A lot of his predictions seem unlikely, but when you read more into his evidence it makes more sense. If nothing else he is extremely good at modeling the growth of information technologies. I agree with his predictions in theory, but there is a lot of potential for social issues and legislation to slow things down.

I'm fairly confident that at some point we will be able to build artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence. It may not be as soon as Kurzweil thinks, but it will probably happen at some point. Beyond that, technological progress will increase even faster.


Either way, Kurzweil is mainly trying to popularize a positive view of the future and technological advance. There are a lot of people in the world, including lawmakers, who mainly see the dangers of high technology and could greatly slow its advance with laws and social opposition. If he can get more people looking forward to the future rather of fearing it then there is less chance for any major resistance to the changes.

I kind of agree with his "a need for a new religion based on the principle of mutual respect between sentient life forms, and on the principle of respecting knowledge. This religion would not have a leader, instead being purely personal to adherents."

However "Kurzweil expects that, once the human/machine race has converted all of the matter in the universe into a giant, sentient supercomputer it will have created a supremely powerful and intelligent being which will be Godlike in itself." is a tad off the deep end.

Anybody know who the guy standing between Kurzweil and Bill Gates is at 1:10?