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Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?
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ist
06/01/09

In reply to Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?
I must say I find the tone of this post disturbing. My projected return date is 2041 and I've been counting on Mr. Kurzweil's projections for years now. Trust me, if I'm to expire before my mind/soul can be digitalized then there's not much point in hanging around anymore. Is there!

I only put up with the sob's at FOX TV, Washington DC and Jesus Freaks for that moment when I can be immortalized on a hologramed embryonic stemchip and turn myself off for 500 years until all of Dick Cheney's genes have been weeded out of the gene pool.

Now your telling me this might all be a fantasy? I think not! I take a rainbow of meds to keep me until my singulartarical birthday. At least three antidepressants, two mood stabilizers, one anti-psychotic and I moved to California in 2001 for obvious reasons. How the heck do you think I made it through the GW Bush years and Star Trek Enterprise?

There is no way I'm going to just sit here, be cured of cancer, grow ultra-sounded new teeth, listen to Ayn Rynites who never heard of the French Revolution, and passively watch humanity 'black hole' itself looking for God particles, WITHOUT the promise of out living my very species!

So somebody better Cray me up before I go all BSOD on this rock!
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Charlie Jane Anders
06/01/09

@ist: "I take a rainbow of meds to keep me until my singulartarical birthday." I totally want this on a T-shirt.
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Roklimber
06/01/09

In reply to Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?
Predictions are a dime a dozen. Good, accurate predictions are the realm of science, not that of wishful thinking and wishful thinkers.
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Grey_Area
06/01/09

@Roklimber: by 2014 you will be able to get 25 predictions for a dime. They will be beamed directly into your cerebral implant by robo-unicorns on the chocolate space station.

St. Ray told me this in a dream.
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rhetoracle
06/01/09

In reply to Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?
Does anyone else see belief in the singularity as a kind of atheist's techno rapture? (The singularity is going to come and then we'll all upload ourselves to machines and our consciousnesses will live forever!) Kurtzweil is behaving a lot like a religious leader who has to backpedal when his prophecies don't come true by the predicted date. His followers can deal with the cognitive dissonance, but I don't see the public being too forgiving for much longer if things don't change drastically during the twenty-teens. If things *do* start to progress like he's predicted, then there will probably be many more articles in the mainstream media like this one in newsweek--and probably an increased focus on his Singularity University.
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braak: You are, as usual, completely correct.
06/01/09

@rhetoracle: Yes. This is why the singularity is sometimes referred to as the advent of NerdGod.

Don't blame atheists, though; making a god out of computers counts.
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NefariousNewt
06/01/09

In reply to Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?
Predictions are the province of psychics, soothsayers, astrologers, and fools.
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