The Transcendent Man

The technology we have around us is evolving and moving forward at an alarming rate, and one of the indivudlas at the forefront of what could be next is a man named Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is an author, inventor, computer scieinst and more, but is without a doubt best known for his work in the field of futurology, which is to look and explore the possibilities of the future. Here I will look at him and what he thinks may be next for technology and our bodies, and how the two will soon possibly work together.

Kurzweil first rose to prominence in the public eye for his variety of different tech inventions that served important purposes such as first charge-coupled flatbed scanner and first print to speech reading machine for blind individuals. As a result of all his great inventions he was awarded the highest honor in technology in the USA (the National Medal of Technology and Innovation) from then-President Bill Clinton.

(source: ted.com)

Throughout the years, he has continued to innovate and now actually has a full time position at Google, where he is responsible for working on new projects in the area of language processing. And while his inventions and innovations have been spectacular, it has been his past predictions and thoughts about the future that have made him famous.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kurzweil publically made a number of claims in books and reports, some of which have famously came through. While many predictions were made, his most significant was that he seemingly predicted the massive amount of growth the internet would have, way back when there was just over 2 Million people using it. For comparison, the internet is now used by more than 3 Billion people.

(source: bloomberg.com)

As for his future predictions, he is a firm believer in the fact that, within a decade or so, we will be able to directly connect our nervous system to a simulated 3D environment and would be able to spend time there and live our lives, just like we live them now, but in an artificial environment. He also believes that within a few decades, we will have tons of tiny cell-like structures in our body called nanobots that will fight off disease, allow us to download consciousness, improve memories and more. If you have some time, I greatly recommend reading more about this man and his thoughts as he is consistently seen as one of the brightest minds out there.