Ray Kurzweil, author of the book, “The Singularity is Near,” takes hundreds of nutritional supplement pills every day, and once a week he takes many others intravenously. He is trying to live long enough to live forever. He created FatKat, an artificial-intelligence investment program that he claims has brought in stock market returns of 80 to 100 percent for the last two years, as well as many other technological inventions and businesses.
Bill Gates called Ray Kurzweil “the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”
He is a believer of accelerating returns:
“…the explosive power of exponential growth goes far beyond transistors: Human technological advancement, the billions of years of terrestrial evolution, the entire history of the universe, all, he argues, follow the law of accelerating returns. He has put a team of researchers to work gathering technological, economic, historical, and paleontological data. All of it, he claims, graphs neatly onto an exponential plot, starting out slowly, then nosing sharply upward through the ‘knee of the curve’ into higher order and greater complexity, arcing toward infinity.
At such moments, Kurzweil’s predictions have the ring of eschatology, of half-cocked end-times rapture. For him, though, it’s surreal to hear people talk about the size of the Social Security shortfall in 2042 - by then, he believes, advances in nanotechnology will allow us to ward off disease and senescence and to manufacture all the goods we want for a pittance. By then, in other words, aging and poverty may hardly exist and people may not retire or even work in a way that’s recognizable to us.
Kurzweil points to the skepticism that greeted his forecast, in 1990, that in as few as nine years a computer would beat the world chess champion. He was too conservative, as it turned out: Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.
