The dinner was a lot of fun. There was a lot of delicious, healthy food and a lot of interesting conversation. Aubrey de Grey first spoke about the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project and its goals. Then Kurzweil talked for about an hour on the Singularity. Most of Kurzweil’s slide show presentation contained exponential graphs (like this one or this one) of the rapid growth of information technology. Based on the charts one can predict that the next 25 years will change more than the last 500. If the growth continues at its current pace, computers will soon become self-aware, humans will be able to copy themselves to a disk and make backups, there will be full submersion virtual reality, as well as almost anything else you can and cannot imagine.
As chartists, we know that “the trend is your friend” and not to fight the trend. And never try to guess a top. But we also know that no chart goes up forever. I am excited to see how it all plays out. Regardless of the outcome, I think the world 25 years from now will be a much different place.
I wasn’t able to get a hold of an Othello board beforehand, and Aubrey didn’t bring his either. Weak attempts at creating a board from plastic cups didn’t work either and we finally agreed to play online at some point in the future.
Kurzweil couldn’t talk about FatKat (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), no matter how much I pestered him. He did confirm what I already knew: that a small hedge fund will be launched in January, the program has returned more than 100% for the last two years, and Michael W. Brown - former CFO of Microsoft and chairman of NASDAQ - is an investor.

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