Frankfurter Allgemeine | Futurist Ray Kurzweil: immortality for all

August 8, 2011

Frankfurter Allgemeine — August 8, 2011 | Jordan Mejias

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

[ Translated from German ] Ray Kurzweil works tirelessly to lead the way to eternal life. In 2029, predicts the American author and inventor, the human brain and computers will merge.

He is sixty-three years old and is looking forward to the next century and further. He swallows daily one hundred and fifty pills, can regularly refresh intravenously, toughens his body in the gym and takes only a fat-free, vegetable-rich diet. But as he knows, this is not enough to gain eternal life. So he has become involved in the development of machinery, to merge with human biology, and so live indefinitely. That will happen when the corresponding calculations rise in two or three decades. The technical term for this is Singularity.

Ray Kurzweil is no crackpot. He built a computer at seventeen that composed music. He invented electronic and musical instruments from keyboards, synthesizers and a reading machine that translates text to voice, to computer programs for the learning disabled and a hedge fund that utilizes artificial intelligence. He has become rich. He is admired and praised by Bill Gates and by no less than former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. […]