Futurist Ray Kurzweil at the Advanced Manufacturing Expo and Conference in Anaheim, Calif. (Image courtesy of Solar Power World.)
Futurists are getting invited to speak at design and manufacturing conferences, perhaps in the belief that their past studies or successes have given them special insight into the future. The warning of every financial prospectus that “past performance is no guarantee of future results” doesn't seem to apply in such cases.
One such futurist is Ray Kurzweil , most famous for inventing optical character recognition and converting the written word to speech. So many accolades preceded Kurzweil's talk at the Advanced Manufacturing Expo and Conference , held earlier this year in Anaheim, Calif., that I feared he would have little time to speak. He did, however, manage to get off some zingers, which I've paraphrased below:
The future is very predictable—if you look at present events and trends just right. Had you looked at the way the Internet was forming....
He wishes we could turn off the gene that stores food as fat. It may have served primitive man well, but we can be sure our next hunting season is going to be good—since it will take place at the supermarket.
We passed the number of processors in the human brain a decade ago, noted Kurzweil, speaking of IBM, or Big Blue. IBM's question-answering computer, Watson , beat Jeopardy’s best players. How? It read Wikipedia.Watson made up for what it lacked in human intuition with speed.
Kurzweil gives solar energy a great chance in meeting the world's energy needs. Although it currently supplies only two percent of the world's energy, solar energy is growing rapidly and is only six doublings (12 years) away from reaching 100 percent of this need.
Tactile feedback: I have a patent on something that lets you hug someone on the other side of the world.
On Steven Pinker’s book, Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined. We are living in the best time on Earth! So why aren’t we enjoying ourselves more? We have a higher life expectancy. More people are eating. More people are attending college.
There are two billion smartphones on Earth.
Nanomachines in our blood are monitoring chemicals and attacking pathogens.
Technology has been a double-edged sword ever since the discovery of fire. It has cooked our food but also has burned down our houses.