Read the book, and watched the documentary "the singularity is near" on netflix, both were pretty interesting but Ray Kurzweil always struck me as kind of a nutty guy who desperately wants to live forever, but then i see shit like the following in the news. In the old version of the documentary "the singularity is near" it showed Kurzweil walking around with a bag full of pills that he slowly ate during the day, all vitamins and shit that was supposedly supposed to optimise his chances of living, so it made him seem like he was kind of loony, a guy who was desperately afraid of death. What do you guys think? Are we on the verge of humans and machines merging and human minds being able to live forever? This is a concept that has always fascinated me, and imo we are coming closer and closer to living in a virtual simulation world anyways,(people now days seem to basically live on their phones) so what difference would it be if you could convince your mind that you are living a real life for 100 years, but in reality its all just a simulation like the matrix that takes places over a very short time period. Like one of those good dreams that seems like it lasts forever and you dont ever want to wake up. It still seems like a stretch IMO to say that in the next 30 years mind and machine will merge. When i look at where tech was 10 years ago when i first read this book and where it is today, it seems like while we keep creating multitudes of useless shit like twitter and facebook there is still no cure for cancer, or anything that you could say is a huge life extending discovery. But then i see things like the video below, and it brings my interest back.
Trailer for "The singularity is near" Here is the whole documentary, the updated 2016 version. (definitely worth the watch for anyone interested in technology and the future.)
The other thing that troubles me about The singularity concept, is this whole idea of exponential growth, i.e. our knowledge of the universe keeps growing faster and faster as we learn more and more, the reason why it is troubling to me is because as a trader I have seen how this story ends every single time when humans are involved, and its not pretty.