Today, information is everywhere; it is cheap, it is instant, and it is constant. Technology is the intravenous fix for the wonderjunkie in all of us, but unlike other addictions, this one is healthy. We should embrace the discomfort of insights unfamiliar to us and live outside of our filter bubbles.

Just as blacksmiths helped move us into the industrial age, our modern-day wordsmiths - translators and interpreters - will help us move from the current age, in which information is merely available, to an age in which information also becomes highly relevant and useful.

Google's self-declared mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It's impossible for Google to accomplish this without translation.

In the opening session of Techonomy 2012 today, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick interviewed Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and transhumanist who has developed a cult following for his prediction of the merging of humans and computers.

I go to a lot of tech conferences and trade shows. It's a necessary evil for me. I don't enjoy it much, in fact they give me a screeching headache ...

As I stepped off the NYC subway on my way to interview Ray Kurzweil, a woman bumped into me and my iPhone fell, bounced, and then dropped down into the tracks. People looked on in horror as if a puppy had just died.

In Darwin's Pharmacy, the transhumanist philosopher Richard Doyle focuses on his favorite technology: the psychedelic, "ecodelic" plants and chemicals -- read: drugs -- that can help make us process more information.

According to Ray Kurzweil, machines will reach human levels of translation quality by the year 2029. In addition to text-based translation, numerous advances have taken place recently.

The next 25 years will be about simplicity and great design. Complexity is not valued in world that tends towards greater complexity.

Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be only a decade away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert...

There is no basis at present for believing that medical interventions based on postulated but not-yet-realized nanobots will perform their duties without the side-effects associated with every other therapeutic agent ever employed.

Editor's Note: This post has been removed from the Huffington Post....