If you haven't already downloaded the article into your brain, the New York Times blew the cover on the trans-humanist movement this weekend, just as a bunch of the devoted were gathering at Harvard for the H+ Summit, to hear from the movement's de facto leader, inventor Ray Kurzweil.
Last year, Motherboard visited the man who gave the world text-to-speech technology and the musical synthesizer to talk about his vision of the post-Singularity future -- a world in which humans will remake their own biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale machines that can repair cells and meld their minds with super-intelligent computers. The eventual goal is to become immortal, and perhaps resurrect the dead:
In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil's father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father's effects -- photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric's DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.
By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.
Kurzweil, who uses a regimen of over 100 vitamins a day, many of them manufactured by one of his companies, in the hopes of living to see the Singularity -- elaborates:
Read the rest of this article at Motherboard