Ray Kurzweil Sells Transhumanism To Gamers

From http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=6822

Ray Kurzweil Sells Transhumanism To Gamers
02-22-2008
www.roguegovernment.com
Ethan Allen

If the Matrix existed in our world today, Ray Kurzweil would most definitely have to be the Architect. Kurzweil was one of the keynote speakers at this year's Game Developer's Conference, and once again he pitched his cyber-future ideas to the naive audience of 16 year old Nintendo junkies and witless gaming editors, who are only concerned about the HD wars and the color choices of next year's ipods. Kurzweil spoke about the future of gaming for the next 20 years, and how advances in technology would not only benefit mankind in creating new video game capabilities, but that technology would soon be affecting humans directly, mainly in the use of nanotechnology, integration of computer interface systems and biology. All of this was of course bottled up in the Christmas present of video gaming advancements in order to win over the gaming kids and industry heads.

"Biology is very capable and intricate and clever," Kurzweil said, "but it's also very suboptimal compared to what we ultimately can build with information technology and nanotechnology... If you were to replace a portion of your blood with these respirocytes, you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours."

The Transhumanist and technocratic societies have longed dream for the time when technology and man would combine and allow for our 'weaker' elements to be removed, in order for man to become free of disease, memory loss, conflicting emotions, and even mortality. Rise in augmented cognition hardware is currently advanced enough that the U.S. military is now prototyping HCI devices for their next generation warrior programs (which of course use video games to demo and develop their AI routines, remove faulty system operations, etc).

"In a more general view, Kurzweil noted that the average life expectancy was growing at the rate of roughly three months a year. Now that information technology is affecting medicine, Kurzweil projected that in 15 years, the life expectancy of people will start expanding at the rate of more than a year for every year that passes, essentially not just delaying off death, but actually pushing it further away with each passing day."

"We didn't stay on the ground," Kurzweil said. "We didn't stay on the planet. And we have not stayed within the limitations of our biology."

One can only weep for the future when the ideas of transhumanism are being sold to our children disguised in shiny digital packages and gizmos that play MP3s and offer the chance to upload media to their hippocampus. What may be seen as a boon for the digital entertainment industry by some is seen as a dangerous warning sign of overbearing social engineering by others. The Terminator movie's main theme is that the future is not set, and that mankind only chooses to make his own destiny. If we leave our destiny up to people like Kurzweil we won't have a future for much longer; we will be nothing more than echoes, ghosts in a machine.

"Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools."

- Henry David Thoreau