Kurzweil Argues Technology Improves The World, Compares DNA to Code (geekwire.com)

Futurist Ray Kurzweil told a Seattle conference specific ways in which technology is already improving our lives. For example, while there's a general perception that the world's getting worse, "What's actually happening is our information about what's wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes two of Kurzweil's other interesting insights: "We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."

[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."

Comments

Re: Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's Director of Engineering, inventor of optical character recognition, inventor of the digital music keyboard and lots of other stuff - his Wikipedia page is quite lengthy...

Re: Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care?

[Oligonicella]

For instance:

Inventor David Shepard appears on a 1959 episode of "I've Got a Secret" [with demonstration] with the secret "I invented a machine that read and writes." Mr. Shepard is considered to be the inventor of the first OCR (Optical Character Recognition) machine, though that term is not used here.

So, it's been around too long for him. What we appear to have with crediting Kurzweil with inventing OCR is a moving of goal posts to accommodate his tech instead of the fundamental idea and implementation.

A search on "OCR inventor" yields the name Emanuel Goldberg as the inventor of Optical Character Recognition (1931).

So Kurzweil moved it into a more modern computer, he didn't invent OCR per se.

What? 99% of land not used?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I have traveled in India extensively in trains. My mom has actually dissolved baby formula in the condensed steam from the locomotives to feed me. (Indian loco drivers are kind to mothers traveling with infants). No, 99% of the land is not being left untouched. Even while traveling through the Western ghats and all the tunnels, or through the Chambal valley in Madya Pradesh, through the Vindhyas ranges, or Aravalli ranges ... The signs of human habitation are ubiquitous.

Farming every tiny itsy bitsy pieces of flat ground, herding goats and cows in the slopes strewn with rock, making one wonder what do these goats eat? rocks? There are no untouched pieces of virgin forests left in India. Not in significant quantities.