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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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

What's wrong in the world.

[MrKaos]

We get information about the world wide slide of the west into a dystopia, where every single country is passing more laws designed to 'keep us safe' which roughly translates to 'give politicians more power to control us'. You can almost see the politicians high fiving each other in the background as they deceive us with some new outrageous lie.

We get information about how world wide mega corporations suction the wealth of nations into their ever increasing profit books while introducing 6000 page monoliths of trade agreements to governments around the world and refer to the laws of countries designed to protect their people as 'obstructions' to trade as they complete the conversion of citizens rights into capital.

We get information about how spy agencies around the world increasingly capture record store our personal information as they move from covert to overt intelligence operations.

We get information about the world wide destruction of ecosystems, species collapse, combined with global warming and all of the political and social tactics used to stop any progress because if you can deny the carbon externalities then all the rest of them must be bogus as well.

It is what is implied by the better information, that the hidden autocrats controlling the reigns of global power aren't going to let go any time soon. The old powers control the wealth of the world and we all do not and they will not let go. That is the 'implied' information from this better information.

Re: crowded

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I lived in the Netherlands. Ray is spot on there, too. Even driving the long hour and a half on the highway from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, one giant supercity, you pass through many more miles of open farmland than urban area, dotted with villages. And inland it is almost solid farmland.

Ray is right. There is a ton of room to move out of cities there without addecting farmland use much (to say nothing of improving farming techniques that will more than compensate, i.e. food prices will continue to drop over the decades even as farmland becomed marginally, a few percent, less available. And a few percent is an enormous space for more spread out living.