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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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:Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used...

[drinkypoo]

10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped.

Yes, and that is especially wrong because it is unnecessary. Believe it or not, Los Angeles receives enough rainfall to account for more than 90% of its water use. But about 99% of that water runs straight into the ocean (where it causes brackishness during rains, because so much water is shed so quickly!) because Los Angeles has been paved all to hell, and has no ability to retain water. It's like a runner that's skipping salt.

In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.

Sewage is a big issue. At best you need enough room to compost the poop, and since nobody here wants to be a night soil man we have a whole expensive infrastructure for piping the shit around... using water. A lot of water. And then, the water is maybe used for irrigation. But we could at least be using AIWPS and getting clean water out of the other end of the system, albeit at some cost in space. Which brings us back to what you were saying, of course.

Food is actually a much smaller issue. Vertical gardening on aeroponics can produce a whole lot of produce in a very small space with very little resources. There are dozens if not hundreds of such operations across the country so far, and they are reproducing rapidly.

Trash is a huge issue, but it should be a lot smaller. Notably, all packaging should be recyclable, and what isn't recyclable should be compostable. It should be outright illegal to sell anything that comes in a non-recyclable package. That would go a long way towards solving this problem.