“He told me that his work as a dermatologist had let him to conclude that many individuals who were suffering with psoriasis and eczema were actually “weeping through their skin.” In other words, these people, for one reason or another, were unable to weep openly, even though they had experienced events that warranted a good cry.”
–Don Colbert, MD, Deadly Emotions quoted in The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice is Making us Worse by Steven Ray Ozanich
This is where we are at right now, as a whole. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
–Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, and musician. His material, encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy, was …Wikipedia
(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd.)
Violent crime and unemployment rates are nearly twice the national average in Baltimore. Educators say factors like these add significant stress to children, causing emotional and behavioral problems, so several public schools are working to reduce that stress with mindfulness and meditation. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
Epimetheus, Prometheus and Pandora
Once upon a time, long ago, the great god Zeus overcame the gigantic race, the Titans, to become the most powerful god. He ruled over Olympus and banished the Titans to Tartarus, but he spared two of those he conquered, Prometheus (or forethought) and his brother, Epimetheus (or afterthought). Instead of banishing them, he gave them the task of going to earth to make its creatures. Just before he sent them down from the heavens, he gave Epimetheus gifts to offer their creations.
The brothers traveled to earth and set to work. Using the abundant river clay, they began to mold their creations. Prometheus was wise and the more thoughtful and cautious of the two brothers. He took great care with his work, spending a good deal of time thinking over each decision he made in crafting human beings. He decided he would shape them like the gods, for he imagined great things they would one day accomplish.
His brother was not so thoughtful. He worked as fast as he could, shaping and molding all the animals. Each time he finished a creation, he handed out of one Zeus’ gifts. He gave the animals strength and endurance. He gave out a keen sense of smell and sight. To some of his creatures he gave wings; to others he gave claws; to others he gave a protective coat; and others still received thick coats of fur.
When Epimetheus was finished with his creation, he realized he had given away all Zeus’ gifts, and he had nothing left for his brother to give the human beings.
When Prometheus finished his work and saw his creatures shivering in the cold, dark night, terrified of the many powerful beasts his brother had created, his heart ached. He could not bear the sight of their suffering, and so he decided he must return to Olympus to ask Zeus for another gift. He wished to give his creations fire.
He stood before Zeus and humbly asked, “I wish you to give me one more gift. The people do not have coats of fur to keep them warm, and they do not have protective shells or wings or claws. Please, let me give them fire.”
Zeus was furious at so bold a request. “The fire belongs to the gods and to the gods alone!” he roared. “How dare you return asking for more!” And he sent Prometheus away.
Prometheus knew he must help his creations, and although he understood Zeus could be a vengeful, angry god, he decided he must do something. He would steal fire.
He waited until he was certain Zeus was not watching, and he lifted his torch to the light of the sun, catching an ember of fire. This he hid inside a hollow stalk and hurried back to earth.
He gathered the people and said, “I give you fire,” and he set the ember free.
It burst into flame, and all the people cheered at the warmth and the light of this gift.
“Never let the light of Olympus die,” Prometheus warned. “If you keep the flames alive, you shall live good and happy lives.”
The people were overjoyed. With fire, they no longer shivered in the cold night. With fire they were able to forge weapons to subdue the wild beasts. With fire they made tools to till the earth and build dwellings. With fire they warmed those dwellings. And the animals feared the sight of those flames and no longer attacked human beings.
As the humans watched the smoke spiraling up into the sky, their thoughts turned to the gods. They decided to build temples to honor those gods, and they decided to roast an animal as a sacrifice to those gods.
When Zeus looked down and saw the fires flickering, he was furious. He understood Prometheus had betrayed him. But when he breathed in the smells of those sacrifices, he calmed down. He liked this notion of a sacrifice to him, the all-powerful god.
Prometheus did not like watching his creations burning their meat as sacrifice. He worried that they had too little to waste on the gods, so he devised a plan.
He instructed the men to butcher an ox and to divide the meat into two equal portions. “Place chops and roasts in one half and bury these beneath sinews and bones. In the other half place scraps and entrails and fat.”
When they had followed his instructions, Prometheus invited Zeus to earth to choose his offering, and naturally Zeus selected the half that looked better — the scraps and fat. When he realized Prometheus had tricked him and cheated the gods, he was overcome with rage.
“Now you and your creations will suffer!” he roared, and he sent for Hermes, the messenger god, to carry Prometheus to the top of the Caucasus Mountains and chain him there.
Every day an eagle swooped out of the sky and tore at Prometheus’ liver, and every night his immortal liver once again grew. The next day the eagle returned, swooped down, and once again Prometheus suffered the anguish of his punishment. It was only the visits from his son, Deucalion, that gave Prometheus any joy.
Zeus had sworn to punish humans, too, and this he did — in a roundabout fashion — by creating a beautiful woman, Pandora. She was endowed with many god-given virtues, including curiosity, and Zeus sent her to Earth as a wife for Epimetheus. Epimetheus, despite warnings from his brother not to trust gifts from Zeus, accepted her, and in time, Pandora wreaked terrible havoc upon humans.
Prometheus, however, did not suffer eternally after many ages had passed. Zeus relented and allowed the great warrior, Hercules, to rescue him. Hercules killed the eagle and broke Prometheus’ chains, thus freeing this great hero and friend of mankind.
(uexpress.com)
Amy Webb (born c. 1977) is an American futurist and author. She is the Founder of the Future Today Institute. She is an Adjunct Professor (future of technology) at New York University’s Stern School of Business. She was a 2014-15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Webb was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.
In 2001, Webb graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2003 she launched a future of news R&D shop. In 2006, she founded Webbmedia Group, which advised primarily media and technology companies. Now in its second decade, Webbmedia Group has a new name––The Future Today Institute––and an expanded scope. FTI answers “What’s the future of X?” for a global client base of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, government agencies, large nonprofits, universities and startups.
In 2009, she founded Knowledgewebb, a digital media training company. That company expanded in 2015 with a new cofounder. It is now called Knowledgewebb Training, and it focuses on digital media training on near-future technologies.
In 2010, Webb cofounded Spark Camp, a next-generation convener that facilitates important conversations on the future of a better society.
During her career as a futurist, Webb has worked with hundreds of government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, universities, and associations from around the world. She has also written extensively about her methodology.
Forbes named her one of the Women Changing the World (Technology category). In 2012, she was named one of Columbia Journalism Review‘s “20 women to watch”.
The Signals Are Talking: How Today’s Fringe Becomes Tomorrow’s Mainstream Webb’s book about her near-future trends forecasting methodology was acquired by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus. It was published December 6, 2016 and selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016 and as one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2016.
How To Make J-School Matter (Again) In 2015, Harvard University published Webb’s research on what can be done to reform college and graduate education and the news industry.
Data, A Love Story In 2013 Webb released the memoir Data, A Love Story through Dutton Adult. The book chronicled Webb’s attempts at online dating. Initially meeting with failure, Webb collected and analyzed data to game online dating.
Data, A Love Story has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese for overseas markets. Critical reception for the book was positive, with Booklist calling it “clever and inventive”.
Webb’s TED Talk about Data, A Love Story has been translated into 31 languages and has been viewed more than 4.5 million times.
Michael Rogers is a different kind of futurist—one who combines real business experience with technology skills. Add to that the keen eye of an award-winning investigative journalist and the storytelling skill of a novelist, and you have The Practical Futurist.
Michael is a dynamic speaker who delivers an entertaining and common-sense vision of change for business and individuals, blending technology, economics, demographics, culture and human nature.
His recent work has ranged from serving as Futurist-In-Residence for The New York Times to writing the popular Practical Futurist column for MSNBC. He speaks and consults for clients worldwide, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and is a frequent guest on radio and television.
Contributed by Calvin Harris, H.W., M.
April 19, 2016 (Playboy.com)
Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.
Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.
After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.
At 68, Kurzweil has his fingers in many pots. He co-founded Singularity University, a research institute and think tank that focuses on how science can solve humanity’s challenges involving water scarcity, overpopulation and energy shortfalls. His Google team is developing tools for machine intelligence and natural language understanding, including a series of “chatbots” that can converse with you and have different personalities. In his spare time, Kurzweil started a hedge fund and just finished his first novel. He is a husband, father and grandfather.
You describe a near future in which nanobots inhabit our bloodstreams, our brains upload to the cloud and people never die. It sounds terrifying.
When people talk about the future of technology, especially artificial intelligence, they very often have the common dystopian Hollywood-movie model of us versus the machines. My view is that we will use these tools as we’ve used all other tools—to broaden our reach. And in this case, we’ll be extending the most important attribute we have, which is our intelligence.
The capability of information technology doubles each year. At the same time, the price of the same functionality comes down by half every year. These are all features of what I call the law of accelerating returns. It’s why you can buy an iPhone or an Android phone that’s twice as good as the one two years ago for half the price. My smartphone is several thousand times more powerful and millions of times less expensive than the $11 million IBM 7094 computer I used when I was an undergraduate at MIT in 1965. But that’s not the most interesting thing about my phone. If I want to multiply computational and communication power by 10,000—that is to say, if I need to access 10,000 computers—I can do that in the cloud, and that happens all the time. We’re not even aware of it. Do a complex language translation, a complex search or many other types of transactions, and you’re accessing thousands of computers while you sit quietly in a park somewhere. Over the next couple of decades we’re going to make ourselves smarter by integrating with these tools.
Humans are evolving into iPhones?
We’re merging with these nonbiological technologies. We’re already on that path. I mean, this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction. It is part of who I am—not necessarily the phone itself, but the connection to the cloud and all the resources I can access there.
Isn’t what nature gave us enough?
We have limited capacity in our brain. It’s at least a million times slower than computational electronics. The part of our brain where we do our thinking is called the neocortex. It’s a very thin structure around the brain that emerged 200 million years ago with mammals, which were rodent creatures. The big innovation came 2 million years ago when humanoids evolved and developed a large forehead. If you look at other primates, they have a slanted brow. They don’t have a frontal cortex. That additional amount of neocortex is what we used to add higher levels of abstraction, and that was the enabling factor for us to invent, first of all, language, but also things like humor and music. No other animal can keep a beat. No other animal can tell a joke.
So plugging our brains into machines will make us exponentially smarter and more charming?
Exactly. By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud. So we’ll have an additional neocortex, just like we developed an additional neocortex 2 million years ago, and we’ll use it just as we used the frontal cortex: to add additional levels of abstraction. We’ll create more profound forms of communication than we’re familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes. We’ll be funnier. We’ll be sexier. We’ll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments.
What exactly will that look like from the user end?
Let’s say I’m walking along and I see my boss at Google, Larry Page, approaching. I have three seconds to come up with something clever to say, and the 300 million modules in my neocortex won’t cut it. I need a billion modules for two seconds. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud just as we can access additional computation in the cloud for our mobile phones, and I’ll be able to say exactly the right thing.
But the truth is, we don’t know what it will look like. Once we can expand our thinking in the cloud, our intelligence grows beyond anything we can currently comprehend. Our intuition about the future is linear. It’s hardwired in our brains that way. Ten thousand years ago you would track an animal in the field and expect it to speed up as it went along. You would make a linear prediction as to where it would go so you could catch it. That type of thinking made sense, but it ignores the sort of exponential growth we see with technology. We’re approaching a point where technological progress will become so fast that everyday human intelligence will be unable to follow it. It’s a horizon past which the concepts we’re familiar with are so transformed that it’s hard to see past it.
This is the event horizon you call the Singularity. Why have you set its arrival so specifically in 2045?
The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. But there will be dramatic changes prior to that. I’ve been consistent about these dates for decades now. One is 2029, which is when computers will pass a valid Turing test, meaning they’ll be indistinguishable from human intelligence in a conversation.
How will all this help us live longer?
Let’s start with genetics, which is now called biotechnology. It’s beginning to revolutionize clinical practice and will completely transform medicine within one to two decades. We’re starting to reprogram the outdated software of life—the 23,000 little programs we have in our bodies, called genes. We’re programming them away from disease and away from aging.
For instance, at the Joslin Diabetes Center, they turned off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells you to hold on to every calorie in your fat cells. That was a good idea 10,000 years ago when our genes evolved, because the next hunting season might not work out so well. But today it underlies an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. We’d like to turn that gene off. They tried it in animal experiments. The animals ate ravenously but remained slim. They didn’t get diabetes. They didn’t get heart disease. They also lived 20 percent longer. And that’s just one example of 23,000 genes.
We’re involved with a company where we add a gene to people who are missing a gene that causes a terminal disease called pulmonary hypertension, and the treatment has actually worked in human trials. We can subtract genes. We can modify stem cells to have desirable effects such as rejuvenating the heart if it’s been damaged in a heart attack, which is true of half of all heart attack survivors.
The point is health care is now an information technology subject to the same laws of acceleration and progress we see with other technologies. We’ll soon have the ability to rejuvenate all the body’s tissues and organs and develop drugs targeted specifically at the underlying metabolic process of a disease rather than taking a hit-or-miss approach. But nanotechnology is where we really move beyond biology.
Tiny robots fighting disease in our veins?
Yes. By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system. Our immune system is great, but it evolved thousands of years ago when conditions were different. It was not in the interest of the human species for individuals to live very long, so people typically died in their 20s. The life expectancy was 19. Your immune system, for example, does a poor job on cancer. It thinks cancer is you. It doesn’t treat cancer as an enemy. It also doesn’t work well on retroviruses. It doesn’t work well on things that tend to affect us later in life, because it didn’t select for longevity.
We can finish the job nature started with a nonbiological T cell. T cells are, in fact, nanobots—natural ones. They’re the size of a blood cell and are quite intelligent. I actually watched one of my T cells attack bacteria on a microscope slide. We could have one programmed to deal with all pathogens and could download new software from the internet if a new type of enemy such as a new biological virus emerged.
As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process. One researcher has already cured type 1 diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device.
So if we can hang on for 15 more years, we can basically live forever?
I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy. By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthdate but rather your remaining life expectancy.
That’s a lot of Friends reruns. Won’t we get bored?
Ennui is certainly one of the challenges. If we’re doing the same things for hundreds of years, life will become profoundly monotonous. But that’s true only if we have radical life extension without radical life expansion. So we’re going to make ourselves smarter, as we’re doing already, but as we directly merge with this technology and expand our thinking into the cloud, we’re going to be adding more levels of abstraction to our thinking.
Just as we went from primates to humans and invented art, music and science, with that additional neocortex we’re going to be adding even more profound forms of communication and more profound activities as we, again, add to the levels and scope of our neocortex. We’re going to have fantastic virtual environments. We can enjoy any earthly environment, but we’ll also have fantastic imaginary environments limited only by our imaginations, and our imaginations are going to become greater.
By the 2030s, you and I could be hundreds of miles apart, and it will seem just as though we’re sitting together as we are now—there are even technologies that will enable us to touch one another. I actually have some patents on that. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift is just one harbinger of the coming era of virtual reality. Today the technology is not quite realistic, but by the mid-2020s, with retina-based devices transmitting images directly to your retina, similar devices in your ears and other sensors that stimulate the tactile sense, you and I could be in different locations and yet feel completely as though we’re both at a table in the Taj Mahal or walking on a virtual Mediterranean beach, feeling the moist warm air on our faces.
By the 2030s this technology will go inside the nervous system. I mentioned nanobots that will connect your neocortex to the cloud. Another application will be to send signals directly to your neocortex as though they’re coming from your senses. So your brain will feel like it’s actually in the virtual environment. It’s going to be extremely realistic and incorporate all the senses.
Sex often leads the way in technology. It sounds like the future will see plenty of innovation on that front.
Yes. Early adoption of new communication technologies often involves sexual applications. Gutenberg’s first book was the Bible, but that was followed by a lot of more prurient titles. The same thing happened with film, videotape, the internet and products such as Second Life, which was an early attempt at virtual reality and has a large adult sexual-interest section. And as virtual reality becomes more realistic, certainly sexual activity will be extremely popular.
How do you envision the future of sex?
Not only will people be able to have sex together in different locations, but you will have the ability to change who you are and who your partner is. In virtual reality you don’t have to inhabit the same body you have in actual reality. A couple could become each other, for example, and experience the relationship from the other’s perspective. You could transmit a more idealized version of yourself to your lover, or she may alter how she wants you to look.
So looking normal won’t be an option for sexual partners of the future? We’ll all be super-idealized physical forms?
I think we’ll expand our concept of what’s normal. I mean, we’re doing that already. People are doing things to their bodies that were considered radical some decades ago and are now considered mainstream, like tattoos and piercings but also cosmetic surgery. As you go into virtual environments, some people create avatars that look very much like themselves, and other people create fantastic new types of creatures. I think our aesthetic will modify, given the freedom of virtual reality, so you won’t have to be the same person all the time, but you could when you want to be.
What you’re describing could change the very nature of relationships, not to mention redefine what it means to be monogamous.
We have already to some extent separated the biological function of sex from its communication, sensual and recreational purposes. You can certainly have sex without having babies, and you can even have babies without having sex. In virtual reality we will have even more freedom to experiment.
We already have more lines to draw today than we did in the past. Is watching pornography infidelity? Well, couples disagree about that. People have different opinions. Communicating in a sexual manner over the internet, is that infidelity? Some people think yes; some people think no. If you get tired of your partner, you can turn your partner into someone else, or you can transform yourself. You’ll have that option as well.
You and your wife have been married for more than 40 years. But is there anyone whose body you would like to inhabit?
That’s a good question. I haven’t been asked that one before. Probably some attractive woman. If I had to pick one? Amy Adams. I like the perky way she uses her body.
Fascinating. Do you have any other pop culture crushes?
[Pauses] Taylor Swift.
You listen to Taylor Swift?
I do. I think she’s very soulful, and her voice has gotten better too. “Teardrops on My Guitar” is a pretty great song. I was hoping to meet her at the Grammys last year, but she was sitting too far away from me.
In the 1980s, you invented the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer, the first keyboard capable of simulating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments. Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton and Prince are among its many fans. Do you have any rock star moments to confess?
Nothing too scandalous. My friendship with Stevie Wonder goes back to 1976, when he invited himself to my office to listen to the Kurzweil reading machine for the blind. My wife and I hung out with Ray Charles. More recently, Alanis Morissette approached me at an airport to thank me for the Kurzweil keyboard. It’s rewarding, but I’ve always been shy. Unstructured social situations make me nervous.
Every generation has its defining psychological label, and armchair therapists today love throwing around the catchall terms on the spectrum and Asperger’s. Some have used those terms to describe you.
I do see some social awkwardness in myself and in some of my associates who are brilliant in technology. But we’re intelligent enough to compensate for that and find ways of interacting with people. I have always dreaded cocktail parties, but I’ve always had one good male friend and, from an early age, was able to connect one-on-one with women. I met my wife at a party and spilled red wine on her pants, which might have been intentional. I insisted that I wash it out with her leg still in it. We fell in love very quickly and got engaged within a year.
Let’s move on. Your employer, Google, is a behemoth now. How does it avoid becoming the next IBM?
I think the Google leadership realizes, as do most enlightened technology leaders, that paradigms are short-lived and you have to constantly reinvent yourself. You can’t ride just one paradigm and one algorithm, though the PageRank algorithm that underlies search has certainly been one of the most successful algorithms in history.
At Google we’re constantly looking for new ideas and for people who can fashion new ideas and success. I run a team of more than 40 really brilliant scientists. We’re working on natural-language understanding, trying to get computers to understand the meaning of documents, and it’s quite an incredible team. That’s actually the most important resource I have discovered at Google: the talent there.
Do you think universities will still matter a hundred years from now?
Those institutions represent a confluence of intelligent people. Good ideas come from smart minds working together. But education is changing. One of the beneficial things we’ll have from technology is very high-quality learning, from preschool to graduate school, all free and all online—including interaction with teachers and fellow students. I think the principal role of education should be to encourage people at all ages to do projects and learn from those projects. The most important reality of what we call Silicon Valley is the freedom to fail. Here we call it failure of experience. You have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur.
You certainly are optimistic. But in many ways, the world is an increasingly difficult and dangerous place. Look at the continued violence in the Middle East and the totalitarian regimes in Africa and North Korea, not to mention corruption, racism and greed.
Well, I wouldn’t put all those phenomena in the same basket. Despite oppressive regimes, the consensus is actually moving in the right direction toward greater liberty, freedom and democracy. That wasn’t always the philosophy of the world. I mean, there were almost no democracies 200 years ago and only a handful 100 years ago. Not every society is a perfect democracy today, but most believe it is the desirable norm we should seek.
This is the most prosperous and peaceful time in human history. If you read Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he documents a very profound inverse exponential in violence. Your chance of being killed hundreds of years ago was far greater than it is today because there was extreme scarcity of resources hundreds of years ago. Technology is driving progress here too. On one hand we’re seeing more violence because people are capturing it on their cell phones. But that brings awareness to it. In the past, the next village could have been destroyed and you might never have heard about it.
Human life has become immeasurably better. The poor today have amenities that kings and queens didn’t have one or two centuries ago, including refrigerators and toilets, not to mention computers, televisions and recorded music.
A vast digital divide separates those with access to communications technology from those without access. Won’t that gap only get wider?
No. People think the world is getting poorer, but according to the World Bank, for example, poverty in Asia has been cut by 90 percent over the past 20 years because these societies have gone from primitive agrarian economies to thriving information economies. The internet is entering developing areas at a rapid rate. The kid in Africa with a smartphone has more intelligent access to information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago, and progress like that spreads very quickly. It’s a radically different world than it was a generation or two ago.
We live in interesting times.
Very interesting. People say they don’t want to live forever. Often their objection is that they don’t want to live hundreds of years the way the quintessential 99-year-old is perceived to be living—frail or ill and on life support. First of all, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about remaining healthy and young, actually reversing aging and being an ideal form of yourself for a long time. They also don’t see how many incredible things they would witness over time—the changes, the innovations. Me, I’d like to stick around.
Last year Bill Gates said, “It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”
Bill Gates is completely ignoring the 50 percent deflation rate that’s inherent in information technology. You did have to be wealthy to have a mobile phone 20 years ago. They didn’t work very well. They did one thing, which was make phone calls, and they did it poorly, and they didn’t fit in your pocket. Today there are billions of them doing a million things, and they’re basically free. By the time technologies work well, they’re affordable for almost everyone. By the year 2020, you won’t require as much wealth in general.
We won’t need money in the future?
We’ll be able to survive with very little money. Not that I advocate that. Money will be important. But as we get to the 2020s, we’ll be able to print out most of the material resources we need with 3-D printers and similar technologies. We’ll be able to print clothing at pennies per pound, which is what 3-D printing costs, and there will be an open-source market with free designs you can download and then print out on your printer.
What about our energy and food needs?
Certainly within 20 years we’ll be meeting all our energy requirements through solar and other renewables. We’re awash in energy—10,000 times more than we need, from the sun—and we’re going to move to these renewables not just because we’re concerned about the impact on the environment but because it will be cheaper and more economic.
We know how to clean up or desalinate water using other emerging technologies, such as Dean Kamen’s Slingshot water-vapor-distillation system, at very low cost, particularly if we have low-cost energy. We’re going to have a vertical agriculture revolution where we’ll grow food in vertical buildings, recycling all the ingredients and resources so there’s no ecological impact, unlike the environmental disaster represented by factory farming. Pesticide-free fruits and vegetables done through hydroponic plants, in vitro cloned meats.
Many of your past predictions were accurate, but you got plenty wrong too. In The Singularity Is Near you wrote that by 2015 we would be able to depend on robots to clean our houses.
I don’t think I actually said that, but if you google my predictions, you’ll see I’ve fared quite well overall. I did an analysis of the predictions I made for 2009 in the book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I wrote in the late 1990s. I made 147 predictions, and 86 percent were correct. Even some of the ones that were incorrect, like self-driving cars, were not all that incorrect. They were off by just a few years. Directionally it was pretty accurate.
Do you know what your IQ is?
It was measured when I was a child at 165, and I haven’t measured it since.
Does it bother you that some people think you’re crazy? Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Douglas Hofstadter compared your work to “dog excrement.”
I think that particular statement reflects poorly on him. The difference between myself and my critics is that we’re looking at the same reality, but they apply their linear intuition about where we will go, and I’m thinking about it from the exponential perspective. The good news is, the evidence for my position is everywhere around us. I gave a speech not too long ago to junior high school science winners from around the country, and they came up afterward and said, “Oh, that’s really so true. Things were so different when I was eight.” [laughs] People are seeing the results of exponential growth because you don’t have to wait that long now to actually see it unfold.
Continue reading “Reinvent Yourself: The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil” by David Hochman
Barbara will explore the meaning of the planetary shift from self centered homo sapiens to spirit centered homo universalis and discuss the similarities of our process of spiritual growth that parallels how our planet is going through its own phases of evolutionary growth. Her work is a synthesis of a social and philosophical understanding of the contact myths with an eye towards how they apply to the larger cosmic dimensions.
Fetish events like the one this couple attended are cropping up all over the US.
50 Shades of Grey has changed the calculus on how our society views fetishes and BDSM. Though once considered deviant and shameful, today most psychologists lend us an entirely different view. Sexual fetishes are far more common than we think. A recent study published in the Journal of Sex Research, finds that one in three people in the US have taken part in one, at least once in their lives.
Sex researchers are just starting to delve into the fetish world to see what can be gleaned from it. Some studies have reaped interesting results. Though there may be fetishists who have experienced a past trauma, it’s not a reliable predictor. And there might be some benefits to engaging in a fetish or BDSM.
How do we define a fetish? It comes from feitico, a Portuguese word meaning “obsessive fascination.” The technical term in psychology is paraphilia, which is an atypical sexual interest in an object, act, body part, or sensation. So far, 549 separate paraphilias have been identified, and there may be many more.
According to a study out of the University of Bologna in Italy, the most common fetishes deal with non-sexual parts of the body. A foot fetish is the most common. Nearly half of all fetishes are foot fetishes. Usually, its men focused on women’s feet. The second most common is for accessories such as stockings, boots, or gloves.
Though some of us have a predilection for something, the fetishist cannot technically climax without his or her fetish present. For instance, a couple might enjoy incorporating bondage, food, or role play occasionally into their sex life, in order to “spice things up.” That doesn’t mean their fetishists. They just enjoy a little kink. Desiring to wear a diaper, to be spanked, to kiss a woman’s foot, be peed on, don a collar and leash, be tied down, or feel leather against one’s skin can all be considered fetishes. Even such things as voyeurism, cross dressing, or exhibitionism are parahilias.
There are some really strange ones, like getting caught in quicksand. There’s sploshing or WHAM which is covering your partner in whip cream, baby oil, body paint, or other substances. You might even fantasize about getting swallowed by a large, imaginary predator (vorarephilia), digested by it, and expelled, while parts of you remain and become part of that creature. Harvard research psychologist Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D. says, “Pretty much anything you can think of, someone out there probably has sexual associations attached to it.”
One-third of Americans have taken part in some sort of fetish or kink play, and elements of BDSM such as bondage are becoming more mainstream.
Once thought of as depraved or deviant, today, paraphilias are only thought to be negative, if engaging in it causes harm or distress to the person or another. Paraphilia was removed from the DSM V, when the so-called bible of mental disorders was updated in 2012. Though the field of sexology is new, most therapists today believe that having a fetish is perfectly healthy, as long as it is expressed with a consenting, adult partner.
Study after study finds no correlation between a fetish and any sort of pathology. But suppressing one or trying to condition it out could cause psychological damage. Dr. Richard Krueger is an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. He told Healthline, “The literature is limited, but it would suggest that they’re (fetishists) healthy or healthier” than those who don’t have one.
Sex counselor Jessica O’Reilly, Ph.D. said that just as people have different tastes for food, they have diverse sexual fantasies. So a fetish may be “one element of our diversity in terms of sexual interest and arousal.” O’Reilly believes that usually, it’s something that’s imprinted in the mind when a person is first becoming aware of their own sexuality. Most people remember when they first acquired their fetish, though not always.
Say a boy loses his virginity to a woman wearing thigh-highs. From that day forward, he may associate the stockings with sexuality, and so become aroused when he sees them. Other fetishes may be imprinted in the same fashion. One study in the 1960s showed men naked photos of women, alongside pictures of boots. After a protracted period, participants began to associate boots with arousal.
With wider acceptance, kink, fetishism, and BDSM have become big business. The industry brings in $9 billion per year in the US, according to IBISWorld.
This suggests that developing a fetish is Pavlovian in nature. Further research supports the claim that paraphilias are non-sexual elements which though a certain experience, somehow get associated with sex. As a result, the more such impressions we encounter, the more fetishes we might acquire over time.
Paraphilias are often considered the realm of men. But women are the largest consumers of erotica. 50 Shades of Grey sold 10 million copies, and was read almost exclusively by women. This book includes bondage, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM). These are not only separate fetishes, but have become an acronym for what some consider a lifestyle, while for others it’s a hobby or interest. BDSM on the surface appears to deviate from the norm. But the practice is actually more common than we think.
Consider how popular spanking is, which could be considered a part of BDSM. Somewhere between five and 10% of Americans have either spanked or been spanked by a partner, according to the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. This involves no real damage. Yet, some of the same biochemicals released during sex, such as endorphins and serotonin, flood the system during instances of pain. So a little pain might even heighten the experience.
Rather than depraved, one study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggests that those couples who take part in BDSM might actually be emotionally healthier than those who only partake in “vanilla” sex.” 902 BDSM practitioners and 434 controls participated. Researchers found that BDSM practicing couples had better communication, less neurosis, were more open with one another, better able to communicate their needs, and were more sensitive to the needs of their partner.
Though the sexual revolution had a lot to do with it, the internet has acted as a catalyst for increasing our comfort level surrounding BDSM and fetishism. Even those thought to have an “extreme” fetish can find legions of others with the same interest on websites and chatrooms, and through certain venues, even meet in person.
Moreover, some mainstream dating sites like OKCupid are now allowing users to communicate their fetish to would-be mates. Before the internet, those with interests outside the sexual norm felt isolated or even “sick.” Today, we realize how common atypical sexual interests are. And it’s likely that as more knowledge about paraphilias settles into the general population, harmless fetishes are bound to become more widely accepted.