Who is Ray Kurzweil

The first reason I admire Ray Kurzweil is because of his book; The age of the spiritual machines. I have read this book years ago but it has been my favorite book ever since. I have a Dutch copy of it and the translation of the title is; The Age of the Living Computers. I find this worth mentioning because perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this book is the fact that we humans and computers will merge. We will ultimately become cyborgs.

His optimistic visions and predictions of the future. In his books and also with the new film that will be released end 2009 Kurzweil tries to give us hope about our future by describing the technologies that we, the human race, have created as a tool we can use for good, rather than the continual narrative that we are on a path to destroying ourselves.

"Technology is 'the continuation of evolution by other means.''

"Improving knowledge and technology will make death avoidable"

"Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020."

"Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust."

''Ultimately the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current 'dumb,' simple machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics."

Read more Ray Kurzweil quotes on Gaia.com

Ramona is the photorealistic avatar host of KurzweilAI.net. She's also the first live virtual performing and recording artist.

At a tech conference Kurzweil used a singing computer avatar named Ramona to do his presentation. This stunt was the inspiration for the 2002 Al Pacino movie Simone.

You can chat with Ramona on KurzweilAI.net but it's a bit disappointing because the AI used falls a bit short.

Chat with Ramona on KurzweilAI.net

• The Age of Intelligent Machines 1990
• The 10 Percent Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer 1993
• The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence 1999
• Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever 2005
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology 2005

About Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever 2004

The book, with 452 pages, has more than 900 footnotes. There is a research rationale for each recommendation, backed up by some 2,000 scientific citations.

''We started from a perspective of, 'What does the medical literature show?''' said Dr. Grossman, the book's co-author and founder of the Frontier Medical Institute, a longevity clinic. ''We can defend everything we say.''

The authors offer no silver bullet, no single nostrum, or even a handful, that will insure a long and healthy life. ''It's a complex case,'' Mr. Kurzweil said. ''That's why it takes a book to make it.''

Foreword by Ray Kurzweil:

The explosive nature of exponential growth means it may only take a quarter of a millennium to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes. The ongoing expansion of our future superintelligence will then require moving out into the rest of the universe, where we may engineer new universes

"These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous," "They don't account for anything like the technological progress we're going to experience."

Transcendent Man chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil and presents his bold vision of the Singularity, a point in the near future when technology will be changing so rapidly, that we will have to enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence to keep up.

TRANSCENDENT MAN Premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival 2009.

"I believe our film offers something many Hollywood films and documentaries lack today: hope about our future ... Ray is describing the technologies that we, the human race, have created as a tool we can use for good, rather than the continual narrative that we are on a path to destroying ourselves. We intend for this film to combat cynicism with the idea that we can and will change the world for the better."

The official Transcendent Man Movie Trailer website: Transcendent Man

Ray Kurzweil claims humans could become immortal in as little as 20 years' time through nanotechnology and an increased understanding of how the body works.

Read the article on Telegraph.co.uk

Courtesy photo Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Kurzweil takes over 200 supplement pills a day plus intravenous treatments once a week in order to stay as healthy possible and maybe live long enough to use technology to live forever.

Ray Kurzweil began his dinner with a pill. ''A starch blocker,'' he explained, ''one of my 250 supplements a day.''

"Emerging trends in medicine, biotechnology and nanotechnology open a realistic path to immortality."

Ray Kurzweil is serious about it:

''Genes are sequential programs,'' he said. ''We are learning how to manipulate the programs inside us, the software of life. And personally, I really believe that what I'm doing is reprogramming my biochemistry.''

Mr. Kurzweil's research soon extended to aging and longevity, and he has continued at it ever since, consulting doctors and scientists along the way. His blood, metabolism and fitness are monitored regularly. The results appear encouraging. His biological age, using tests like high-frequency hearing, memory and lung capacity, is about 40. ''In a sense, I treat myself as a laboratory,'' he said.

''People are coming from a number of directions to these same truths,'' said Dr. Joseph Zibrak, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. ''The science behind much of what Kurzweil and Grossman are talking about is becoming conventional.''

Mr. Kurzweil, however, is going further. He is sticking to his 250 pill-a-day regimen, though he adjusts his routine if his research suggests improvements. In this research, Mr. Kurzweil is both the scientist and the laboratory. ''I've tried to approach this as an inventor,'' he said. ''That's how I approach problems, constantly measuring, testing and searching for the best ideas.''

These are fragments of an interview with Ray Kurzweil in the New York Times. Read the whole interview here

... you'll automatically be making a donation to The Acumen Fund, working to solve global poverty.

Doesn't that feel good?

the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen, he says, and almost more extreme than we can imagine.

"everything is ultimately becoming information technology."