Re: >H ExI Advisor Ray Kurzweil in new BusinessWeek

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jul 07 2000 - 18:22:59 MDT


Max More <max@maxmore.com> writes:

> Transhuman Mailing List
>
> Ray Kurzweil has been popping up all over the place since publication of
> his excellent book The Age of Spiritual Machines. The current issue of
> BusinessWeek is the latest appearance, spreading transhumanist ideas into
> the culture:
>
> http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/june2000/nf00629i.htm

There was a review of him in Futures too. He gets around quite a
bit. I think he definitely has been the major popularizer of
transhumanism in the mainstream media over the last year, for good and
ill.

The problem seems to be that his description is very much a somewhat
passive "this happens, and people react to it", instead of "this is
what people will/might do", which is a much more active view of the
future. I think we should be careful when we discuss our ideas to
point out that they are not deterministic stuff that just happens, but
that they are a part of a larger process driven by human ingenuity,
ambition and curiosity.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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