Things Are Better than We Think

Me:
Bill Gates once said and perhaps someone else before him: "We greatly overestimate what can be accomplished in the short run, but greatly underestimate what can be accomplished in the long-run"

Are things better than we think, I certainly hope so! Because there are some folks out there on my FB feed who think the end times are imminent...

From:  "Ray Kurzweil, the author, inventor, computer scientist, futurist and Google employee…

On the effect of the modern information era: People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse. … That’s the perception. 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. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.

Me: We live this every day on FB/Twitter, between Twitter accounts that can report every happening all over the world essentially instantaneously then those FB friends who seem to revel in violence, umbrage and grievance porn on FB we live in a different world.  Folks have lamented “media” for under-reporting good news for decades but they do so because the world is mostly good news and the bad stuff is what grabs folks’ attention because well it is mostly unusual.

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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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

How technology will change humanity’s geographic needs: 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. Now, 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. We can have workgroups that are spread out. … But ultimately, we’ll have full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, augmented reality.

Me: Again this was written in 2016 but with Covid this dynamic, which the internet was already facilitating, has already accelerated.  What the true implications are, we cannot yet know.

On connecting the brain directly to the cloud: We don’t yet have brain extenders directly from our brain. We do have brain extenders indirectly. I mean this (holds up his smartphone) is a brain extender. … Ultimately we’ll put them directly in our brains. But not just to do search and language translation and other types of things we do now with mobile apps, but to actually extend the very scope of our brain.

Why machines won’t displace humans: We’re going to merge with them, we’re going to make ourselves smarter. We’re already doing that. These mobile devices make us smarter. We’re routinely doing things we couldn’t possibly do without these brain extenders.

Me:
Lets just say I know some folks that could use a brain enhancement and leave it at that...

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/ray-kurzweil-world-isnt-getting-worse-information-getting-better/