Ray Kurzweil, bekanntester und prominentester Futurologe und Unternehmer der USA, hat in einem Interview im Magazin der New York Times Auskunft über seine Visionen gegeben.
As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die?
My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy.
You have described microscopic nanobots of the future that will be able to shape shift into anything, even gather into patterns that mimic familiar life-forms. So millions of nanobots will be running around that look just like Ray Kurzweil?
This idea of creating a whole virtual body with nanobots, that’s more like a 2050 scenario. But by the 2030s we’ll be putting millions of nanobots inside our bodies to augment our immune system, to basically wipe out disease. One scientist cured Type I diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device already.
You’ve said that if you woke up one day with a terminal disease, you’d be forced to invent a cure. Were you being serious?
I absolutely would try. I’m working now on a cancer project with some scientists at M.I.T., and if I develop cancer, I do have some ideas of what I would do.
I imagine a lot of people would hear that and say, Ray, if you think you’re capable of curing yourself, why don’t you go ahead and start curing others?
Well, I mean, I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything. What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make. I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’m joining Google as director of engineering.
