After listening to futurist Ray Kurzweil speak, one is left less with concrete impressions than a general sensibility, one that's difficult to articulate but reinforced by certain words that he uses again and again: expansion, doubling and – perhaps most significantly – predictable.

It's a bit like being lectured by a salesman or an evangelist. And I think there nugget of truth to the latter characterization. At the beginning of his talk yesterday at the World Science Festival, he mentioned intelligent design:

"A more sophisticated take," he said, "is that the laws of physics are a form of intelligent design. Of course, the designer might be an adolescent in some other universe, and our universe is just a science fair."

Not that Kurzweil necessarily believes this, or even that it would matter if he did. His accomplishmentsare many, and he probably forgets more before breakfast than I figure out in a week. But something about Kurzweil's certainty brings out the contrarian in me, or at least the skeptic. Of course, my inner skeptic makes plenty of mistakes – so take all this with as many grains of salt as you'd like.

Kurzweil's talk recapitulated the narrative for which he's known: the steady growth of computing power and sheer reality-describing data will eventually give scientists an unprecedented understanding of biological systems, including the human body, and the ability to hack it in ways that may ultimately defy death.

This process follows an exponential growth curve, one that's seen elsewhere in history, most notably in the progression of life from eukaryotic cells through the Cambrian explosion and finally to us, homo sapiens, who are poised at the point where things are about to shoot straight up.

Kurzweil's confidence is tremendous. At one point, neuroscientist V.S.

Ramachandran, who had delivered the talk before his, expressed doubt that we could quickly reverse-engineer what is fundamentally a hacked system, with evolution taking advantage of multiple shortcuts and multifunctionalities and all-purpose jerry rigging.

"God is an hacker, not an engineer – and that's a problem we'll have to confront," he said. And Kurzweil's response was simply that it wouldn't be a problem.

Some of Kurzweil's predictions I'm perfectly willing to bet on. The ascendance of solar energy, for example: solar panel efficiency has been doubling every two years, and Kurzweil says that only seven more doublings are needed before the sun meets humanity's energy needs.

Likewise, nanotech-based therapies are moving from the lab into early-stage clinical trials, and look quite promising.

But can we jump from these examples, from the exponential curves

Kurzweil assembled to depict various biological and economic and social phenomena, to the Singularity – a point at which our tools are so proficient at making themselves that more-human-intelligences emerge, and change is so accelerated that we can barely make sense of it?

This seems to require a certain faith. Faith is often rewarded, but it also tends to have blind spots. And in Kurzweil's talk, the blind spot appeared to be the human condition. At one point he predicted that we would soon be able to inactivate genes responsible for fat storage, which were useful on the savannah but not in an age dietary abundance.

But is this really the best approach? Doesn't it make more sense to simply eat less, especially when dietary insufficiency is still a reality for billions of people?

I know this criticism is a bit nit-picky, and doesn't address the probability of what he's saying. But Kurzweil's description of humanity's ascent towards the Singularity implies that it's an essentially good thing – and though the therapies he describes would be wonderful, there's a certain impersonality to it.

What will the future mean for us, for our relationships to other people, for our hopes and strivings? I'd love to ask Kurzweil. But in the meantime, I pose the question to you, Wired Science readers: do you think the humans of Kurzweil's future will be happier than us?

Note: Some great relevant reading is "Why the future doesn't need us", published in Wired back in 2000 by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun

Microsystems and Kurzweil compatriot. Wired also did a Kurzweil Q-and-A last November, and his website is chock full of his writings. (Kurzweil's

World Science Festival PowerPoint presentation is also supposed to be there, but I can't find it – if you can, please post the link.) And for fictional treatments of the Singularity, I recommend Isaac Asimov's

"The Last Question" and Accelerando by Charles Stross.

One other thing I'll say about Kurzweil: the cocktail of vitamins, supplements and nutraceuticals he's concocted to keep him healthy until the advent of radical longevity-enhancing therapies appears to be working. He's 60 years old but looks ten years younger.

*Image: Roland Dobbins

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See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.