How long has it been since we’ve had a real futurist post? Too long!

Wired has a great big article on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity today from which I learned that our buddy Ray is a little crazy:

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments.

Kurzweil is going to all this trouble in order to live until the Singularity occurs and the human life span is extended substantially if not indefinitely. Immortality is nigh! Here’s how:

According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won’t die.

Nice. Downloading yourself has its perils though. You know how you can accidentally replace all your music with your friend’s if you plug in your iPod haphazardly? That would be very bad news in this scenario.

Kurzweil is weird in a good way though. His theories require a certain open-mindedness that is apparently not limited strictly to technical matters:

To press his case, Kurzweil is writing and producing an autobiographical movie… Kurzweil appears in two guises, as himself and as an intelligent computer named Ramona, played by an actress. Ramona has long been the inventor’s virtual alter ego and the expression of his most personal goals. “Women are more interesting than men,” he says, “and if it’s more interesting to be with a woman, it is probably more interesting to be a woman.” He hopes one day to bring Ramona to life, and to have genuine human experiences, both with her and as her… “I don’t necessarily only want to be Ramona,” he says. “It’s not necessarily about gender confusion, it’s just about freedom to express yourself.”

Hot! Experiences with her and as her? Not only is he going to become a transgendered robot, he is going to have sex with his feminine alter ego! The future is going to be awesome, man.

As bizarre as the pursuit of life-extension technology can be, I really liked this quote from Kurzweil’s doctor:

“Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study,” Grossman explains. “We don’t have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves.”

Experiment away, Ray. See you in the future.