Why should we believe Ray Kurzweil’s visions of accelerating technological progress? In response to my Findings column about him and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it’s naive to assume exponential progress can go on — that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data.

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. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

When speaking of death and immortality though, it’s important to bring in the perspective of a school of thought called the Transhumanists. These thinkers believe that information technologies are growing exponentially and that this exponential growth will transform nearly every aspect of our lives, including our ability to extend life indefinitely, which is also known as radical life extension. I happen to agree with them, and am a big fan of these theories. One of my favorite Transhumanists, Ray Kurzweil, explains radical life extension this way

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious. Led by futurist Ray Kurzweil, proponents of the so-called strong-AI school believe that a sufficient number of digitally simulated neurons, running at a high enough speed, can awaken into awareness. Once computing speed reaches 1016 operations per second — roughly by 2020 — the trick will be simply to come up with an algorithm for the mind. When we find it, machines will become self-aware, with unpredictable consequences. This event is known as the singularity.

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Question: I have read on the Internet that it is not possible to create alkaline or acid water from pure water and that water that is pure enough to drink can't be split into alkaline and acid components. Is this true?

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