The breakfast of Short
Ray Kurzweil, Google's chief futurist, says he spends "a few tens of thousands of dollars a year" on slimming pills and his diet. It all starts with a good breakfast. Kurzweil's provides:
- berries (85 calories per cup)
- dark chocolate infused with espresso (170 calories per 30 grams)
- smoked salmon and mackerel (100 calories for a 90-gram serving)
- vanilla soy milk (100 calories per cup)
- stevia (zero calories)
- porridge (150-350 calories per half cup, depending on ingredients and cooking method)
- green tea (zero calories)
Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day for everything from heart health to eye health, from sexual health to brain health. Less and less than the 250 of a few years ago, presumably, thanks to research progress.
As for which portion of breakfast actually contains food, Kurzweil favors "healthy carbs with fewer calories." "Healthy carbohydrates" (as opposed to "unhealthy carbohydrates", which include sugar and refined and heavily processed carbohydrates, such as white bread) they are typically composed of whole grains, which means they contain a major portion of fiber, a component of foods helps the digestive system work smoothly. As for “filling up on fewer calories,” foods higher in protein and fiber are key to making that happen.
So let's go back to Kurzweil's breakfast. Berries and porridge have lots of fiber, while smoked fish and soy milk are good sources of protein.
Thumbs up, Mr. Kurzweil!
But… Breakfast is not, however, without sugar. Vanilla soy milk has 7 grams of sugar, how many does chocolate have. And, even though the sugar in the berries is natural, there's a whopping 15 grams of it. If you add even a couple of grams of the porridge, Kurzweil's first meal of the day already includes over 30 grams of sugar.
This approaches the maximum of 37,5 grams that the American Heart Association recommends men ingest per day. For women The AHA recommends limiting sugar intake to about 25 grams per day.
As a substitute for more sugar Kurzweil is using stevia, which has no calories. Even though stevia is sugar-free and calorie-free, we still don't have enough evidence to say that stevia (or other calorie-free sugar substitutes, like Splenda or Sweet-and-Low), are completely free of health consequences. At this point, the first question that arises is, for those who don't already know him, "... but who is this Kurzweil?".
Who is it Ray Kurweil?
Kurzweil had already explained all the details of his food choices 10 years ago in a 2009 book with the significant and programmatic title Transcend: Nine Steps To Living Well Forever.
Kurzweil, on the lookout, looks like Woody Allen's nerdy twinwrites Caroline Daniel in the Financial Times in a long article in the weekend supplement entitled Breakfast with the FT: Ray Kurzweil.
In some ways Kurweil is a force of nature as his bio shows. In his long career as an inventor, one of his many, he has invented very important devices such as the first machine for recognition and reading aloud of printed texts for the blind, the flatbed scanner with the first OCR (optical character recognition) and a music synthesizer that can faithfully reproduce the sound of a piano.
He has also been thinking and writing about artificial intelligence (AI) for 50 years. In The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) he predicted the ubiquity of the internet and the rise of mobile devices. The Singularity is Near, his 2005 bestseller focusing on AI and the future of humanity, had a huge impact, also influencing our Gianroberto Casaleggio in his training as a futurist. When Kurzweil showed a draft of the book to Larry Page, the co-founder of Google was so impressed that he asked Kurzweil to develop his own searches in Google "Come here - he said to Ray -, come to Google. We have the resources, the computing power, the data and the talents to develop your work”.
So in 2012 he joined Google as director of people group responsible for developing machine intelligence, with the denomination of Chief Futurist (chief futurist).
Kurzweil's supporters call him the “supreme thinking machine” ed “Thomas Edison's rightful heir”. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." For critics of him, however, he is "one of the greatest cheaters of our time", and a "narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity".
From great Vienna to New York
Although he belongs to the second generation, Kurzweil's story resembles that of many great intellectuals of greater Vienna, whose contribution to shaping the contemporary world can never be overestimated. After the Anschluss, in March 1938, the Kurzweils had fled Austria to settle in New York's Bronx. Ray's father, Fredric, was a pianist and conductor and his mother, Hannah, an artist. Ray, born in 1948, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family of immigrant artists.
From those years Ray still has the book collection of Tom Swift Jr, a writer who inspired him to become an inventor. Another major influence was her grandmother, Lillian Bader, who has written a memoir, One Life is Not Enough (something that seems made especially for her nephew) about her life in Austria. When Kurzweil was five years old in 1953, his grandmother showed him her mechanical typewriter which made a big impression on the boy:
“It looked like a magical machine. You could take a blank piece of paper and turn it into something like a book page. It wasn't like sleight of hand, it really happened, it was technology and technology is magic."
In high school his first big invention was program a computer to analyze composers' melodies and write original music in the same style. With this invention he won various national competitions, had a mention from President Johnson and was called to take part in a very popular television program, I've Got A Secret.
in 1970 he graduated from MIT with a thesis on computer science and literature. Other inventions followed after graduation. The most gratifying was the reading machine for the blind that he worked on for several years starting in 1973. "The thrill of inventing - he says - is when there is a leap from dry formulas drawn on a blackboard to important changes in of people". Singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder became the first person to own the Kurzweil reading machine.
The avatar of Fredric Kurzweil
The bond with the father is still very strong. Ray keeps hundreds of boxes filled with his father's papers. There are the letters and even the electricity bills. There are 8mm films, photographs and lots of records of his music. The son's idea is to create an avatar of the father based on all the information contained in these documents which could be indispensable for reconstructing his personality. For people who remember him, he would be an avatar indistinguishable from the real Fredric Kurzweil. Even this avatar would be more like the father than the father himself would have been if he were still alive.
In the future, there will be microscopic nanobots able to shape the change of anything, even joining together to form patterns that mimic familiar forms of life. This idea of creating a virtual whole body with nanobots is a 2050 scenario though. But by 2030, there will be millions of nanobots in our bodies to boost our immune system, which can eliminate disease. One scientist has already cured type I diabetes in rats with a device the size of a blood cell.
Lin defiance of death
Kurzweil's interest in health is still linked to his father and is long-standing. It dates back to when he was 15 and Fredric had a heart attack. He died at 58 when Ray was just 22 years old. Kurzweil realized that he may have inherited his father's pathologies. At the age of thirty, in fact, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Frustrated with conventional treatments, he approached this condition with the spirit of an inventor. His belief was that genetic predisposition could be overcome. Common sense says it's 80% genes and 20% lifestyle. If you're diligent, Kurzweil says, it's 90% lifestyle and 10% genes.
Though 70-year-old Kurzweil has a fresh face (uses antioxidant skin cream daily), is getting older, even though his biological age may be in his late XNUMXs. But that's nothing compared to Kurzweil's ultimate goal of living forever. This means staying healthy enough to get to what he calls “Bridge Two, i.e. the moment when the biotechnological revolution will reprogram our hereditary biology” and then to “Bridge Three”, the moment when molecular nanotechnology will allow us to rebuild the Human Body.
The extension of life beyond the biological limit has been one of Kurzweil's main thinking for decades. Today, this sci-fi mission to save humanity from death has been embraced by Silicon Valley's tech elite. Billionaires like Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, call death "the great enemy"; death is no longer seen as inevitable but as the ultimate evil to be "destroyed". Google has also created a related company, Calico, to fight aging. Calico was born from an initiative by Kurzweil who spoke to the head of Google Ventures about longevity. Now he is a consultant.
Man has learned to accept death, the cycle of life and everything in between, but human beings today have the opportunity to transcend natural limitations. Life expectancy was 19 years a few millennia ago. She was 37 years old in 1800. Life extension is possible. If someone finds a cure for the disease he is revered, but if someone says “I will prevent death” he is laughed at, laments Kurzweil. In 2009, a scientist at Newsweek magazine mocked Kurzweil, saying his was "the most public midlife crisis ever." Kurzweil says the fundamental error of his critics is in believing that progress is linear. His key thesis is that with technology progress can become exponential:
“Information technology has advanced exponentially… 30 steps take you linearly to 30. One, two, three, four, five… 30. With exponential growth, that's one, two, four, eight, sixty-four… one billion. If the progress of medicine in the past was entrusted to chance and luck, today we are starting to understand "the software of life". Data from the Human Genome Project will enable exponential, not incremental, progress. In the next 20, 25 years, we will overcome almost all diseases and aging”.
Artificial Intelligence
His "immortality" project is closely linked to his vision of artificial intelligence on which he is concentrating his intellectual energies both in public debate and in field research.
Indeed, Kurzweil believes that by 2029 a computer will reach human levels of intelligence. Making this avatar may have come down to his work at Google on natural language understanding. Also by 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be as persuasive as people. This implies that these androids will have a will of their own just like people, not just toys that you turn on and off. It's a very serious matter, it can't just be experimentation. It's something you can't play with.
“It won't even be us against them – Kurzweil points out -. We created these tools to overcome our limitations and have already integrated with them. And it's not about some federal artificial intelligence agency, but about billions of people already interacting with devices that are in their pockets.
In a 2012 New Yorker article entitled Kurzweil's new uncertain theory of mindGary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, wondered if the mind is organized on a hierarchical recognition model. He also criticized Kurzweil for ignoring too much human psychology and the theory of irrational behavior.
Kurzweil's job at Google is to move your search away from keywords towards more complex models. He offers this example of a possible rationale for this research.
“I met a girl at a party last night and we only exchanged a few words, but I felt an instant attraction to her. Is this realistic? What does the psychological literature say about this? My long-term project - he concludes - would be equivalent to having from an artificial system an answer equivalent to that given by a person who, having reviewed all the literature on the subject, is able to provide the right references and effectively summarize the conclusions" .
Artificial intelligence is a battleground between technologists. Elon Musk, for example, has called AI “man's greatest existential threat”. While attentive to the dangers of him, Kurzweil is frustrated with the way AI is presented in movies, as a dangerous force separate from humans, an alien invasion of intelligent machines. Instead, he sees artificial intelligence as a tool that will allow billions of men to improve their skills. These tools will pass in our pockets directly into our bodies and brains.
He envisions the future as progress in virtual reality. He says: “We can have our brunch inside the Taj Mahal or on a Mediterranean beach and feel the warm, humid air on our face. Everything would be indistinguishable from actually being there. This will happen in the next two decades.”
As a good joker, he cites his 2001 TED talk where, using sensors, he transformed his voice into that of female rock singer Ramona and sang White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. “I was a different person, a young woman – comments Kurzweil -. I had a truly liberating feeling. You can be anyone. A couple can reverse the roles”. Well, the conclusion is up to you whether the future can be bright or terrifying.
Yes, oh well magnomese the pills