American inventor Ray Kurzweil has been appointed head of a new school for futurologists backed by Google and the US space agency Nasa. He will become chancellor of the Singularity University based at Nasa’s Silicon Valley campus in California.
The institution gains its name from a controversial 2005 book by Kurzweil, entitled The Singularity is Near. In it, he argues that the exponential advance of technology is set to transform society by giving rise to computers that are more clever than humans. He claims that the leap in computing power will drive rapid advances in other fields which could solve the problems of climate change, poverty, famine and disease.
Ray Kurzweil, who worked as a computer scientist before turning to future gazing in the late 1980s, first coined the concept of nanobots which could work inside the human body repairing damage as the go. This would be combined with the use of biotechnology to unravel the ageing process and for the nanotechnology eventually to be capable of slowing it down and ultimately reversing it. He predicted that within 15 years that human life expectancy would start to increases at a rate faster than you age. The first step involves adopting a good enough diet and exercise regime to live long enough for the technology to catch up. At least that part wont hurt!