Book Review: "Live Long Enough to Live Forever" by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, check out “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever” by Ray Kurzweil. It’s his newest book. The premise is that there are three bridges to get us to a nearly unlimited life span. The first is using what we already know. The second bridge is using biotechnology that does not yet exist. The third is nanotech to allow us to directly connect our biology to other technologies.

I’m just starting on it but I love all of his books and this one is already awesome and I’m only on page 19!

The ideas build heavily on Ray Kurzweil’s work on the double exponential technology growth rate and singularity theory.

“Ray has spent several decades studyingand modeling technology trends and their impact on society. Perhaps his most profound observation is that the rate of change is itself accelerating. This means that the past is not a reliable guide to the futre. The 20th century was not 100 years of progress at today’s rate but, rather, was equivalent to about 20 years, because we’ve been speeding up to current rates of change. And we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate, equivalent to that of the entire 20th centure, in the next 14 years. And then we’ll do it again in just 7 years. Because of this [double] exponential growth, the 21st century will equal 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress — 1,000 times greater than what we witnessed in the 20th century, which itself was no slouch for change.”