What do futurists really know?

Michael Rogers, who writes the Practical Futurist column for MSNBC, attended the World Future Society's annual meeting in Toronto, and reports on it here.

"The highest profile futurist waskeynote speaker Ray Kurzweil, the prolific inventor who has become a best-selling author with visionary books like “The Singularity is Near.” In the category of here-and-now, Kurzweil showed off his latest invention, a remarkable portable reading device for the blind that verbally helps its owner photograph any piece of text — a clothing label, a menu, a sign on the wall — and then reads it aloud. Kurzweil also reviewed at breakneck pace his vision of the future, which involves both human-level artificial intelligence and stunning medical breakthroughs by 2020 — by which time, Kurzweil predicts, research will lengthen our lives by more than a year for every year we live.

Immortality? Probably not, but Kurzweil does suggest that if baby boomers just hold on for another fifteen years or so, they’re looking at a lot more lifespan than previously supposed. "