Kurzweil interview: designers need to read this...  

Ray Kurzweil is a famed computer programmer/inventor/futurist. His bread and butter is pattern recognition and associated software/hardware designing. He has developed a ton of stuff you will recognize from the 80s, 90s and this decade. His side dish is forecasting future trends in technology. He has a fairly good track record. On his side dish, he places large helpings of human/machine convergence and a notion that the rate of change in knowledge/technology is likely to accelerate to a point that society reaches a knowledge/historical equivalent of a singularity in physics. He explains this better than I could. So read it. And it really doesn't matter whether you buy the singularity metaphor or not (I don't), but the facts and algorithmic simulations and forecasts are really more striking and fantastic than most science fiction, and best of all, based on alot of evidence. Kurzweil is the real deal when it comes to profound AND fact based modelling of how the knowledge/technogy supernova is exploding infinite in all directions (thanks to Freeman Dyson for infinite in all directions). You may not agree with Kurzweil, or you may reduce him to another techno intoxicated super geek, but I guarranty you that your understanding of accummulating knowledge and technology will be substantially enhanced. And in turn that will give you a better sense of the present and future context/subtext you are really designing into.

I'm bringing this online interview with Kurzweil to your attention not just because its Valentine Day, but because some Canadian computer scientists just shocked the knowledge worker/computer world a few days ago with claims of having developed a workable quantuum computer 2-3 decades before even futurists like Kurzweil were expecting. If this break through in quantuum computing is for real, even the most fantastic notions in Kurzweil's forecasts are about to become testable. Much of Kurzweil's forecasts hinged on achievement of massively parallel processing 3D computing to achieve computation frontiers comparable to or greater than the individual human brain, and with computers linked to the collective human intelligence. Quantuum computers seem suited to play a crucial role in allowing exactly that.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil_singularity/kurzweil_singularity_index.html