March 27, 2008
Wired:
One day, sitting in his office overlooking the suburban parking lot, I ask Kurzweil if being a singularitarian makes him happy. “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily,” he says. “But we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life.” Kurzweil expects that the world will soon be entirely saturated by thought. Even the stones may compute, he says, within 200 years.
