Ray Kurzweil about Singularity and Technology P2

Typical of his type, including mainstream media reporting, justification and positive examples of extreme mad science are spewed to tug at emotions while dodging the realistic contexts. For example, Glenn basically asked about if people would be able to hack our neural implants "to turn you off", so Ray responds that Parkinson's disease patients have implants that they can download software (updates) into. Eventually they move on without any actual proposed safeguard / solution.

My other talking point from this clip is about another Beck statement: "May I be a test person for the fat thing. No, seriously."

What he was referring to can be explained nicely here: "RNA interference is a tool that has a lot of people excited, and one reason for the excitement is that we hope it will provide a new method to control almost any gene in your body".

This is where we begin to enter dangerous territory in terms of "transhumanism". And don't get me wrong, soon enough it will become blurry to comprehend what amounts to 'life extension' and 'transhumanism', and what doesn't. But it goes something like this: Transhumanists like to cite people with prosthetic limbs, pace-makers, Parkinson's neural implants and the like as justification of their fantasies of super-human immortality.

The difference is these people -many of whom are diagnosed with near-terminal disease in early life- are coping with often debilitating diseases, whereas our futurist mad-scientist witch-doctors are bent on utilizing any and often all possible forms of... (keyword) enhancements to achieve their goals. It's a philosophy of selfish vanity-obsessive ultra-materialism where the potential of the unfettered consequences on humanity could amount to launching a nuclear missile at Russia just to see if they'd fire back their entire arsenal.

But for Beck perhaps we could excuse him in his quest to look healthy without having to exercise for more than 4 minutes per day, so that his critics won't have much fun calling him fat anymore, even though he really isn't too far overweight. What I'm getting at is this form of gene therapy ins't inherently evil, as many many people have weight issues despite healthy habits, but we're entering the age of unwitting tranhumanistic behavior on the mass-scale.