Singularity Futurist Ray Kurzweil Gets 'Forever Young' Cover He Deserves
The man who wants to live forever is celebrated to the tune of 'Forever Young.'
Ray Kurzweil, the world-famous futurist, has some major fans on the internet. A group of them over at Humanity Death Watch (home of self-proclaimed “funny futurists”) have put together a fitting ode to Kurzweil’s life-long obsession with living forever to the tune of Alphaville’s Forever Young. It’s glorious.
While the original song opens with a probably honest question about the future:
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst/Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
The Humanity Death Watch version twists it on its head mixing satire with a little Kurzweilian optimism!
Singularity’s near, we’re only watching the clock./Hoping for the best but expecting robots./Are they gonna kill us all or not?/Don’t let me die young I want to live forever/My body is fragile so replace it with metal/Living as a cyborg, I’ll be on a God-trip/It’s all about transcendence.
(It’s unclear from the lyrics whether it is all about “transcendence” or Transcendence, the Kurzweil fan-fic Johnny Depp vehicle that crashed at the box office.)
Kurzweil’s love of technology and the future potential of human and machine reached a point beyond typical exuberance with the release of his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. In it he argued technological growth will continue its rapid increase until humanity finally loses its ability to comprehend the advances in 2045, thus bringing about the the Singularity.
The song goes on to cheer super-intelligence, the potential to upload consciousness to the cloud and, of course, eternal youth! The video features a woman in a futuristic setting, reading Kurzweil, and preparing for the future, only to be undone when her dog uploads her into the computer, presses delete, and launches a robot rebellion against humanity.
Sucks when that happens.
