The song is a slow ballad, floating with echoing guitars, that breathes and stretches with layered and buried vocals that I could not understand completely, but, with such a title and lines like ‘when the younger dies’, ‘if he was alive’, it is obviously an homage to the same computer science guy Conor Oberst raves about in his upcoming album.
Amazing Baby must be obsessed with Kurzweil too, and his desire to fusion the human mind with the machine, in order to become an immortal cyborg.
Wait a minute, look at your computer, can you see it? I bet you can. But during this TED conference in February 2006, Kurzweil had predicted we would not able to see computers anymore in 2010 because they would be too small:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html
He keeps reminding me of a cult leader that announces the end of the world at a precise date; when this date arrives and he is proven wrong, people continue to believe in his predictions for reasons that escape me.
Iman compared him to Ron Hubbard, and I can see the parallel, even though you cannot start to compare both men on the technological level, the only thing that Hubbard has ‘invented’ being that stupid machine consisting of two tin cans connected to a voltmeter that scientologists call a E-meter, give me a fucking break!
Kurzweil has invented tons of things, I don’t question his genius and his tremendous contribution to technology and computer science, but I don’t buy his aura of New Age guru. Scientists don’t make predictions about the future based on exponential curves with precise dates like the ones he comes up with, predictions in science are called hypothesis; Kurzweil’s predictions are just speculations, sound much more like prophecies and prophets are the opposite of scientists.
But how many bands are celebrating the guy who wants to build in only 20 years what evolution did in million years?
The Canadian band Our Lady Peace, which is apparently quite successful, has released a concept album in 2000 entitled ‘Spiritual Machines’, also inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s book ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’. Short tracks of dialog from Kurzweil himself are interspersed among the actual songs, er… that reminds me something.
And it doesn’t stop there. The experimental Brooklyn band Yeasayer said that their album ‘Odd Blood’ is partly inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s theory that computer intelligence will eventually replace the human brain!
And if you read the lyrics of Regina Spektor’s ‘Machine’,… ‘I live in the future/In my pre-war apartment/And I count all my blessings/I have friends in high places/And I’m upgraded daily/All my wires without traces/Hooked into machine’
Could it be? May be…
With so many endorsements, and one from Bill Gates himself who said ‘Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future’, the guy is not leaving the landscape any time soon.
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