<!--intro-->Reason magazine has an interesting <a href="http://reason.com/hod/rb110900.html">article</a> based on <a HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?tag=exoscience&keyword=ray%20kurzweil&mode=blended">Ray Kurzweil</a>'s keynote speech at the recent Nanotech conference in Bethesda. Kurzweil talks about the human genome project ("<i>Fifteen years ago it was a fringe project and some said it would take 10,000 years to finish it. But we went from a cost of $10 to analyze each DNA base pair to something on the order of a penny per base pair in 10 years.</i>"), human health ("<i>Within 10 years, revolutions in genomics, proteomics, therapeutic cloning, and tissue engineering will be adding more than one year every year to human life expectancy. If you can hang in there a few more years, you will actually get to see how dramatic the 21st century will be.</i>" - keeping in mind that currently we add 120 days to life expectancy ever year), and <a HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html">Bill Joy's recent conversion</a> to neo-Ludditism ("<i>Relinquishment is utterly infeasible because technological progress is not one thing. It is the result of the activities of thousands of researchers and companies which can't be controlled.</i>")<!--/intro-->
