A couple of posts back, I opened a review of Ray Kurzweil’s book Transcend with the line, ‘Want to live forever?’ Seems that quite a few people do, and some are prepared to put a big heap of cash up front to make that happen.
Google has just announced the launch of Project Calico, an offshoot company designed to tackle the illnesses of ageing and, in essence, to find a way to beat death. If you read Kurzweil’s book, that’s not as crazy as it sounds. The technology is coming, and with Google’s backing could come a lot faster.
It looks like Google chief Larry Page has also read Transcend. Earlier this year, Google hired Kurzweil, and it seems this may have been with Calico in mind. The world is changing fast.
In the 20C, you became a big player in the business world with a psychological outlook that was not in any way admirable – studies have shown the most successful are literally psychopaths. (That account says 1 in 25 – recent studies say it may be much higher…)
In the 21C and the knowledge-based economy, you don’t need to be a psychopath to get on, you need to be smart. The new breed of business leaders emerging from Silicon Valley are, almost to a person, utopians – they want to make their heap of cash, but they want to make the world better at the same time (presaged all those years ago by Google’s famous informal company motto, Don’t Be Evil).
The world is changing better.