We've all heard of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, but how many of us have heard of Ray Kurzweil? Clearly, it's not enough. Ray Kurzweil, who has been called "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison," among other things, is a computer scientist, inventor, and futurist. Just to be clear, a futurist is someone who attempts to predict the future based on the present. However, it's not anything like a sketchy psychic or a grammatically incorrect fortune cookie. In fact, Kurzweil makes predictions anywhere from 10 to 80 years in advance that boast incredibly high forecast accuracies.

Not only did he predict the fall of the Soviet Union in his first book "The Age of Intelligent Machines" in 1986, but, interestingly, his prediction that computers will be able to beat humans in chess "by the year 2000" also came true when Chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997. According to Kurzweil, 89 out of the 108 predictions that he made were "strictly correct" as of 2009, while 102 out of the 108 were "essentially correct," meaning that they were only a few years off. In fact, there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloging the predictions that he's made. That's how you know that this guy is legit.

One concept that Kurzweil firmly believes in is the coming of a singularity, a borrowed mathematical metaphor to which he dedicates an entire book called "The Singularity is Near." The singularity, which Kurzweil claims will occur by 2045, describes the point in time when human intelligence combines with the technology that it uses to create a single entity—the singularity. According to him, this integration and upgrade of the human condition will bring about the GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics) Revolution, shattering what we currently understand to be the limits of human biology in particular.

Kurzweil's term "reprogramming biochemistry for immortality" embodies exactly what it sounds like. It's the possibility to reverse aging, cure serious heart diseases and cancer, and, ultimately, prevent death. With a dad who died of heart disease and who had warning signs of such in his early 30s, Kurzweil took his health into his own hands. Today, he takes more than 200 vitamin and mineral supplement pills per day to "reprogram his biochemistry." According to Kurzweil, his methods have produced much better results than the treatment that he had to undergo initially and the fact that he's still alive supports that claim. With the exponential rise of modern medicine, it's not implausible that we can achieve this in 30 years. However, one question still remains: do we want to?

A lot of Kurzweil's arguments for the singularity are based on the premise that death is bad and that survival is the ultimate goal for human beings. Of course, as individuals, our selfish instincts drive us to do anything and everything to avoid death, but what about society as a whole? Immortality means that nobody will die—which goes without saying—but let's think about what that means for a second. A simple problem that instantly arises from that situation is the logistical nature of population growth. Although we're not nearly there yet, immortality will eventually cause us to push the limits of Earth's carrying capacity. However, Kurzweil could probably argue against that by saying that by then we would've figured out a solution to that problem (space colonization and asteroid mining).

However, something else troubles me on a deeper level. I believe that the removal of death from human life effectively eliminates what we currently conceptualize as "life" from the human experience. I gained this understanding of life in philosophy class when we talked about God's omnibenevolence. The question was if God is omnibenevolent, then why are there evil occurrences in the world? The answer is that without evil, there is no good. If everything were perfect, then you wouldn't derive a sense of good from that because good is relative to bad. Every quality of life—hot and cold, light and dark, good and bad—are not merely opposites, but interdependent pairs that are defined by one another. Therefore, without death, there is no life.

To Kurzweil, death is a loss, a tragic event. However, death is also necessary because it causes you to appreciate something or someone that you've always taken for granted. Our awareness of the fact that someday we will be deprived of life makes us want to spend every moment of it doing something that's worthwhile, something that will allow us to transcend death and make it into the history books. I assure anyone who is reading this that if they could retake a class an infinite number of times, they'd be much less motivated to study for a test or work on a project. Take that example and extrapolate it to society in general. Everyone could potentially lose the motivation to do anything at all. The background timer of death ticking over our heads makes us want to make a difference in our short lives. In other words, running against the clock of death makes us run hard and run fast. Without a clock, time will be seemingly infinite and urgency will be nonexistent.

So far, our advancements in technology have been exponential. However, after we hit the singularity, progress as a function of time might go from looking like something exponential to something logistic.

This is just a visual representation of what we're talking about here.

In my opinion, this singularity that Kurzweil is suggesting could be the last great advancement that we make as humans (or as cyborgs). Although I'm not absolutely sure that the singularity will come about, I predict that, if it does, the extinction of biological death will inevitably lead to the death of motivation for significant technological progress and, therefore, progress in general. The figurative singularity will necessarily become an actual singularity of not just intelligence, but also of time.