222
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ray Kurzweil :
The population explosion is not terribly relevant. The
economic growth and the growth of technology vastly exceeds the pop–
ulation explosion which has been much smaller and is, in fact, leveling
off.
If
you look at economic growth over the last seventy-five years, you
see that it is also an exponential; the economy has been growing and the
rate of growth has been growing-slowly, but it has been growing. The
whole Social Security debate is incredibly short-sighted. It's based on
models of future economic growth of about I.3 percent per year, which
is lower than the seventy-five-year average, dramatically lower than the
last ten-year average: the economy's been going up. Now suddenly it's
going to shift down to this very slow growth rate?
If
you make that I.6
percent, which is still dramatically lower than what we've seen in recent
years, or even lower than the last fifty years, you don't have a problem
with Social Security thirty years from now. It's just amazing to me that
you could have this very hot, active, contemporary debate that both the
Democrats and Republicans pay homage to about some crisis decades
away, based on an economic model that is-even if you ignore the new
economy--completely out of sync with what we've seen. But technol–
ogy is certainly driving economic growth, so at least in the material
world we are far better off and continue to be through this exponential
progress of technology.
Mark Mirsky:
I feel hopelessly old-fashioned in addressing this to you,
Edward, but I was puzzled by your remark that you didn't see the idea
of progress outside of science. And it seems to me we went into Kosovo
and other places because we are totally mesmerized by the idea of
becoming better human beings, and that science in every possible way is
a result of the notion that we are going to become better human beings.
I think it goes back to the Greek notion of learning you find in Plato,
that learning is a form of progress-that progress is made through
learning. One thing that strikes me is that scientists tend to be incredi–
bly naive when they leave the world of science and come to the world
of human, social beings. I mean human in terms of biology, sex, social
interaction-I don't see the computer really understanding this complex
world. I would even suggest that one of the reasons for growth of the
Web was the kind of sexual freedom it brought with its access to
pornography. Orthodox Jewish friends, mathematicians, talked about
colleagues who were so fascinated that they were driven to their pow–
erful computers to see what kind of a virtual world they could enter.
