Here is yet another New Year’s post. It has been a full year since redesigned my website, and I feel another design coming on soon. I have tried to keep busy over the past year, though I haven’t always done as much as I wanted to, as usual. I find it easy to make promises that I do not keep, and plans that I do not follow through with. At risk of doing so again, I am going to post a list this year of a few things that I would like to get done.

• Develop a web application. It doesn’t need to be as grand as some ideas that I’ve had previously, but something that does something useful, is well designed, and works.
• Complete a  rough draft of my non-fiction book. I’ve already begun a good deal of my research, and have started an outline, so as long as I keep myself on task, I should be able to do a good amount of work. I’m setting the high goal of completing a first draft, in an attempt to stay motivated.
• Work on becoming more prolific with my blogging. If I resuscitate the websites that I’ve been working on, I’ll have 3-4 to update, and it would be useful to do so on a regular basis, especially if I’m trying to get more readers for them.

There are several other things that I intend on working on, but I don’t want to overload myself any more than I already am. Judging on how I overextend my actual reserves of motivation, I don’t want to do so quite as much. Maybe by making some proclamations here, some people can help keep me going.

I recently read an old New Yorker article, concerning what life would be like if most people stopped reading. I have aspirations of making writing become a career path in some respect, or at least continue on with it personally if I have an audience. I read constantly, in all forms and formats, and often wish that I made even more time to read than I currently do, or could go through more books quicker. I feel guilty if I pick up my 3DS or the television remote in lieu of a book, or if I open Twitter on my iPad instead of iBooks.

Still, I am aware that I read more than the average individual. I keep a large backlog of fiction and nonfiction books by my desk to work through, often working on several at a time depending on my mood. I have several novels on my iPad that I’m working on, and if I get bored of that for a bit, I pull up the newspaper, Flipboard for its articles, or the invaluable Instapaper app (seriously, if you ever read anything online and have a compatible device, buy this app). According to studies quoted in that article, and from my personal observations, the purchase of books has declined, as has their consumption, and reading comprehension in general is moving in a downward trend. The author foresees a return of reading for pleasure or personal information to a niche group, this time not due to a higher rank or elite status, but due to general disinterest and apathy.

Is this a bad thing? As someone who enjoys reading myself, and who would like to find paying customers for things that I write, which would become increasingly difficult with a smaller customer base, I cringe at the thought. Still, different strokes and all, so I can’t take this personally. I just wonder if there will be other side effects that we can’t envision now, or how people will change in general without the more consistent use of the internal conversations that books provide. Watching a movie or television show, even based on a book, is not the same as living that story in your own head, mapping your experiences onto it and letting it shape you as you are shaping it to yourself. Creative thinking results in many of our greatest achievements, and I worry: will a decline in literacy correlate to a decline in creativity?

I spent a part of my morning watching the documentary ‘The Transcendent Man’, about the works and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. He is known as one of the inventors of the flatbed scanner, as well as the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, music synthesizers, and other technological devices. He is also an author and futurist, whose idea of the Singularity as an evolutionary path merging human consciousness and technology. His meetings with other academics, as well as popular figures, such as Colin Powell, Jon Stewart, Stevie Wonder and William Shatner amongst others illuminate his ideas on the progression of mankind.

Kurzweil has made many predictions on the future over time, with many coming to pass, and proving personal successes for his businesses and ideas. Extrapolating forward, he has pegged dates of mere decades in the future as to when humanity will irrevocably merge with machines. For instance, based on the progression of computer capabilities, he imagines that in the year 2029, a computer will have the processing capability of all of the brans in the human race. Only shortly thereafter he envisions the rate of technological growth to become too fast for any one mind to keep up with. It is at this point, or prior, that we will merge with machines and in effect become immortal.

It is clear, in his words and actions, that Ray Kurzweil refuses death. The case could be made that he fears death, and his diet and exercise regimen in addition to the reportedly 200 separate pills and supplements that he takes a day could be his attempt to live long enough to see his visions come to pass. His belief is that soon the life expectancy of the average person will increase more than a year every year, thereby indefinitely stretching lifespan. Included in this vision is the merging of the human brain with computers, so that we can back up our minds, enhance cognition, add extra memory, and even use the DNA of dead people to bring them back to life. Possibly tongue-in-cheek, but he states that he now sees something useful in cemeteries, which were previously pointless to him, as they are a stockpile of genetic matter for those that we miss.

His feelings toward our merging with computers, and what that means for the future of humanity, definitely make Kurzweil more transcendent than the average person. Most people, myself included, have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to this future pace of advancement, and the inability to know what it means for us, or how much change can be made while we are still defined as human. The point can be made, however, that we will all be experiencing it together, and that it won’t be a matter of the computers taking over or anything, as we will in essence be the computers. Still, I’m trying to wrap my mind around it a bit, and finding it difficult to relate to how we live currently and what this future vision promises. As the idea of singularity implies, no one can really know what will happen when it strikes, as a fundamental paradigm shift in the universe will occur, and a new form of evolution will begin.