Ray Kurzweil is the wrong person to publicly personify transhumanism (I'm not opportunistically jumping on the bandwagon, I've been saying this for a long time now). I realized this when I read about his idea to resurrect his dead father by feeding some left-over data into an AI tasked with imitating his father. While I do think it's unethical to slave a sentient AI algorithm to this charade to begin with, the larger problem is that he apparently believes this will bring a dead person back to life. That's a very shallow idea for crossing over to a new substrate, <i>clearly</i> a lot more is required to port over a person.<p>While it's good to have a quasi-official spokesperson who can convey some of the concepts to a broader audience, things also got simplified in a way that seriously distorts them. It's not about arbitrary singular points during our development, it's about the breathtaking directions these developments are destined to go in. That's a much harder concept to sell than, say, a magical tipping point where history ends, but I'd say it's well worthwhile.<p>The standard singularity talk doesn't reflect what's really happening to us - nevertheless, it's important to open people up to the prospect of continued technological development. It sounds so simple, but this is really not an obvious path to people who believe the future will mainly contain ever-lighter iPads and will otherwise be the same: there will be a couple of points in history where technology reaches the potential to fundamentally change who we are, what it means to be alive, and what our goals are as a civilization.<p>Technology will make it possible to alter some very fundamental realities humans had to live with for a long time. The impact of this is enormous beyond words. We get to change things in a very big way, including some options that would be hugely unpopular even for the tech-savvy people on HN - like getting rid of material scarcity, for example, or choosing radical life extension.<p>It's clear that this will be upsetting to a lot of people, and suddenly we need a marketing person like Kurzweil. Personally, I'd prefer Eliezer Yudkowsky would take that role, but that's probably not a good choice for "lay people".