Inventor Kurzweil: No more disease, aging; printable replacement organs

In an article for CNN, inventor, futurist and author of five books including one of Glenn Beck's favorites, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil provided five staggering predictions as to what we could expect in the 2020s and 2030s, including among others major advancements in medicine and 3-d printing.

According to Kurzweil, during the early 2020s, "we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging," as a result of  the fact that medicine has become an information technology industry, whereby

"technologies to reprogram the "software" that underlie human biology are already a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome project was completed in 2003, and will again be a thousand times more powerful than they are today in a decade, and a million times more powerful in two decades."

With respect to 3-d printers, Kurzweil expects a quantum leap in applications and usage, noting that the early 2020s will be "the golden age" of 3-d printing technology, with "thousands of cool clothing designs that are open source and that can be printed out for pennies a pound," and the ability to "print out organs...[and populate them] with a patient's own stem cells."

Kurzweil developed the theory of the "Singularity" whereby he predicts that human intelligence and artificial intelligence will ultimately converge due to the law of accelerating returns in which technology increases in capability at an accelerating pace for a roughly equal cost each year.