The initiative’s two main science projects are focused largely on transhumanism, a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing the dynamic interplay between humanity and the acceleration of technology.

Specifically, the 2045 Initiative’s projects seek to (1) enable an individual’s personality to be transferred to a more advanced non-biological substrate, and (2) extend life to the point of immortality,  and those skeptical about the likelihood of achieving these goals should consider Arthur C. Clarke’s laws of prediction.

The first speaker on GF2045’s second day was inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil, whose “Immortality by 2045” presentation was focused on reverse engineering the brain.

While much of his presentation was familiar to those who have followed his work on technology trend analysis and the Singularity, his material on the brain, also appearing in his recently-published How to Create a Mind, and in part the purpose of his joining Google (to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing), focused on ideation rather than implementation. […]