BouncingBabyBoomer.com

Update from the moshpit of my mind

Just back from a much-needed break in which I made myself read, relax and not write after an intense few days of conferencing and communing with Silicon Valley experts in future think. Now my head is overflowing with things I want to share, not just from the conference [prior posts below], but from the bulging digital folder of clips I have been saving for this space.

Bottom line, it has become clear that now is the time for this blog to divide, so that the tech-geek-cyber-surfing-future-musing content has its own place to live and its own room to grow. Meanwhile, this space will return to its regular programming about how to live long, lively and well in rapidly changing times.

On that latter front, my next multi-part series will be about the "e-patient" movement that is building momentum between self-helping patients and their growing cadre of physician allies online, all of whom want to increase quality (and reduce errors) in medical care. For that information I will be building upon my time as an "Osler Fellow" consulting with faculty at a nearby medical school and sharing tips colected from the growing community of doctor and patient pundits online. Between those posts I will be sharing updates on our other continuing themes, including Boomer health, employment, finances, entrepreneuring, lifelong learning and (un-) retirement.

 

But for that promised glimpse of the future as seen through the eyes of the pundits present at "The Singularity" conference in San Jose look for a live link in the far right sidebar next week to bouncingboomergirlgeek, the sister blog which I am also prepping to launch as we speak.

Is a "Singularity" Near? Learning more about Ray K., part 1

 As mentioned last post, there will be a "Singularity Summit" this weekend in San Jose (at The Tech Museum on Friday and the Montgomery Theatre on Saturday with discounts on tickets here.)

The summit is the brainchild of inventor-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, in partnership with IEEE, the engineering society. But the conference is not all and only about the visions of Kurzweil; it is a convening of several big thinkers and scientists sharing updates on everything from nanotech to artificial intelligence.

For those not already familiar with Ray, this might be an apt time to share from a couple presentations I myself gave about his ideas last year. Whatever you think about his specific predictions, his understanding of history is compelling and his sense of the future is fascinating.

For the next few days I will be folding in snips from my own speaking notes as a preface to what I will later report from the conference itself.

In his book, The Singularity, Ray Kurzweil makes the case that life as we know it is about to radically change. Within a scant few decades, perhaps as soon as 2030, he predicts we will see a "Big Bang" when exponential growth in our understanding of the brain converges with explosive growth in machine intelligence plus nanotech, and the boundaries between man and machine become blurred. How much of this prediction is likely how soon has been a topic of dispute, so much so that IEEE devoted a special issue to this topic last year.

What follows is some detail from the Kurzweil book, interspersed with my own reflections.

Kurzweil Conf. in SJ This Weekend/ Special Offer

Just caught in one of my sidebar widgets - the "Singularity Summit" which is coming to San Jose (CA) this weekend (Fri/Sat, 10/24-5) is offering a discount on its remaining tickets to help make it a sellout. Click here to find out more about the conference (speakers include futurists and far-thinkers, Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, computer industry maven Esther Dyson, and Cynthia Breazeal from the media arts faculty at MIT). Then click here to find out more about tickets at a discount. The hub and I are both going, and this blog will be full of future-trending snips this week and next.

The Thoughts in a Box That Can Kill Us

I am only half-way into this book but I can't say enough good things about it. This could as easily have been called "How Engineers Think" or "How Professors Think"  since many of the same dynamics apply to anyone who absorbs a large body of knowledge and needs to apply it flexibly under real world conditions. However if a physician gets overly stuck inside a logic box it runs a real risk of killing someone. This issue is tackled head on by Jerome Groopman MD who also writes on matters medical for the New Yorker. In this book, he gives us an intimate, accessible glimpse into the minds of doctors, explaining the most common mistakes a physician might make. In this era of soaring medical error rates, everyone with a pulse should check out this book before their next checkup.

Title: How Doctors Think (click on the title to jump to the Amazon page)
Author: Jerome Groopman MD
Publisher: Mariner Books; (March 12, 2008)
Author's site: www.jeromegroopman.com

Preview of the "New Old"

(a sequel to Post 1.3, Selling Us Daddy's Car)

The "New Old"

For Boomers, there is compounding evidence that our later years will be as big a departure from the old norms as our early adulthood.

Our health tends to be better than our parents at the same point, perhaps because we were raised with better diets from an earlier age. We got an early wakeup call about things that can deter decline, such as diet, exercise, brain fitness, and Omega 3s. Meanwhile, new medical breakthroughs seem to keep happening weekly, from pharmaceuticals tailored to one's own genome to pivotal proteins in Alzheimer's plaques. And if that isn't enough, they keep coming up with new lotions, potions and lasers that let you prolong a youthful appearance if you wish to fool Mother Nature some more.

Overall, we tend to be much better informed about our options and much less shy than our parents were about asking questions and expecting value and evaluating results. We've held more jobs in one lifetime and often acquired sklls in more than one discipline. All of this tends to create a wider point of view that seeks a broader menu of options, including the option of not retiring.

To a big bunch of us, much of this seems a good thing, since between the housing slump, the credit crunch, the declining dollar, and our shrinking portfolios, not to mention our rising costs of health care, we may have no choice but to keep on being engaged for pay anyway, especially if we want to access those nifty treatments they say will let us do that long and lively thing.

Muscle-Building Pill. Maybe.

So did you catch that news (see link at end) about the pill that can fake exercise? No kidding; in adult mice it had the same effect on muscles as a brisk burst of cardio, and since the muscles felt as if they were already in shape, it boosted endurance too when the mice actually exercised.

These are just rodent trials, no humans yet, but the implications are fascinating for everyone from athletes to the aging to those with back injuries.

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