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Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

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Mitchell Howe has a short article called “What are the Odds?” which discusses the bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor. I love Kurzweil’s books so this caught my attention.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized at www.longbets.org (where all winnings go to charity), is that a computer, or “machine intelligence,” will pass the so-called Turing test by 2029. The Turing test, a challenge to see if a computer can fool a human judge into thinking it is human, is a traditional benchmark for the point when true Artificial Intelligence can be said to have been achieved - a historic moment, by any measure.

But with recent discussion of AI taking place in the context of a wager, debates have tended to focus on the difficulty of the problem rather than the implications - as though the arrival of true Artificial Intelligence would only mean the difference between a robot making your coffee and brewing it yourself.

What are the stakes, really? Why should this wager matter to you personally? And what, exactly, are the odds?”

Mitchell then delves in at a high level explaining the two sides of the bet. This is a great little read if you’re at all interested in AI. For further reading you should check out The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. This book is so fascinating that I read it from front to back in just a few days.

Click on over and check out Mitchell’s article “What are the Odds?”