Meliorism is the idea in metaphysical thinking that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one.

In comparison, one may contrast this concept with that of apologism.

Source: Wikipedia

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

The rate of technological change is dizzying, and it's only getting faster. In September at Stanford, the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change is acknowledging the trend with its second annual Accelerating Change conference. The 2003 confab was billed as "the first in the world to focus on the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the consequences of a technological singularity." What is a technological singularity? A moment when runaway ad-vances outstrip human comprehension and all our knowledge and experience becomes useless as a guidepost to the future.

Futurists find it hard to resist this radically changed superhuman future, though futurists are, in point of fact, human. Our IQs aren't high enough to boil water. Our brains aren't supercharged with nifty silicon memory chips. Our organs aren't continually rejuvenated by blood-borne nanomachines. Such shattering break-throughs seem more or less plausible, but they're so mind-boggling that we can't say anything useful about the effect they're likely to have.

What limits are there to the speed knowledge and technology can increase? Singularitians often claim there are very few, and that the Singularity will be extremely rapid, on the order of a few days, hours or even seconds. But does this really hold water?

The Singularity is poorly defined, but one common definition is that it is the point where technology and science develops globally fastest, the inflexion point of the sigmoid curve of technological progress. This is also often believed to be the transition from humanity to posthumanity, although this could reasonably occur far before or after the inflexion point. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the Singularity is "The Big Event" of history in some way, which echoes the millennial meme and western eschatology (although it is separate from the Omega Point, which it often is confused with).

As I see it, there are a few limiting factors on the development of science and technology.

As kids, my friends and I stumbled across the old piece of plywood while hiking. Such large junk was a familiar site -- these woods on Chicago's South Side near Palos Forest Preserve were really not woods at all, but overgrown underbrush along the industrial Illinois & Michigan canal corridor. The piece of plywood was almost overlooked, but I noticed that if you jumped on it there was a bit of a bounce. We cleared off the dirt and grass. There were hinges; it was a makeshift door. With some effort we opened it and within seconds we pledged to keep our discovery secret. After all, it's not every day that you find buried in the woods a nuclear fallout shelter!

For the next few years, during the early '80s, my friends and I prepared for the end of the world. It wasn't enough to just plan -- the door we discovered became our escape hatch from the world, where we would adventure in role playing games like Twilight 2000 and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We didn't just believe the end was coming, we fantasized about it. Jimmy Carter reinforced our beliefs in his farewell address, Ronald Reagan said Star Wars could save some of us from an all-out attack, abc's The Day After prepared us for survival. Then the 1984 movie Red Dawn brought our past few years of post-apocalyptic planning to life on the silver screen. The apocalypse better get here soon, our kid-sized notions told us, otherwise we're all going to have to get jobs at McDonalds or the mall.

Data-Driven Analysis, Informed Speculation, and Activist Agendas within Scientific, Technological, Business, and Humanist Dialogs

Friday September 12 - Sunday, September 14, 2003
Tressider Union, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

More information

The point in time when current trends may go wildly off the charts--known as the "Singularity"--is now getting serious attention. What it suggests is that technological change will soon become so rapid that we cannot possibly envision its results.

Technological change isn't just happening fast. It's happening at an exponential rate. Contrary to the commonsense, intuitive, linear view, we won't just experience 100 years of progress in the twenty-first century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.

I don't think that life such as ours with a lot of water and the carbon chain is more than an ephemeral stage; These mortal frames that last a hundred years must be a very primitive model in the cosmos. I would put my money on the silicon memory bank as an immortal form of life and on the disembodied, or omni-bodied, form as the ultimate residence of mind.
- Robert Jastrow.

One can resist the invasion of an army; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
- Victor Hugo

The observation that technological progress, feeding back into itself, provides an ever-increasing rate of technological progress.

See this page on the Kurzweil website for detail.