Jerry Weber: Heart of Vinyl

February 22, 2011

It is early in the morning at Jerryʼs Records in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The employees arrived 30 minutes ago, but the place is silent. No music is playing, and it seems the work of pricing and categorizing records might, for once, feel as tedious as it really is.

Suddenly, a staccato voice booms across the entrance and hallway, reverberating off the walls: “BOBBY BENNETT, WHERE ARE THE FFF**KING CUSTOMERS?!?!” The voice belongs to the boss, Jerry Weber — a portly and well-loved 63 year-old man who looks like Santa in a sweat suit. Bennett, who works for Weber, is amused but not amazed.

Jerryʼs Records is easy to miss from the street, but world famous to those who know it. Viewed from the front, it looks like it went out of business years ago – an old sign and dusty window are all passersby will likely notice – but walk inside and climb a flight of stairs, and you will soon encounter a literal warehouse full of vinyl records, stacked from wall to wall in rooms that seem to multiply magically as you walk through them. Itʼs as though the tiny shop expands á la Alice in Wonderland once patrons close the door behind them.

And if you know about music shops, you may indeed think you have entered an enchanted place once you set foot in Jerryʼs. In September of 2010, Rolling Stone ranked Jerryʼs #10 amongst music shops in the United States, and of the 25 ranked, Jerryʼs was the only one in the top 10 that deals exclusively in vinyl. Jerryʼs reputation is so stellar that visits from rock ʻnʼ roll celebrities are not uncommon. Robert Plant, singer of legendary band Led Zeppelin, paid Jerryʼs a visit during his 2010 tour stop in Pittsburgh.

But in an age of downloads and iPods – or, for that matter, compact disks and cassette tapes — how is it that Jerryʼs Records has stuck around for over 33 years? The short answer is, “Just barely.”

“The only reason Iʼm in this business is ʻcause I got nothinʼ else to do. You see any customers here? Realistically, to sell this place Iʼd be really hard pressed to get, like, half a million dollars for everything – and half a million dollars ainʼt s**t. What can you do with it? You can buy a house and a car. Rent, utilities, taxes and salaries – that eats up almost everything.”

“My son works for me. Between me and him we make, like, one good salary, but we split it, so thatʼs it. Iʼve got a whole store full of great records and just think – nobody cares.”“One time a few years ago I was pretty sure I was going to die. I tried to sell the place so my kids wouldnʼt be stuck with it. When I showed people my books and stuff, they laughed at me — so I didnʼt die; I kept on living. Iʼve come to the conclusion that Iʼm going to die with a pricing gun in my hand.”

Weber may be dissatisfied financially, but perhaps he is secretly relieved to hold the pricing gun just a little longer: “The problem is that anybody around whoʼd be good enough to run this place donʼt have the money to buy it. The best kind of music person is an absorber. Thereʼs people who listen to music, and dance to it, and sing to it, and make out to it — and thereʼs people who hear music – like music is wired into their brain. I deal with a lot of those people in my shop.”

Sometimes it is difficult to tell whoʼs who at Jerryʼs, because the employees are all former customers who put in plenty of hours for free long before they were on the payroll.

Chris Kardaz, 55, singer and guitarist of popular local rock band Kardaz, has been shopping at Jerryʼs since the early ʻ80s, and is now in charge of the 45ʼs section. Previously a postal worker, Kardaz has been working for Weber since 2002. “I used to be a mail sorter, but now Iʼm a record curator. This is exactly where I belong. I gravitated here for work because this is where I like to be anyhow. I get a chance to see records in this shop before anyone else gets to see them, and Jerry is pretty good about letting me have whatever I want for my collection.”

Asked to play a recording of his own band, Kardaz takes a CD out of a box and jokes: “Donʼt tell Jerry I have a CD here. He hates CDs. I canʼt even play this for you, because we donʼt have a CD player in the shop.”

Another customer, defense attorney Eric Jackson Lurie, 48, has been coming to Jerryʼs for more than 20 years: “I just finished doing a trial, and Iʼm on my way back to the office, and I had to pick up some records. Jerry is a special guy – a walking encyclopedia — and thatʼs also what makes this store special. To all of us who have known Jerry for years, this is a home away from home. Jerryʼs is the greatest record store in the country, and anyone who collects vinyl whoʼs been here will tell you that.”

“The prices are ridiculous. This album I have here in my hand from 1978 has never been opened and itʼs out of print. If Iʼd found it on the Internet, Iʼd happily pay seventy-five bucks for it, but here Iʼm only paying five bucks.”

The people who work and shop at Jerryʼs are living testaments to the shopʼs long history.

Jerryʼs Records began as the Record Graveyard in 1976, after Weber was suspended from his post office job “for being too much of a bad boy.” He and a partner started using the upstairs storeroom of an Oakland bar to sell records. The rent was $75.00 a month.

“It wasnʼt a challenge at all. Seventy-five bucks a month? Anybody can afford that. We put a lot of our own collections in there to start, knowing that weʼd get ʻem all back. All we had to do was put a sign out that said, ʻWe buy records,ʼ and people started bringing us records. When college kids need a case of beer on a Friday night, they look and see, and if they ainʼt got no money, theyʼll sell records. We wouldnʼt pay much, but weʼd buy everything.”

“In 1980, we started needing more space, and my partner didnʼt want to get more space, so I let him buy me out. I opened my own store a few months later. I started out with maybe 1000 or 1500 records in ʻ76 and now I have over 2 million.”

Categorizing and alphabetizing the endless stream of records that pass through the shop is tedious work, but the employees, who love working here, hardly seem to notice that their work is set out for them literally years in advance. Weber has so many records, in fact, that the shop cannot contain all of them. Weberʼs home in Swissvale is itself a record warehouse, and though the warehouse is not organized, it contains just as many records as the shop.

The extra warehouse is a consolidation of Weberʼs previous accommodations for himself and his records: “I used to own three houses in my neighborhood that were full of records. Every time a house came up for sale Iʼd buy it and put records in it.”

Now that Weber owns a warehouse apart from his shop, his records neednʼt live with him anymore. Instead, he lives with his records.

Weberʼs employees know vinyl is sacred to him, and understand his large record collection as an extension of his personality. According to employee Jeff Donnelly, 25, who is also earning a masterʼs degree in organ performance at Duquesne University, “Youʼve got to be a vinyl enthusiast to work here. Everything Jerry does is big. At one point he even had records in the bathroom of his house! Jerry is larger than life, even his key ring – it has to weigh two pounds. Thereʼs no baby steps with Jerry.”

Donnellyʼs affection for his boss is hard not to notice as he recalls a gift given to Weber at a Christmas party in 2009: “Someone gave him a can of Heinz brand spotted dick [a kind of bread pudding]. He picks it up — and at this point he had gone through a considerable amount of Crown Royal — and he says, ʻSo what am I supposed to do with this thing? Eat it? F**k it? Iʼll take it home and feed it to Willieʼs dogs. If the dogs donʼt die, maybe Iʼll take a bite.ʼ” The can remains in the shop, unopened.

Donnelly also recalls a more serious conversation he once overheard between Weber and a customer – a conversation that hints at a human vulnerability Weber does not usually display: “We had a customer who was sort of lamenting about his father dying, and Jerry said, ʻWell, you know, life does suck sometimes.ʼ The customer just kept going and going. Finally Jerry said, ʻListen. I woke up one morning, and my wife was lying there dead next to me, okay? Life sucks.ʼ”

Tact is not Weberʼs strength, but amongst his employees and customers his authority is unquestionable. He is deeply concerned about the integrity of music, and when he gripes about the modern music industry, he seems to channel Holden Caulfield, the indignant protagonist of J.D. Salingerʼs Catcher in the Rye: “Iʼve never watched MTV in my life, because it makes us all phony. It makes you attracted to music in a phony way. Naked women jumping around and stuff — it taints the quality of the music.”

“When you started being able to make music without playing any instruments or having any talent – and could make sellable music — thatʼs when things started getting a little hairy for guys like me. You have all these non-talented people – and you know how you know that they didnʼt have no talent? ʻCause their records build up in stores like mine. Nobody wants ʻem. They sold millions of records ʻcause of MTV, but nowadays the only time anybody ʻll want ʻem is for a nostalgia party or something. They donʼt have no real value.”

For his purposes, Weber knows what the real value of music consists in, not just sonically, but also in terms of the format it is stored upon. Apparently, his breed is not dying just yet, because most of the audiophiles he serves are surprisingly young: “People in their 60ʼs and 70ʼs donʼt care about buying records anymore. About 50% of my customers are under 30.”

To the allegation that CDs sound better and last longer than vinyl, Weber says, “Thatʼs horsesh*t. The first CDs came out maybe 25 years ago, and a lot of them have deteriorated already. There are 40 year-old records in here, and if nobody scratches them up theyʼll be fine.”

“Even if you listen to a record and never play it again, youʼre still better off for listening to it. I bought a lot of these records when people dumped their whole collections and went to CDs, and then five or ten years later they come back and say, ʻI never should have sold you my records.ʼ”

Trends come and go, but Weber is proud of his staying power, and of his vinyl treasure: “When I sell a Beatles record to a 14 year old, I always tell him, ʻThis record is about 40 years old. Youʼre probably going to live into your 70ʼs, so if you take care of it, youʼll have a hundred year-old record to give to your children.ʼ”

Blue Sky Sunrise: The Death of Jee Choi

Friday, March 25^th 2011, 7:20 AM – A group of college students drives southbound on Interstate 95 through Ormond Beach Florida in a green ‘98 Land Rover. Another group is 30 minutes behind them. Rush hour hasn’t started, so the road is nearly empty.

They talk a lot about the future. All are 20 or 21 years old, and nearing their last month as college students. They left Pittsburgh last night for the Ultra Music Festival in Miami – a three-day spring concert featuring electronic dance music by artists such as the Chemical Brothers and Moby.

The boxy, 4-wheel drive S.U.V. handles strangely, swaying slightly with each correction of the steering wheel.

Anya Rosen, a small-figured blonde, is so excited to get to Miami that she left cold and rainy Pittsburgh wearing a swimsuit under her shorts and tank top.  She stayed home during Spring Break so she could save $500 for this weekend. Most of her friends did the same.

The other 5 passengers are dozing, but Anya can’t sleep. She is uncomfortable, because she is sitting in the back storage area in a driver’s side jump seat, surrounded by luggage.

Jeremy Philipson, the car’s owner, sleeps in the jump seat across from her. Christina Aliprando is in the front passenger’s seat, and Kyla Graham is the driver. Anya’s best friend Jee Choi, a young, handsome Korean-American, nods off on the back passenger’s side, and Valerie Corvino – known as Val – sleeps beside Jee, her legs resting on his lap.

Anya reaches diagonally across the back seat and taps Jee on the shoulder so he can see the sun rise. The sun is orange and fiery. Lately, Anya and Jee have been talking a lot about the colors in the sky, because they are painting a large portrait of it together. Both are art majors at Carnegie Mellon University, and they have been working together for the past 4 years. They were awake all of last night absorbed in their final collaborative projects.

Jee rouses for a moment to appreciate the sky, then closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he will have only moments left to live.

*

On the road, Anya and her friends rotated driving. Anya started driving around 3 AM. The steering wheel handled awkwardly but she thought, “It’s not my car. Maybe this is just how the car is.”

Kyla took over after Anya, around 6:30 AM.

“We all got out of the car when I switched with Kyla. We were really excited at this point. We had just gone through Georgia and were in Florida. We were going to be in Miami around 1 PM, in just a few hours.”

“We were going to go to the beach and it was going to be awesome. The sun was just starting to come up. I remember when we got back in the car I gave Jee a hug and we talked about how excited we were. We were amped.”

“When I tapped Jee on the shoulder so he could see the sunrise, that must have been the last thing we talked about. I was sleeping after that. The next thing I remember, the car started swaying violently back and forth. This must have been around 8:30 AM. Time kind of just stopped. I didn’t know what time it was again until, like, 8 at night.”

“The car started shaking, but it was small at first. Then it got bigger and bigger. It was like turbulence on an airplane. I thought, ‘We’re gonna crash,’ and that thought was really frightening. I was still collecting my thoughts when the car started flipping.”

“I think this happened because the back wheels of the car were not in tandem with the front wheels. It’s a four-wheel drive, so when you steer, the wheels are supposed to all move together. The rear drive shaft fell off the back of the car, so the back wheels were impossible to control.”

“Kyla tried to drive but the back wheels didn’t respond. Jeremy yelled ‘Brakes!’ so she hit the brakes and then the car did a semi circle. It was top-heavy, so it flipped.”

The Land Rover swerved hard to the right and flipped multiple times, finally landing on its side, wheels facing the shoulder of the Interstate. Val and Jee, the only two passengers not wearing seatbelts, were thrown from the car.

Anya’s responses were purely instinctual. Her mind was blank until the car stopped, and then there was a rapid stream of thoughts: “I’m alive. I’ve gotta get out. I’m bleeding. I hope nobody is dead.”

Jeremy got out of the car before Anya, and yelled at her to get out as well. Anya jumped out of the back skylight, facing the road.

She felt blood coming out of her head and moved her hand across her face. There was blood on her hand, and she was afraid her brain was exposed.

She turned to her left and saw Jee on the pavement, bleeding out of his nose and ears, but otherwise seemingly unharmed. His face looked perfect – pristine – and she thought, “He’s just unconscious; he’ll be okay.”

Jeremy performed CPR on Jee, but it was hopeless. Someone asked how many people were in the car, then Tina screamed, “Val! Val is under the car!”

Jeremy knelt down beside the car and held Tina’s hand, telling her not to move. Val wasn’t screaming, but her fingers were moving.

Anya walked to the side of the road as Kyla screamed, “I killed him! I killed him!” Anya didn’t cry or scream. She said nothing as she slumped down onto the grass.

Other drivers who had witnessed the accident rushed over and told her not to move. They surrounded her, holding her head and hands.

Looking up in shock, she only thought, “The sky is very blue.”

*

By the time Anya and Kyla arrived at the hospital, it was about 9:30 AM.

“It’s a really nice hospital — really big. It’s right next to the Daytona 500, so it’s a really good hospital if you have a head injury.”

“My hand really hurt. My head also kind of hurt, but I was more concerned with the blood than I was with the pain. They asked me if I could sit up, and I could.”

“They told us that Val had an insurvivable injury, and that they were just trying to keep her alive until her parents arrived. The nurse who was giving me x-rays said, ‘Well, you don’t look so bad. You’re a little scraped up, but you look a lot better than the other girl. Maybe she’ll survive. We’ll see.’”

“My father called and asked if I was okay. He told me he was sorry about my friend Jee dying. That was the first I’d heard of it. I pretended I already knew. I just said, “Yeah, I’m sorry too.’ ”

Anya and Kyla were released from the hospital within hours with minor injuries, but Val’s brain was swelling so much that doctors had to remove a section of her skull.

“She was really battered and bruised. They had to shave her hair and there were pipes and tubes everywhere. She had a black eye. She just didn’t look like herself.”

“I smoked a lot of cigarettes outside the hospital. It was really hot and sunny and beautiful. Kyla and I camped out in the parking lot with towels. Kyla was really upset and crying a lot.”

“I didn’t cry until a priest — a hospital priest – took us into a room. We were just sitting there and I realized that Val was probably going to die. I was grieving for both of them – Jee and Val — and I started crying. By that time it was like 4 in the afternoon.”

“They told us we should eat something, and brought us up to the cafeteria. I had a bit of clam chowder, but it wasn’t very good.”

Later, Anya spoke to Val’s mother over the phone as she was transferring flights in Georgia.

“Her mom was hysterical over the phone. She asked if I’d seen Val or if I knew what was happening. I didn’t know what to do or say.”

Val is still alive. Nobody knows whether or not she will fully recover.

*

The next day, Anya and Kyla went to the wreckage yard to see the Land Rover that killed one of their friends and left the other with a life-threatening head injury. It was surrounded by other wrecked cars, covered in a blue tarp. The windows were shattered and the roof caved in.

“I think Kyla realizes this wasn’t her fault. She saw the piece of the car that fell off. It was in the back of the car. It was this big thing, like a big black tube.”

“I can’t imagine what Kyla is feeling right now. It could have easily been me had I driven for another hour. I had wanted to drive until the sun rose, but Tina told me I should switch because I’d been driving long enough. I’m so grateful that I wasn’t the driver.”

*

Jee and Anya’s final art project will be a square room with windows, surrounded by another, larger room without windows. The walls of the inner room will be painted with a landscape and blue sky, and the walls of the outer room, which will be viewable through the windows of the inner room, will be painted to look like the inside of a home.

“It’s a flip-flop reality type of thing. Jee and I built the inner room and painted most of it just before we left for Miami. I did the grass and the trees and we did the sky and the coloring together. Jee left off with the sky.”

The night before the accident, after working on their room installation piece until around 3 AM, Anya and Jee worked on their other collaborative project until the sun came up. It was important that they did this in the dark of night, because the project involved illegally spray-painting on public property.

“He dressed up as a gorilla and spray painted bananas in public places while I filmed him. We were making a parody on street art. We enjoyed it a lot.”

“We did the gorilla project until 6 AM. This was our third time. Whenever we’d finish something he’d always say ‘Party on Wayne!” and I’d say, ‘Party on Garth.”

There is still a banana stenciled onto the back of a billboard near Carnegie Mellon University – a vestige of Jee’s brazen sense of humor. The billboard is adjacent to the bridge that crosses over Boundary Street.

With tangible reminders of Jee all around, there is no easy way for Anya to make sense of his death.

“It’s hard to find meaning when your best friend is killed in a car accident. We spent lots of time together – lots of time together. He was the person I could talk to about what I wanted to do creatively. Being able to share my passion was really great. Nobody is ever going to replace him.”

“In his coffin he looked pale. It just didn’t look like him at all. People told me I would be emotionally scarred if I saw him in his coffin, because that would be my last memory of him. But that’s not my last memory of him. My last memory is of him looking at the sunrise.”

Artificial Intelligence: Are humans in “Jeopardy,” or are we advancing?

In February 2011, IBM’s Watson computer was victorious over human trivia quiz champions on the game show Jeopardy. Does this mean computers can be smarter than humans? Not even close, according to Carnegie Mellon/IBM researcher Eric Nyberg. He says we should focus on augmenting, not overcoming, human capabilities.

*

Eric Nyberg leans over his desk, his nose almost touching the window of his office on the 6^th floor of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technology Institute, housed within the angular and ultra-modern Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies.

Nyberg cannot stop himself from solving problems, even when problem solving is out of place. A bad situation brews on the street below: At least ten police cars surround a city bus, and as officers emerge, hands on their guns, to apprehend a suspect, Nyberg observes and comments with the kind of pragmatism one might expect from a man whose work in artificial intelligence just vanquished the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time:

“It looks like the guy ran away. If you wanted to get away – not that I plan robberies – this is actually a pretty smart place to do it, because if you run from Morewood and jump over the fence, you can go right down into Junction Hollow. There’s no way you can get there from here unless you go back to Fifth Avenue and then over to Neville, and then go down.”

Nyberg, a tall, thin, bespectacled 49 year-old with a white pony tale, is a deeply creative man with problem-solving talents to spare. He excels at his hobbies more than most people excel at their careers. A talented musician, when he is not helping design computers that understand questions in natural language, he is designing and building electric guitar amplifiers — complete with “Nyberg” brand name and logo — that rival the very best in the business.

Nyberg’s focus on solutions explains why he was instrumental in the victory of Watson – IBM’s trivia supercomputer designed to win against human opponents on Jeopardy. But when asked if machine intelligence might some day overtake human intelligence, Nyberg immediately zeroes in on the problems:

“Watson is just a trivia-answering box. If I asked Watson, ‘Where can I catch the 54C bus to go home?’ he couldn’t answer.”

“Watson learns only when there are a lot of past examples to learn from. Thousands of Jeopardy games are available online, so if you want to learn how to play Jeopardy or teach a computer how to play Jeopardy, even though Jeopardy is a tough game to play, it’s actually not hard to try to build something.”

Watson, based on IBM’s DeepQA (Deep Question Answering) technology, is a powerful search engine that reads and interprets texts to find precise answers to questions asked in natural language. It is a quantum leap beyond search engines that deliver thousands of candidate answers, and is likely to impact fields such as medicine and intelligence very strongly. What’s more, it may soon be available to governments, hospitals and other organizations.

In an interview with Computerworld Magazine, IBM Senior Consultant Tony Pearson said DeepQA will be on the market within the next two years. According to Pearson, the 90 IBM Power 750 processors used for Watson’s televised Jeopardy match cost around $34,500 apiece, but the cost of slower systems would be much cheaper – as little as $300,000 for systems that require 30-seconds to deliver targeted answers, or much less for systems with much slower processing times:

“It’s quite possible [to wait two hours for an answer] if you run it on your Power 750 at home.”

DeepQA technology is useful in many applications, but Nyberg has found himself needing to explain to the public the limitations of machine intelligence, and why concerns that it may rival human intelligence are misplaced:

“I get reporters asking me questions like, ‘Is this the end of the human race?’ and I just tell them, ‘No, Watson will not be getting the launch codes any time soon. Watson thinks grasshoppers eat kosher.’”

“I call this the tyranny of anthropomorphism. Any time you stand up a computer agent that appears to have a dialogue and uses a human voice, and almost appears to have whimsy or emotion — even if it does only one thing right — you will completely overbuy. We’re not trying to oversell, but you’re overbuying. Come up with ten questions any human could answer and see what Watson’s answers are to those. Then you’ll realize how much we bought in.”

Nyberg does not see human-level artificial intelligence on the horizon, but he has high hopes for augmenting human intelligence. He refers to a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, entitled The Diamond Age.

The book describes a highly sophisticated device — an information companion that grows with children. The device learns about the child who owns it so that the more questions she asks, the more the answers are tailored to her development.

“This is science fiction, but it has interesting implications. If you think about a model like that, the person is not being invaded by technology. Rather, the technology is helping humans achieve their highest potential.”

Nybeg’s vision is ambitious, but he is not alone. The notion of augmenting human capabilities with technology is no longer confined to science fiction.

During the same month Watson was victorious on Jeopardy, the cover of Time Magazine read, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.” The photo on the cover was of a human with a computer cable plugged into the back of his head.

February 2011 also saw the release of a documentary film describing the life and work of noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, who was also the main subject of the Time article. The film, entitled Transcendent Man, follows Kurzweil’s life and career, and the movement he is at the center of. The movement, known as transhumanism, seeks to exponentially improve human capabilities through technology.

Transhumanists say that in the very near future we will use technology to direct our own evolution, replacing mutation and natural selection, and making humanity as we know it obsolete. According to them, the human genome will soon be as upgradable and transferable as software, and our interface with the tools we create will be so intimate that we will meld with our inventions and become more than human.

Some people do not think this would be a good thing. In the September 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, Francis Fukuyama, Johns Hopkins Professor of International Political Economy, called transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea” because, according to him, its first victim “might be equality.”

Fukuyama asks, “…. what rights will these enhanced creatures claim….  compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow?”

Nyberg is not as worried as Fukuyama, but still views Kurzweil’s cybernetic vision with caution. He supports the broad agenda of enhancing human abilities, but questions what he sees as the limited concept of technology promoted by most transhumanists:

“I think the discussion has been very narrowly focused on how to make people cooler, faster or smarter — like some kind of bionic man. Transhumanism should never be defined in terms of the technology or how you look or what you’re carrying around. It should be defined in terms of capabilities or behaviors, not in terms of people having things grafted on to them and plugged into the back of their brains.”

Nyberg also worries about improving technology without simultaneously improving morality, and wonders whether transhumanists are overly-focused on means when they should be focused on ends – ends that would make us not only more powerful, but also better:

“In order to be transhuman, you’d have to get to the point where people would be fighting to get the jobs that have the biggest opportunities for community service. That’s what transhumans would care about, not making the most money or having the most power.”

Technology may not be improving morality, but it has already augmented our abilities in measurable ways that would have been considered transhuman, at least in some respects, centuries or even decades ago.

For example, many say colorblind British artist Neil Harbisson, 28, is a cyborg because of the electronic equipment he wears in order to transform color into sound waves, allowing him to “hear” colors. Harbisson identifies with his “eyeborg” so much that in 2004 he successfully petitioned the British government so he could wear it in his passport photo. Hearing aids, pacemakers and other common devices may also qualify as early cybernetic advancements.

Nyberg even sees the dawning of transhumanism in things that are not attached to the body:

“I had a situation fairly early on with the World Wide Web where I was in Germany late at night. All the offices were closed, and I had no idea how to get the train to Stuttgart, but because I was a technologically savvy person, I just went to Google or Alta Vista or whatever the search engine was in those days, and had the right information at my fingertips. By conventional means I would have been at a loss.”

In addition to the technology of today and the technology of the future, Nyberg also suggests that we consider what role the “technologies” of the ancient past might play in expanding human potential in the transhuman age:

“While Kurzweil is talking about living forever through technology, and there are people designing drugs to make our minds go faster, there are other people who would laugh at this and say all we really need is to discipline ourselves, meditate and do yoga and so forth. You can make your mind go a lot faster this way — and you will achieve insights you would have never had otherwise.”

Nyberg is open to low-tech solutions because he approaches everything as a scientist. He is not interested in gadgetry for its own sake, but in solutions that can make life better and more peaceful.

On the street below, the police take their suspect into custody, and Nyberg shows his autographed copy of Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Intelligent Machines. The inside cover reads, simply, “To Eric, Welcome to the age of intelligent machines – Ray.” – but Nyberg is ambivalent. Echoing a minister’s criticisms of Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Nyberg says, “This comment about how it’s our goal to find God, and not to become God, is maybe something we need to spend a little time on.”