Ray Kurzweil has some nice insights into measuring innovation and growth from a technology perspective.
Yeah how do we get HIM to check out this Bitcoin thing?! Hopefully he'd see how it will bring about the singularity faster, be making all commerce more efficient. Rumor is he takes like a billion vitamins a day so he has a chance of living until the singularity, but he'd be better served by advocating true free market money.
http://www.singularitysummit.com/October 15-16, 2011 New York
The Singularity Summit 2011 will be a TED-style two-day event at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City. The confirmed speakers include futurist Ray Kurzweil, neuroscientist Christof Koch, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIT polymath Alexander Wissner-Gross, DARPA challenge winner Riley Crane, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, economist Tyler Cowen, television personalities Jason Silva and Casey Pieretti, and robotics professors James McLurnkin and Robin Murphy.
I'm
quite confident someone from this forum will be there, networking and chatting about Bitcoin.