Ray Kurzweil is taking us toward a singularity of stupid.

Yesterday in Gizmodo, that publication I hate so much I want to vomit on Jesus Diaz’s shoes, there was a post about a new product called Blio, which will be debuted at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas.

Brief note: I won’t be going to CES this year, because no one would put me in a large enough goddamn hotel room. Also there was a concern about the ability of certain unnamed wussy corporations to write off that many prostitutes as a tax expense.

Brief note 2: If you’re reading this and you’re my wife, “prostitutes” is a tech industry term for EVDO cards.

Anyway, the Blio is an application that:

lets you read your ebooks as they’re intended to look on paper

This supposedly revolutionary system is being pushed hard by Ray Kurzweil, that insane lunatic who’s behind all that talk of The Singularity, that moment after which the future will be incomprehensible to us and impossible to predict because of how goddamn fast progress will be going.

Ignoring the vast criticisms of some of Kurzweil’s failed predictions or the numerous criticisms that the notion of Singularity itself is based on cherry picking of arbitrary markers of progress, which is to say bad science, I have to wonder if Ray’s spending too much time looking drunkenly toward the future to notice  the present, or the past. Seriously, Blio looks like a cool app and everything, but we already have something like this: it’s called Adobe Acrobat.

We can already look at visually accurate books, with illustrations and fonts and everything else in place. It’s called Adobe Acrobat. And you know what? It’s already cross-platform, runs on the iPhone and other smart phones, and it’s a pretty safe bet it’ll run on the Tablet no matter what form it takes, because PDF viewer support is built into Mac OS X!

Unless there’s some major piece of this product I’m not understanding — which isn’t the case, because I’m Walt Mosspuppet, and I understand everything — this is just a skinned version of a PDF reader. Why would this attract attention at all? Sure, if you tell the common, technically illiterate masses that something’s new, they’ll believe you because they don’t know enough to tell you you’re full of shit, but I thought you were better than that, Gizmodo. I thought you knew about computers.

The only reason this product is worth mentioning, and barely, is that it shows us yet another futurist who understands the world about as well as aliens did in old Star Trek episodes, a futurist who understands present day technology even less. I must drive to my divorce lawyer on the moon in the flying car I purchased in 1968!

And if you want to see Blio right this minute? Use Adobe Acrobat. Jesus.