Ray Kurzweil, America’s most visible futurist, has been in the news a lot lately. He’s the subject of a new documentary film, “Transcendent Man“, and he’s recently launched Singularity University, dedicated to combining and furthering the fields he believes will be key to our exponential trajectory toward becoming one with our computers, an event commonly referred to as the technological singularity.
Kurzweil is generally respected for his inventions (you’ve seen the synthesizers) and for his keen prognostication (fall of the Soviet Union, victory of Deep Blue), but his views on aging make many scientists uneasy. Specifically, he believes that immortality will be possible in our lifetime via the following roadmap:
1. Live to 2045 however you can. Kurzweil, who would be in his late 90s at that point, takes 150 supplements each day to “reprogram his biochemistry”, slowing the aging process as much as possible.
2. Within a few decades, nanotechnology will be advanced enough to halt or reverse aging and treat most of the afflictions that have death as a side effect.
3. Around 2045, computers will be completely integrated with and within us, making us immortal. Having access to their binary innards, they will be able to improve on their own designs, causing technological progress to explode.
What do you think: underestimated visionary or kook living out a very public midlife crisis?
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So if I live until 2045, I am all set for life!! http://bit.ly/11RIbN
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If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, definitely check out the Wikipedia articles on the Singularity and Transhumanism
A lot of smaller minded people like to call this religion for atheists, but anyone with half a brain can see the logical basis of these ideas. Since natural selection has stopped due to human interference, the only ethical and logical means of improving our species from this point is using out own technology to do so. The future is going to be a very interesting time.
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Not that have a leg to stand on arguing with this guy over his predictions, but I am pretty sure he’s made a nice lil business for himself selling these supplements.
I’ve also started thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong with immortality and thinking that maybe death is a reasonable alternative after all.
I’m pretty sure I can make it to 2045 anyway, so we’ll just see what happens. Supplements still probably aren’t a bad idea.
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“A lot of smaller minded people like to call this religion for atheists, but anyone with half a brain can see the logical basis of these ideas.”
No, anybody with half a brain can see that the logical basis for these ideas is *deeply flawed* and mostly just wishful thinking. The only reason some people don’t see this is likely because they *want* to believe in it, and aren’t really trying to question it. That’s why people call it a religion.
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By doing all that shit to his body, he is probably drastically decreasing the probability that he will survive to 2045. He’d be better off living at the edge of starvation. Maybe he does that too. I think the best prediction of Ray’s immortality comes from the current actuarial tables.
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he’s so full of shit. and btw, who wants to live forever anyway ? so fkn selfish. just do more in the time you’ve got. most people do fuck all in their lives. new life is the way! ideas are immortal; we individuals don’t matter as much as the network.
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OK, I’ll ask the obvious question. What happens when no one dies?
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I love Ray, really. I even own one of his fancy-ass synthesizers (a K2600XS). But, I say he’s full of shit on this one.
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“the logical basis for these ideas is deeply flawed”
Care to elaborate? The time-scale Kurzweil may have for them to come to fruition may be *generously* optimistic, and I take issue with a number of his other ideas, like that "mind uploading", but to say that the *logical basis* for these ideas is *flawed*? I think *that* is wishful thinking. There are a million ethical arguments you could use against transhumanism. There are a million practical arguments you could use. But the logic is very much sound.
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Kurzweil says we expand out into the rest of the universe.
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#1 be rich
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What’s wrong with mind uploading? If you can replace all of the components in your brain with digital counterparts utilizing a step by step approach, this is no different than the Ship of Theseus paradox. Once you are digital, it’s not much more of a step to get to brain downloading. At the very least a copy of your brain could live on the internet and gather information that could be merged into your physical brain.
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“Live to 2045 however you can.”
So we all just need to focus on that for now. NO ONE DIE BEFORE 2045 REDDITORS!
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Maybe he just doesn’t eat. You gotta think you might be full after swallowing that many supplements.
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It’s a very interesting question, and could go in many possible directions. *Assuming a similar population and wealth distribution and psychology to that of contemporary society, likely government-sanctioned reproduction licenses would be required. You would probably end up with a GATTAGA-like situation where only those with the best genetic outcomes would be given permission to breed. This, of course, does not rule out sex altogether, it’s merely a matter of controlling fertility. In less industrialized countries, they would probably not require these kinds of controls as they would also not have very wide access to the kinds of treatments and/or technologies required to attain immortality. *Assuming a completely transhuman society, one would expect the business of reproduction would become a centralized affair, so that the individuals would be free to work at whatever tasks they specialized in. The concept of gender and sexual preference would lose meaning, and it would be likely eliminated altogether. And that’s just covering the reproductive issues, not to mention the psychological problems. For instance, we don’t have the capacity for unlimited memory storage, so cybernetic enhancement would probably be required for memory extension. For immortality to really work out for humanity, you would probably have to completely redesign the human body.
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I’ve noticed a correlation between taking interest in life expectancy and being old. In my experience, the *much* older crowd is even likely to equate longevity with quality of life, too. The young never talk about life expectancy. So here’s the rule that I invented (no basis in fact or anything else, just amusing): You become officially old when you start thinking about how long you’ll live.
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Step 1: Don’t die.
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2 – Don’t die.
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Without the physical brain there is no consciousness. You can’t just replace it bit by bit and hope you trick your ’spirit’ into staying, the matter that makes up your brain *is* your consciousness, or what generates it, and so replacing it might leave you with something *resembling* you in every single way, but it will be someone/thing entirely separate. It’s the same problem with teleportation and cloning; you end up with exact duplicates, but the original individual is gone. Now, if your brain matter was stored offsite and you could connect to different bodies or networks, that is highly more realistic.
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On a giant human pyramid.
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While the link is broken, I think it’s still appropriate to say that Ray Kurzweil is a douchebag and I don’t really care what he says.
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I’ve also thought about immortality, and something about that concept seems wrong. When trying to think of waking up everyday forever, my brain just can’t handle it. Has anyone else tried to picture what it would be like to live forever? I mean, close your eyes and just imagine that concept.
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Please to explain how living (productively) forever is selfish.
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Step 2: Repeat step 1.
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Who needs to live forever? My great grand parents didn’t live forever, and they aren’t complaining.
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Kurzweil’s not the first to come up with this kind of idea (minus the supplements). Anyone read Negroponte’s "Being Digital"?
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1. Don’t die. 2. Cryonics pattern insurance 3. Invest heavily in nanotech and WBE (Whole Brain Emulation) research.
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“For immortality to really work out for humanity, you would probably have to completely redesign the human body.”
This may be true, but for immortality to be generally available and allow for normal reproduction, we are going to need to have similar leaps in space migration and hospitable planet settlements. There’s simply no room left here on planet Earth. If reproduction is severely limited to allow for this type of immortality, it would, I believe endanger the human race in the long run. Nothing is fool proof and if some pathogen arises that most/all are susceptible too, say bye-bye…
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Depends on which arguments we’re talking about. For instance, his arguments about technological advance are pure wishful thinking: He looks at the past, and then assumes things will continue. There is no actual argument there to refute in the first place. His arguments about AI look a little bit like they’re based on some kind of logic, but he plays fast and loose with definitions (that is to say, he defines nothing, such as what "intelligence" is supposed to even mean). Even if we accept his simplistic idea of what intelligence entails, the argument still doesn’t hold: He says that if we can just make an AI that is more intelligent than us, it can then make another AI even more intelligent, and we’ll have an exponential development of intelligence. This is rests on the hidden assumption that "making an AI of intelligence X" is some kind of linear process. It should be easy to see that making an intelligent AI can get a lot harder the further you go: Say that we create an AI that is twice as intelligent as us. This in no way means it can make an AI twice as intelligent as *itself*. Perhaps the problem suddenly gets harder, and it can only create an AI 2.5 times as intelligent as a human. This AI in turn can only manage 2.6 times. And after an infinite number of cycles we’re still not past a factor of 3. That is, just because a series is strictly increasing does not mean it is exponential. It can stop at any point. And once again, that is *if* we accept this horribly simplistic view of "intelligence" as some kind of one-dimensional variable.
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This argument is correct to a point – if you were to make an exact duplicate of your brain and simultaneously "switch off" your current brain while "switching on" your new one, your stream of consciousness probably wouldn’t transfer to the new brain. However, if you slowly *replaced* the current brain with a new one (say, cell-by-cell over the course of years) that was functionally equivalent, it would make sense that your stream of consciousness would be unaffected. Whether the new brain used neurons or circuit boards is really not that important, so long as they have the same output. This process happens regularly in your body as it is, with cell replacing cell, and yet your consciousness remains.
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Well, would you especially like to die today? I know I wouldn’t, and I doubt (barring anything horrific happening in my life) that I ever will – the human desire to keep on living and enjoying life is just too powerful. While the abstract concept of living forever may seem overwhelming, I doubt there would ever come a day when you would say "Jee, I’ve had enough of life. I am going to kill myself from boredom.". And besides, if you ever did come to such a point, you could just kill yourself (assuming you don’t have any ethical problems with this).
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grelthog is essentially making the same point that I am. The Ship of Theseus paradox speaks of a piece by piece replacement of the components in a ship. At the end, none of the original Ship exists any longer, but it is still the same ship – or is it? I think in the case of consciousness, it the continuous stream that matters. You have many subconscious processes going on in your brain at all times, some that change or are replaced completely. If you changed the processes slowly enough, it would be no different than the changes you go through as you advance through your life. Essentially what I’m saying is that if you are correct, I’m not the same consciousness I was years ago, and as far as I’m concerned, when I go into a computer it won’t be any different than that.
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What’s the evidence that natural selection has stopped for humanity?
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I’m ok with licencing people to have kids, (in an immortality situation only, not currently) as long as it’s done on a meritocratic basis, rather than a political or economic basis. In other words, those who are the smartest, strongest, most creative, etc can have children, not those with the most connections or money. Of course, that’s an even more far-fetched scenario than immortality.
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I just re-read my copy of the The Age of the Spirutal Machine, and his predications for 2009 was a bit optimistic, I bet the same goes for his 2045 predictions. I wont go into all the things he predicted for 2009, since someone else have: http://thefix-online.com/features/looking-back/
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom contains a fun hypothesis of immortality. Rather than ‘die’, many people just hybernate for years or centuries (or until the heat death of the universe) on end. A copy of them wakes up, determines if life is interesting enough to live, if not, they basically kill themselves and let their original copy continue to sleep.
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Fusion better be working before immortality or our food and energy supply is fucked.
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To be immortal is to spend eternity in this form. Is that really what you want?
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Basically, natural selection means that whoever is most suited for the environment will have more offspring, passing their genes on. Since the large majority of people (in industrial countries), live long enough to have as many kids as they want, genetics doesn’t come into play as much, except in maybe fertility (even then, there are drugs that get around it) Cultural factors are much larger than physical factors in determining how many kids someone has. So, we’re experiencing more of a "cultural selection" than a natural one. Less education, more poverty= more kids. This isn’t natural selection, however, since education and wealth isn’t something you physically pass on to your offspring.
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because, assuming limited resources, you’re living at the expense of someone else (someone younger who would replace you when you died).
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Temporarily.
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There’s a limit to the number of people who can be alive at once? I wasn’t aware.
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I don’t think anyone really wants to live forever, but I think we’d all like the option to live as long as we want while feeling at our peak.
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I’m pretty sure that to sustain immortality we’ll have to spend eternity in some *other* form. And we’d conceivably have a great deal of control over what that form is.
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Population control. Its on the way, immortality or not.
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Velociraptors on hoverboards make that nigh impossible.
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we need to move to another planet so we can have rampant sex and live like crazy disgusting animals.
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So at some point you’ll want to kill yourself. No problem. That’s your choice. That’s what I want, a choice on whether or not to die. I don’t want to be dead because it’s a biological function.
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Whoever wrote that article has no idea about current affairs. "Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices. Many of the flying weapons are the size of birds, or smaller." Not only are there unmanned flying drones, there are also ground-based robots used in military now. These UAVs give the military unprecedented advantages in the field. "There would be a significant reduction in the size and weight of personal computers below that of the notebooks of 1999—a banality, except that “significant” in this case means that PCs could now be embedded in clothes and jewelry." How big is your Iphone? It is faster than most computers in 1999 (Pentium) "Rotating memories (like hard drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDs) would be on their way out, in favor of “purely electronic” memory." 10gb flash drive is so cheap, nobody uses CDs or DVDs to carry information anymore. "“Smart paper”-quality will be standard in computer visual displays." Amazon Kindle uses something like that. It can also do decent text-to-speech.
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Why would I want to have children if I can live as long as I want? Hell, I don’t even want kids now.
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