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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But we don’t yet know where it stops, if it even stops at all. Sure, there’s a good possibility that we’ll run into a roadblock of some sort, but there’s no reason to assume it will be anytime soon. And more than likely there will be workarounds. Just like we’re approaching the operational limits of silicon for processors, but carbon and other materials will allow us to continue to increase computing speeds.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Here are the possibilities: Immortality becomes possible: 1. you are alive and become one of the first immortals. hooray for the suppliments and vitamins. 2. you died. oops. at least you won’t know what you’re missing. Immortality is impossible: 1. you live for a little bit longer because you took some vitamins and didn’t get cancer or super-AIDS. 2. you died a little earlier, but you can’t even laugh and say "I told you so Kurzweil"
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
“Since the large majority of people (in industrial countries), live long enough to have as many kids as they want…”
Actually that is natural selection. Humans are smart enough to plan for a life of plenty, assuming favorable socioeconomic circumstances, and hence they have lots of offspring. So many of us survive not because we’re going around natural selection but because we live in a world favorable to us right now. In 25,000 years, when a new Ice Age starts, it will be a different story… > genetics doesn’t come into play as much Actually yes they do. If you can’t properly reproduce or are born with genetic defects that will kill you before you reach sexual maturity, your genes won’t transfer over. And don’t forget sexual selection and predation. Not everyone ends up married with kids and there are millions of people who die from violence and crime before they can reproduce.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Just because someone is a douchebag (and Kurzweil is) it doesn’t mean he or she is not worth listening to. Thomas Edison was a douchebag, Henry Ford was a douchebage, Steve Jobs is a douchebag. Obviously, none of them have ever contributed anything of value to the world.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Fair enough. You go ahead and be selfless and die. I’ll be selfish and alive.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
*WHICH IS FUCKING AWESOME!*
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Use gotos!
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Do you even know what he is taking? There is a lot of research behind it.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I don’t care what other people think, I want to live forever.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Love. Now insufficient humans specimens still breed and produce their ugly, asthmatic, diabetic, cancerous, obese offspring.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Consciousness is an illusion. It’s one that I enjoy very much and I’m sure I’ll continue to enjoy it as soon as I’m a digital copy of myself.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Go read 2 B R 0 2 B.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Ah, but see, the environment is not fixed, not on an evolutionary time scale. Genetics may not come into play as much, not on the time scale of our perceptions. But we are constantly facing new contagious diseases and its not always possible to develop cures fast enough to prevent large portions of the local population from dying off. Are those that survive not the lucky winners of the game of natural selection? Furthermore, we have very little cultural factors that can respond to cataclysmic natural disasters. When will the next one occur? Who knows but it will occur. Can we conclude that natural selection is not working at the moment? I’ve never been entirely convinced.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I agree, it’s working, just on *mute*, I’d say. My argument is that we’ve pretty much min-maxed our current environment and that it’d take a large-scale disaster or a change of environment for natural selection to cause significant changes in the physiology of people.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Harry’s 3 easy steps to real immortality * make a horcrux * gather the deathly hallows * make a philosopher’s stone
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I read your comment, then looked up that book in Wikipedia. Found out it was creative commons, so I picked up my iPod Touch and downloaded it instantly, and for free, with the Stanza app. I’ve been reading it for 10 minutes and I had one of those, "Holy shit, we live *in* *the* *future*" moments.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
How is this guy gonna live to 2045 when the world ends in 2012?
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Douglas Hofstadter: " If you read Ray Kurzweil’s books and Hans Moravec’s, what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid."
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Perhaps, but we have also gotten to the point where *we* change our *environment* and not the other way around. This is also a big reason why we have "stopped evolving."
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
<?php
live:
$me->live(); // don’t die
goto live; ?>
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
He has a large supply of duct tape and Twinkies, the only two essentials to survival and happiness.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
You OK with eugenics? Because that is the next progression after the sperm meets egg licenses.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Welcome to life.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Welfare.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
for everyone on here that seems to doubt that we will at some point live forever some things to consider: we regularly construct artificial organs in the lab at this point. They are simple organs, yes.. But it is still incredible and the science has come such a long way in the past 50 years. Immortality seems far fetched now, but living 2000 years doesn’t seem that impossible, and who knows what will happen in that length of time.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Well, like I said, in an immortality situation only. If it’s a choice of limiting who can have kids or everyone slowly starves to death, I’ll choose limiting kids. Hopefully, it’ll be more like the Ender books, where we start colonizing other planets so that those who want to have kids can chose to do that and Earth doesn’t get all over populated.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
There’s no reason to assume *anything*, but that isn’t stopping Kurzweil. And more specifically, there is *absolutely* no reason to assume an exponential growth, which is exactly what he does.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
$php $is $a $sin
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
He addresses the issue of the limits of computation in *The Singularity is Near* (which I have not yet finished reading, so take my comment with a grain of salt). We are currently reaching the limits of silicon computers. Similarly we reached the limits of vacuum tube computing in the 60s. Quantum computing is still in its infancy but it’s not unreasonable to assume that we will have quantum computers in the future, which will most likely follow Moore’s law (as all computing devices before it have) and eventually it will reach the limit of quantum computing (which may be the ultimate hard limit). Same with AI. It will eventually reach an asymptote but even an AI three times more intelligent would be a remarkable achievement (and probably enough, along with quantum computing, to achieve immortality).
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
We go to Mars.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Reminds me of *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
It’s a cool story, yes? I like the post-scarcity economy driven by Whuffie.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
All organisms change their environment.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
"…where only those with the best genetic outcomes would be given permission to breed." GATTACA, forgot one important thing- somatic cell therapy. People are working on this now. Adults will most likely be able to reprogram themselves. If you want your genes improved just take the pill/shot/virus etc.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Consciousness is nothing but an illusion, if we are able to map our brains down to the smallest of neurons then consciousness will arise and this "new you" will be identical to the "old you" in every sense.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
You mean how like, the woolly mammoth created air conditioning instead of evolving to remove its coat? Or how whales made farms instead of having to navigate the globe for food? Totally.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Remember, transhumanism is nothing more than the process of attaining post-humanity. Your question can be better phrased as, "What happens when we alter ourselves past humanity and that species becomes immortal?", because really, humanity will likely continue on in a similar way as it has been. Posthumanity, on the other hand, will do something new. Personally, my opinion is, if we go the "immortal digital consciousnesses" route, all individuals will gradually merge into a superconsciousness, with reproduction being obviously unneeded.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Most Redditors are either pirates or ninjas, and neither group has a very long life expectancy. No singularity for us! AAAAArrrrr.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
It’s not so much stopped, it’s just that artificial means of modifying ourselves has stepped up to a rate well beyond what evolution can match.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
in this argument, having children is selfish: you’re choosing to have children rather than allow someone to live. You’re assuming reproduction and finite resources.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Most likely only a small portion of humanity (and their descendants) will be able to afford immortality. The rest of us will just have to die off to make room, I suppose.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
It’s pretty crazy to think whether some of us will form collective consciousnesses, or some will opt to remain individuals. Some might want a physical body, others remain in digital form with an avatar. Or perhaps both. It seems the seeds of division will be tempting given that we can freely chose how to recreate our identities and form new "groups", and our concepts of governance will either need a revolution or will simply dissolve. It simply blows my mind what the possibilities could be.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
War.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
No, I don’t know what he is taking. I read his book "The Singularity is Near." I use that as a basis to declare him irrational, but I’m open to data. Show me that Ray survives longer than I do and, well, 10,000 other samples, and I buy the grape koolaid.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
No, but thanks for the reference.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
MrX Says Immortality in Three Easy Steps | ::the open end:: http://tinyurl.com/kqcd4r
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I think its funny that where I live at least (Canada) those with a certain history can’t buy or own guns, might not be eligible for a drivers license etc. but can still bring a child into this world. No, I personally don’t think everyone should be able to have a child.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Agreed, but I dibbs staying on earth unless they find some other amazing planet to go to.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
That’s a stolen concept. Illusions depend upon consciousness to exist, therefore consciousness can’t be that which requires consciousness to already exist.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Dyson Spheres are more promising in the short term.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit