AI Could Make Humans Immortal, Predicts Ray Kurzweil
In his new book, “The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI,” famed American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil presents the notion that the first human who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born, thanks to the integration of human biology with artificial intelligence.
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Ray Kurzweil, now 76, has a long history of innovation, including creating the first flatbed scanner, developing the first omni-font optical character recognition, inventing a text-to-speech synthesizer, and pioneering commercially viable speech recognition systems.
Kurzweil has earned 21 honorary doctorates, received technological achievement awards from three U.S. presidents, and has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was also honored with a Grammy Award in 2015 for his exceptional contributions to music technology, specifically for inventing the Kurzweil K250 synthesizer, a groundbreaking instrument capable of emulating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. As such, Kurzweil is also regarded as a pivotal figure in the evolution of modern electronic music.
Ray Kurzweil Source: The Guardian
Ray Kurzweil is best known for his futuristic predictions about the technologies of tomorrow, many of which have historically come to fruition.
Currently serving as Google's Director of Engineering and leading projects in machine learning and language processing, Kurzweil often links his latest forecasts to developments in AI.
Back in 1999, Kurzweil predicted that by 2029 computers would reach and eventually surpass human-level intelligence. He further speculated that by 2045, humans and computers would merge, profoundly altering the essence of Homo sapiens. He calls this process “the singularity.” In information technology, the term “singularity” typically describes a point at which scientific and technological progress accelerates explosively due to AI advancements, potentially leading to the creation of self-replicating robots and the integration of human and machine intelligence, dramatically expanding human capacities.
Kurzweil has authored five books on futurism, but his most notable work is “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” published in 2005. At that time, the concept of artificial intelligence was not widely understood, yet Kurzweil was already championing AI as a pivotal technological tool.
His latest book, “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI,” naturally extends his earlier ideas and is currently available on Amazon.
In a brief essay within this book, Kurzweil explores how our bodies accumulate “errors” over time that lead to aging. “The only solution is to cure aging itself. In short, we need the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues,” he notes.
Kurzweil suggests that these biological limitations could be overcome through the integration of biotechnologies with AI, alongside the development of nanorobots.
These molecular AI nanorobots, numbering in the hundreds of billions, could repair or replace damaged cells, potentially leading to a cessation of aging and a human body that is 99.99% non-biological.
Through this lens, Kurzweil envisions a future where today’s infants might celebrate their thousandth birthday in a body that is almost entirely robotic and nearly immortal.
If the nanotechnology of 2050 solves enough issues of aging for 100-year-olds to start living to 150, we’ll then have until 2100 to solve whatever new problems. With AI playing a key role in research by then, progress during that time will be exponential,
he states.
Naturally, the process of replacing cells will extend to the human brain, dramatically altering our cognitive functions. Ray Kurzweil forecasts that people will be able to think millions of times faster by directly accessing cloud-based information storage.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Ray explained that we are currently limited by the biological size of our brains and can go beyond these limits. The cloud is becoming smarter and grows truly boundlessly.
Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, the answer will just appear. People do say “I don’t want that”: they thought they didn’t want phones either!
Kurzweil predicts.
However, transforming the brain into something akin to a smartphone is not where he intends to stop. He believes that in the near future, humans will be able to reconstruct their bodies in ways that today seem purely fantastical, such as gaining the ability to breathe underwater or grow wings.
“The noted inventor and futurist’s explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come. Since it was published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Near”, Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public,” the publishers of the new “Singularity” state.
It’s no surprise that these provocative ideas have propelled Kurzweil's latest book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list within its first few weeks of release and to number one in the “Biotechnologies” category on Amazon.
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