A man considered to be an expert on the future says that humans may achieve immortality in the next eight years. Ray Kurzweil knows his stuff. All the way back in 1990, he insisted that a computer would be smart enough to beat the world’s best chess player by the year 2000. Gary Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue in 1997. And that’s just one of his predictions that came true! So, what’s all this about immortality?
- Kurzweil thinks immortality is ours (that is, humans’) by 2030. Not only will artificial intelligence be able to pass a Turing test to prove that a machine can be as intelligent as a human, but that we’ll be able to meld ourselves with AI to live forevermore. “2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence,” he told Futurism (via To The Verge). “I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billionfold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”
- So wait, how does that help us live forever? In a separate interview on scientist Lex Fridman’s podcast, Ray Kurzweil said he thinks we can “advance human life expectancy” by “more than a year every year and I think we can get there [to immortality] by the end of this decade.”
- How would immortality even work? According to Kurzweil, it would come down to nanobots being released into our blood vessels and regularly uploading our thoughts and memories to a cloud storage system. For many people, that sounds cool. For others, it’s terrifying.
- Do we really want to live forever? The idea of being able to see what the world is like in 100 or 200 years may seem interesting, but given how things are going on Earth at the moment, there may not be much left to see by then anyway. Human beings have always been born and then died. That’s what makes life worth living – it’s finite. To want more than that seems a bit greedy.
