Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has created special timelines that predict when humanity will reach immortality and artificial intelligence (AI) will attain the singularity. If his predictions come true, it may be enough to skip the next seven years for your chance to live forever.
Kurzweil was reasonably good at making predictions about technology, having correctly predicted in 1990 that a computer would beat human world chess champions by 2000, predicting that it would rise before the rise of portable computers and smartphones, the transition to more wireless technology, and the enormous rise of the internet. has a past.
In 2010, he also reviewed forecasts he had made 20 years ago to see how they were progressing. In that review, he said of the 147 predictions he made for the years from 1990 to 2010, 115 were “completely correct”, the other 12 were fundamentally correct, and only 3 were completely incorrect. Of course, some of his predictions were not quite accurate, as self-driving cars would be in use by 2009.
So, while claims of immortality are bold (and seem highly likely to be false), they shouldn’t be completely ignored. Kurzweil has been making bold predictions like this for a while now, and his predictions come true pretty close to the dates he originally set.
Kurzweil told Futurism in 2017 that “2029 is the consistent date I predict because an artificial intelligence will pass a valid Turing test and thus reach human intelligence levels,” and continued: “For the ‘Singularity’, where we will multiply our active intelligence billions by combining the intelligence we have created. I am setting the date 2045.”
Everyone can be immortal in 2030
In terms of immortality, Kurzweil believes that by 2030 we can extend “human life expectancy” by “more than one year per year” that has passed. Part of this (progression towards the singularity after 15 years) will happen as nanobots flow through our bloodstream, do repairs, and transfer our brains to the cloud. When that happens, we’ll be able to send videos (or email) directly from our brain, as well as back up our memories.
In Kurzweil’s thinking, the singularity is not something to be afraid of, it is something that will heal people and eventually make us “divine.” In his 2015 statement, “We’re going to be funnier. We will be more sexy. We’ll get better at expressing loving feelings,” he said, adding: “If I want to access 10,000 computers for two seconds, I can do it wirelessly, and [my computational power] will multiply itself ten thousandfold in the cloud. We’re going to do that with our neocortex.”
Nanobots have been used to deliver drug payloads to brain tumors, but it’s hard to see how we’ll get to this point in seven years if significant advances aren’t made in the next few years. Brain-computer interfaces have advanced significantly, with paralyzed patients being able to spell sentences using their minds and monkeys (finally) being able to play Pong.
But, as Kurzweil describes, we seem a long way from the future, where human-AI interactions are largely standardized. Only time will tell if he is right.
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