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Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago>, so he's adopted a strict diet with the hope of making it to 2045 and living forever. He'll almost be 100 then. The chances of a man reaching that age are pretty slim. Not sure why people pay attention to this guy considering his expertise is in tech, not medicine. His analogies are often mockingly simplistic (no Ray, cell phone adoption rates have nothing to do with medical research and longevity) and seems to be the standard bearer of the kooky futurist stereotype. I feel my life got a lot easier when I dismissed guys like this and accepted a more dignified idea of dying.
- aurelianito 9y agoWho wants to live forever? https://youtu.be/_Jtpf8N5IDE https://youtu.be/_Jtpf8N5IDE Ray
- ronilan 9y agoWell, not everybody is a genius years ahead of their time. Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
- norswap 9y agoWhile I'm totally on board with the idea of making humans live longer or even forever, wishing hard won't make it so.
- eplanit 9y agoI'm curious, what's the plan for food supply, housing, waste/pollution, etc. in a world that accumulates non-dying human beings?
- norswap 9y agoFuture work :) But probably what you already expect: very strict birth control. People would still die from accidents, etc. For sure, a thorny issue, although not one can make us dismiss the idea of extending human lifes out of hand.
- klibertp 9y agoSoylent! And, (a bit) more seriously, I don't think we'll get to non-dying before getting massively more energy-efficient and developing much more efficient ways of manipulating matter.
- ben_w 9y agoGiven the current accidental death rate would make eternal youth life expectancy around 1,000 years, and given progress with plant engineering, I’d say the only one of those that is a real problem is waste and pollution — and even then only because it’s already a problem even though we could solve it with existing tech.
- weeksie 9y agoReligion for techies. Apocolyptic millenarian beliefs (Singularity)? Check. Transcendence and life after death? Check. Belief in purity and rituals (Vitamins and workout routines)? Check. Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . . It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
- tim333 9y agoYeah but that's like saying antibiotics are casting out ill health demons for techies. Some similarities but important differences also.
- _jal 9y agoYep. Kurzweil has been banging this drum for a long time. I read Spiritual Machines a long time ago and found it to be a simple rehash of 90s-Extropian tropes - utility fog, uploads, all the goodies needed to glue science-fiction nerdbait to a thin rehash of Christian rebirth millenarianism. The book went away in one of my periodic purges, or I'd check to see if he changed his dates.
- tim333 9y agoYou can check most of the predictions / dates on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines_.281999.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe... 2009 "Artificial voices sound fully human" seems a bit optimistic. as does 2019 "Household robots are ubiquitous and reliable."
- r3bl 9y agoWell, sure, but... 2009 "Though desktop PCs are still common for data storage, individuals primarily use portable devices for their computer-related tasks." sounds pretty realistic now. So does 2019 "People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet." with the current progress of AR and VR (although it might be a few years late). My point is, you've nitpicked this in a series of predictions which may or may not be true. Kurzweil's betting a lot on 2045 and AGI, and hoping that 2029 will help him reach that age. The rest is a mix of possibly true predictions that seem absurd, like the two I've pointed out.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- just_steve_h 9y agoRay has been thinking about this stuff for thirty years. He has a knack for getting positive press, which goes back to his time in high school. His ideas reveal the narrowness of his experience in the world: it appears that he has only the vaguest notions of what the lives of most humans currently on the planet are actually like. If he understood humanity beyond the confines of Silicon Valley / Route 128 / Davos, he might spend more of his time applying his alleged genius to actual problems which might admit actual solutions. His fantasy about living forever bespeaks a deep-seated emotional and psychological immaturity. His idea that we could have life without death is not unlike imagining a world of sunlight but no shadows.
- tim333 9y agoRe actual problems he has done a lot on reading machines for the blind.
- msamwald 9y agoI actually think that not wanting to become sick and die are quite universal human desires. It really is the latent driver behind lots of human activity, and certainly behind most religious belief systems.
- OneWordSoln 9y agoIsn't it just simpler to say he's a moron? Because that's what I'd say.
- sctb 9y agoCould you please stop violating the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- OneWordSoln 9y agoPlease point me to which guideline I broke. I am referring to the subject of the article, not another commenter here. In fact, I was merely summarizing what I responded to and interjecting my opinion of a person who thought the frickin Segway would revolutionize the world. I mean, that sounds like a moron to me. Sure, he's a good engineer, but the fricking Segway isn't going to revolutionize anything and anyone who thinks so is out of touch with reality, just as the person I replied to said.
- Asdfbla 9y agoI imagine if it ever comes to that, society is likely to stagnate intellectually. People grow more conservative and reactionary as they grow older (I don't just mean that in the political sense), what would happen if all there is are infinitely old people? I think young generations are necessary, but if everyone lives forever, there's hardly space in the world for them. Maybe it's the fate of humanity and a singularity will just mean that we have reached our limits.
- r3bl 9y agoImagine not having to dedicate your entire career to this one path you've picked, but having enough time to explore whatever you want and as much as you want. Imagine being able to postpone your career because you and your husband/wife decided to bring someone new to this world. You could still achieve anything you wanted, and not be tied by time in this case. In this scenario, you get to choose when you die. Would you live a hundred years? Probably. Two hundreds? Most likely. 500? Highly unlikely. I don't think that the world population might be as big of a problem as we currently think it is going to be. A woman no longer needs to give birth to eight babies to have three of them reach their adultery (as was the case 200 years ago). And, right now, a Western couple is usually able to support one or two children and still pursue their individual career paths. 200 years from now, I cannot realistically say that I don't expect as big of an improvement in human evolution as it happened between 200 years ago and now.
- qohen 9y agos/adultery/adulthood
- ben_w 9y agoWhat if the intellectual conservatism is a symptom of old age, and the “living forever”* is done with fountain-of-youth-style treatments? * except for disease, accidents, war, homicide, suicide, and the heat death of the universe
- owebmaster 9y ago> People grow more conservative and reactionary as they grow older What if they do because they are going to die? Without that limitation, society would be a lot less conservative.
- modi15 9y agoWhen AI takes over, mankind will loose meaning. When mankind looses meaning, extending life will appear pointless.
- shams93 9y agoActually AI will impact China much harder than the US. Here we have driven down employment to the point where a significant portion if the population only get a meager foodstamps to survive. LA has gone from a working class city to a city where a large amount of the working population are homeless living in their vehicle. A tiny elite living forever has really profound economic implications in a system of winner take all. How long can inequality be pushed exponentially before the system breaks down for everyone.
- tim333 9y agoWhile I agree with Kurzweil's stuff on computing per dollar increasing exponentially, in that it has for a long time now, I'm skeptical of the lifespan thing. There doesn't seem particularly good experimental evidence - our life span is longer because of less childhood death but it seems old people have always maxed out in the 70-100yrs old range.
- OneWordSoln 9y agoDidn't an article just come up (Nature, I believe) that just proved that the way our cellular division works, mortality is an important feature of how we work? Of course it is.
- vorotato 9y agoI mean if people start living forever we would have to start killing them. So it's kinda moot anyway.
- T-A 9y agohttp://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114 "Selection between somatic cells (i.e., intercellular competition) can delay aging by purging nonfunctioning cells. However, the fitness of a multicellular organism depends not just on how functional its individual cells are but also on how well cells work together. While intercellular competition weeds out nonfunctional cells, it may also select for cells that do not cooperate. Thus, intercellular competition creates an inescapable double bind that makes aging inevitable in multicellular organisms." ... and so you end up getting cancer, sooner or later. Which of course doesn't exclude external interventions, from chemotherapy to resetting your DNA to a previously backed up state.
- joelbondurant 9y agoRay Kurzweil is Deepak Chopra.
- iamonkara 9y agoThat's a pursuit in the wrong direction..... Hidden underneath the quest for immortality is the eternal quest of freedom from all known and unknown bounds. Unfortunately enough, this quest, when expressed from the confines of the apparatus called "mind" shows up as ego which is limiting, self serving and divisive. To experience the real singularity and immortality one needs an instrument which at its very core is limitless and that my friend is "consciousness". The reason current scientists have not been able to understand the limitless and eternal nature of consciousness is their fundamental assumption which is "matter gives rise to consciousness". Unless this assumption is turned around to "consciousness gives rise to matter" until then this quest for immortality will remain just that, a quest and never a realized goal. At an individual level, we don't have to wait for the Ray's or Singularity of the world, this quest can be completed by each and everyone of us, by focusing our attention within. Attention is the expression of our consciousness in our physical being, and by focusing it within we can break free from the limitations of our 5 senses and the endless maze of thoughts. It is at point of liberation we will realize that we are all immortal beings who where focused in the limited dimensions created by the illusory mind and are all interconnected by the inherent Singularity of cosmic/unity consciousness. Meditation or focusing within is the first step towards a successful quest of Singularity and Immortality.
- Auricoma 9y agoGTFO with this pseudo-spiritual crap.
- iamonkara 9y agoIt is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. -- C. W. LEADBEATER, Man Visible and Invisible
- sctb 9y agoIt seems as though you've come here just to violate the guidelines, so we've banned the account. We're glad to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start posting civilly and substantively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- netsharc 9y agoBy "we", what percentage of the 1% top richest people are we talking about? Indians are dying because of heatwaves, Bangladeshis dying because of floods, Californians because of forest fires... Maybe if the elite build their Elysium-like fortress they'll make it, but my feeling is the vast majority of humans will be killed by climate change. And not within he next 50-100 years, more like 10-20.
- tim333 9y agoRay would disagree: "Grist: Futurist Ray Kurzweil says "we have plenty of time" to replace fossil fuels with renewables" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/21/ray-kurzweill-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/21/ray-kurz... I actually kind of agree with him on that - go solar cells and robots.
- imaginenore 9y agoKurzgesagt just did a video on potential life extension developments https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU
- reasonattlm 9y agoKurzweil's schedule is unrealistic, but his basic outline of how the job gets done is an accurate portrayal of one path ahead to physical immortality. I wrote this a few years back: ------ There exist a growing number of people propagating various forms of the viewpoint that we middle-aged folk in developed countries may (or might, or certainly will) live to see the development and widespread availability of radical life extension therapies. Which is to say medical technologies capable of greatly extending healthy human life span, probably introduced in stages, each stage effective enough to grant additional healthy years in which to await the next breakthrough. You might think of Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, both of whom have written good books to encapsulate their messages, and so forth. Some people take the view of radical life extension within our lifetimes at face value, whilst others dismiss it out of hand. Both of these are rational approaches to selective ignorance in the face of all science-based predictions. It usually doesn't much matter what your opinion is on one article of science or another, and taking the time to validate science-based statements usually adds no economic value to your immediate future. It required several years of following research and investigating the background for me to feel comfortable reaching my own conclusions on the matter of engineered longevity, for example. Clearly some science-based predictions are enormously valuable and transformative, but you would lose a lifetime wading through the swamp of uselessness and irrelevance to find the few gemstones hidden therein. As a further incentive to avoid swamp-wading, it is generally well known that futurist predictions of any sort have a horrible track record. Ignoring all futurism isn't a bad attention management strategy for someone who is largely removed from any activity (such as issuing insurance) that depends on being right in predicting trends and events. You might be familiar with the Maes-Garreau Law, which notes one of the incentives operating on futurists: 'The Maes-Garreau Law is the statement that "most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point", defined as "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it".' If you want to be a popular futurist, telling people what they want to hear is a good start. "You're not going to be alive to see this, but..." isn't a compelling opening line in any pitch. You'll also be more convincing if your yourself have good reason to believe in your message. Needless to say, these two items have no necessary relationship to a good prediction, accuracy in materials used to support the prediction, or whether what is predicted actually comes to pass. These incentives do not make cranks of all futurists - but they are something one has to be aware of. Equally, we have to be aware of our own desire to hear what we want to hear. That is especially true in the case of predictions for future biotechnology and enhanced human longevity; we'd all like to find out that the mighty white-coated scientists will in fact rescue us from aging to death. But the laws of physics, the progression of human societies, and advance of technological prowess don't care about what we want to hear, nor what the futurists say. I put value on what Kurzweil and de Grey have to say about the potential future of increased human longevity - the future we'll have to work to bring into being - because I have performed the due diligence, the background reading, the digging into the science. I'll criticize the pieces of the message I don't like so much (the timescale and supplements in the case of Kurzweil, WILT in the case of de Grey), but generally I'm on board with their vision of the future because the science and other evidence looks solid. But few people in the world feel strongly enough about this topic to do what I have done. I certainly don't feel strongly enough about many other allegedly important topics in life to have done a tenth as much work to validate what I choose to believe in those cases. How should one best organize selective ignorance in fields one does care about, or that are generally acknowledged to be important? What if you feel - correctly, in my humble opinion - that engineered longevity is very important, but you cannot devote the time to validate the visions of Kurzweil, de Grey, or other advocates of longevity science? The short answer is trust networks: find and listen to people like me who have taken the time to dig into the background and form our own opinions. Figuring out whether ten or twenty people who discuss de Grey's view of engineered human longevity are collectively on the level is not too challenging, and doesn't require a great deal of time. We humans are good at forming accurate opinions as to whether specific individuals are idiots or trustworthy, full of it or talking sense. Fundamentally, this establishment of a trust network is one of the primary purposes of advocacy in any field of endeavor. The greater the number and diversity of advocates to have taken the time to go digging and come back to say "this is the real deal," the more likely it is that that they are right. It's easy, and probably good sense, to write off any one person's views. If twenty very different people are saying much the same thing, having independently come to the same viewpoint - well, that is worth spending more time on. One of the things I think we need to see happen before the next decade is out is the establishment of more high-profile longevity advocates who discuss advancing science in the Kurzweil or de Grey vein: nanotechnology, repairing the molecular damage of aging, and so on. Two, or three, or five such people is too few.
- sulam 9y agoIn other news, Ray Kurzweil will turn 81 in 2029, should he live so long.
- briga 9y agoWhat is forever? Surely there must be some limit to life, whether that be the sun exploding or the eventual heat death of the universe. Almost every species on Earth has gone extinct, and almost every great civilization has faded. Every solar system is doomed to collapse eventually. Why should humans be able to defy nature when there is so much evidence that death is inevitable? What if we start living 10000 years instead of 100. Is that what he means by forever? Will we think that's enough years? Is a planet full of 10000-year-old people even something that would be desirable? Steve Jobs said it best: "death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
- Balgair 9y ago10E65 if protons do decay. 10E(10E76) if protons do not decay and virtual black-holes do not exist. At about 10E(10E(10E56)) the universe should spontaneously create a new universe, so that that is the most upper limit of time in our universe. Fairly small actually, compared to things like Graham's number and Tree(3). Turns out, infinity is really big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeJ64KD5cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeJ64KD5cg
- liberte82 9y agoI'll pass.
- cko 9y agoI’m highly skeptical. It’s 2017, and we still debate if carbs are bad for us, we can’t effectively suppress a cough without highly addictive opiates, we don't have the cure for the common cold, and any drug treatment for any disease state involves a ligand binding to a specific site triggering a counterbalancing cascade of effects. Costly biotech drugs produced by recombinant DNA to treat autoimmune diseases? Increased risk of infection. Inhibit cholesterol synthesis with statins? Increased risk of diabetes, and recently, reports of cognitive decline. The then-heralded proton pump inhibitors used to treat acid reflux? Increased risk of osteoporosis, C diff infection, etc. There’s a lot of hype surrounding medicinal advances but every new treatment that hits the market makes me think “more of the same.” I’m just a pharmacist, not a microbiologist, but I doubt lengthening some telomeres and repairing mitochondria are going to be side-effect free. I don’t know much about gene therapy. My impression is that our current understanding of human biology is still much in its infancy. Edit: Spelling
- naasking 9y ago> I’m highly skeptical. It’s 2017, and we still debate if carbs are bad for us, we can’t effectively suppress a cough without highly addictive opiates, we domt have the cure for the common cold, and any drug treatment for any disease state involves a ligand binding to a specific site triggering a counterbalancing cascade of effects. What seems intuitively simple isn't necessarily simple. As unintuitive as it seems, it could very well be that curing the common cold will be harder than curing aging. That said, Kurzweil isn't saying that we will have invented the immortality treatment by 2029, merely that we will have some life extension treatments available. These treatments will simply get you to the next treatment, and that to the next one, and so on ad infinitum. It's not so implausible when framed like that. We've already had quite a few promising results in aging research in the past 10 years, and the interest in this field is growing, and so the pace of advancement will also increase.
- melling 9y agoHe’s predicting that by 2029, we’ll start to add years to our lives. We will be at the beginning of extending life. I think the idea is that if we can delay death long enough, the “exponential“ technology curve will eventually allow us to make ourselves “younger”. In the short-term, people will reach 75, for example, and we can address some of the rapid that occurs in your 80’s. You’ll be a healthier 85 year old, ready to get your next tuneup a decade later with more advanced technology.
- hungerstrike 9y agoThe ability to live forever won't be available to the common man for a long, long time if ever. You aren't even allowed to put what you want into your own body. Do you think the powers that be will allow you to live forever? They thrive on fear, war, death and control. A more likely future is that the ongoing World War 3 heats up really fast, kills a ton of people and China's technological despotism forms the basis for a new world government that will rule in perpetuity. Why do I think that? It's pretty obvious to me that China, a country that was conquered by the British only a century ago, is being setup for this. You know Mao Zedong came out of the Yale school of Divinity right? Every ambassador to China since then has come from Skull and Bones and major players leak nuclear secrets and other high technology to them on purpose (see Israel, Bill Clinton and many, many others). "Made in China" is an Illuminati curse for the entire world - everybody bought into this and you're gonna pay before long. I'm sure that most of you think I'm crazy. That's fine with me. I am used to being part of a small minority. The clueless far, far outnumber the clueful.
- jknoepfler 9y agoAs someone with a reasonable foundation in both the state of AI and the state of neuroscience research, I honestly have no idea why people give Kurzweil any attention. Just about nothing I have ever read from him is even remotely plausible, yet I've met intelligent people (usually mathematically oriented people) who think the detail-sparse garbage is gospel. It's a little infuriating, honestly. The details, which are always manifestly absent from his work, are literally the only things that do matter when evaluating their credibility.
- Balgair 9y agoYeah, I've noticed that too. It always seems to be the math and physics-majors that just swish off biology as 'trivial'. In physics, you can assume a cow is a 1 meter radius sphere of density 1. You can be fine with that approximation. In biology, you are very very interested in the exact number of cells in the lining of that cow's third stomach 5 minutes after it ate wheat. Approximations don't really work in such complex systems as a mammal.
- tim333 9y agoI think with some important ideas like AI improving, he's the most prominent publicist and so gets quoted.
- almonj 9y agoThe futurism this guy pushes seems like trolling. He is a really smart engineer and has to know what he says is hugely exaggerated. He is just making stuff up.
- rsync 9y agoThere is a word that we use to describe constituent parts of a body that ignore termination signals and pursue their own, selfish strategies. That word is cancer. The deep question we have, as humans, is which body it is we are interested in maintaining and prolonging. I think it's possible that you could maintain and prolong the individual human - at the expense of the larger body of humankind. You have to choose - you can't optimize for both. For what it's worth, I think the book _Anathem_ by N. Stephenson offers a decent compromise - there are, in fact, long lived "elders" but they are kept away from society and tasked with deep, long tasks ... and they are in suspension for years at a time. The childish and ill-informed notion that one could "just be ones self, but for thousands of years" ignores the twin catastrophes of descent into a sclerotic, hyper-hyper-conservative society or the massacre on sight of any "vampires" that anyone under the age of 40 comes across.