6 ms·

Ray Kurzweil - Immortality Only 20 Years Away

20 points by keltecp11 17y ago

JCThoughtscream 17y ago
Would be a pity if Kurzweil's predictions follows the path of fusion energy - always, eternally, twenty years away. At any rate, I question the practicality of /physical/ immortality. If we're swapping out blood and organs with effectively superior equivalents, why shouldn't we reexamine the necessity of a fully human-equivalent body? If the entire purpose is to establish life support for the brain and preserve and augment the human sensorium, then why keep blood? Or the liver? Or the stomach?
- aarongough 17y ago
  I agree... I think it's quite likely that once we have the tech to replace all the components of the human body the possibility will also exist to do away with it entirely. I would definitely opt-in for a robotic body! I think I would prefer if it still looked human, but we can debate that in 30 years or so!
  - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
    People'll pay for a humaniform body for at least the first few decades. Then the Grinders get involved, and the cultural body image paradigm starts to shift ever so slightly...
    - oconnor0 17y ago
      Grinders?
      - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
        Grinders, modders, etc - "Grinders" is Warren Ellis's term for it, and I've been rereading his stuff recently, so... Basically, anybody who starts tinkering with the physical form itself - whether by small modifications, such as improved eyesight, or large modifications, like swapping your legs out for a tank chassis.
- Anon84 17y ago
  Why not just build a clone and "flash in" the contents of your brain?
  - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
    Because a clone will take about two decades to mature? And if it's a full clone, will in all likelihood have its own ideas about who occupies its head? And will probably physically develop different from you, as development is partially environmental? All sorts of problems with the cloning path to immortality.
    - Anon84 17y ago
      Or you can assume that by the time you figure out how to download the contents of a brain, you'll have figured out how to speed up the cloning process. Or just start growing a "mindless" clone when you're 30 and start inhabiting it when you turn fifty and then repeat the process. Technically, these are all doable. Now, ethically and morally... that's a completely different story.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        This is all nonsense anyway, but if you're going to do it then I would suggest a way that does not introduce generational noise between copies, or you might find after 'n' generations that you are not immortal after all. Best to keep 'cloning' from your original cells, not from the ones that have gone through possibly many such cycles.
        JCThoughtscream 17y ago
        Alternatively, save the entirety of your genetic code as a data file and update it to the latest storage medium every few decades. Even the best-preserved original cells will become unusable after a while.
peterwwillis 17y ago
In 20 years i'll have my own jet pack and rocket car too. Rosie, can you get the door please?
rsheridan6 17y ago
The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. This means that the methods for making us immortal would have to be perfected in 10 years, at most. The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week. Meanwhile, in the real world, medicine has made only incremental advances in the past few decades. Witness the fact that pharma is falling off a cliff because they haven't come up with many blockbusters recently: http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-approaching/2009-01-03 http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-a... Kurzweil is 61. He's fantasizing that something will be ready in 20 years, which is about his life expectancy at this point. Sad.
- steveplace 17y ago
  >The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. That's for U.S. regs only, right? They could (dangerously) release for broader testing in other countries.
  - eru 17y ago
    Yes. Though Europe is just as bad.
  - rsheridan6 17y ago
    They could, but AFAIK they don't (not that I pay much attention to the drug market in Lower Elbonia). Roughly speaking, the looser a country's drug regulations, the smaller its market. There's not really that much time to be saved here anyway, not compared to the time frame we're talking about. Look at figure 2.1 here: http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&source=bl&ots=NE1UZ-k6dT&sig=Q2GTPTS-TZ0ky9WiUFV2qQtfCw8&hl=en&ei=x0i5StKVM9ev8Qb548meDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#v=onepage&q=&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11&#3... If you skip the Phase III trials and the red tape, you save maybe 5 years. Probably not enough to do much for a codger like Kurzweil, any more than it did for a couple of other dead people who loudly proclaimed that they would live forever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson
reasonattlm 17y ago
I think the best argument contra Kurzweil's timescale is that business organization and the human element in infrastructure processes is incompressible below a certain threshold. I make this argument here: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p... and here: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.ph... I don't think there's a good argument to be made contra what Kurzweil expects to happen. At this point a transhumanist society of enhanced, long-living humans+ seems fairly inevitable, arriving in probably three to four decades rather than two.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Please. This is such an outrageous claim to make that you need evidence to back it up, calling anything on this scale 'inevitable', let alone to stick an upper limit on it less than two centuries into the future is not very realistic. So, instead of looking for all the excellent arguments that have already been made 'contra' Kurzweil, the biggest of which is that nobody can predict the future, let's hear some of the reasons why this is 'inevitable' that do not contain any qualifications or build upon other technologies that we do not have today.
pg 17y ago
I'm suspicious of anything said to be 20 years away. It's far enough in the future that you can be a little hand-wavy about how it's going to happen, but not so far that no one would care. A variant of Occam's razor implies that when something is described in a news article as 20 years away, the 20 came from the demands placed on news articles rather than the nature of the subject.
- Aron 17y ago
  "Generally the prediction comes as far as possible in the future while still being within the lifetime of the predictor." I don't recall the source of this paraphrase.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Sustainable nuclear fusion has been twenty years away for the last fifty years or more. It still is twenty years away. That's a long twenty years.
  - ivankirigin 17y ago
    Saying a research project is X years away is silly, given that you could get it done faster by throwing money at the problem. The moon landing should have been 30 or 40 years away from Kennedy's famed announcement, but it was given a high priority. Nuclear Fusion hasn't gotten enough funding, imho. Solar too.
    - wlievens 17y ago
      Somewhat true, but there's an important difference between an engineering challenge and a research challenge. I know next to nothing about nuclear science, but I guess that fusion will require breakthroughs. Moon landings - while not particularly easy - simply require a lot of quality engineering. Engineering like that is mostly a function of the bags of money you throw at it.
      - ivankirigin 17y ago
tphyahoo 17y ago
it's gonna get crowded.....
blhack 17y ago
This quote speaks to the validity of the person making this claim. From TFA: Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen. BATBOY FOUND!! Page 33! NEW PICS!
- aarongough 17y ago
  If your blood replacement (whatever it might be) was able to store 50 times the amount of oxygen per volume vs real blood then there's no reason why things like this might not be possible. They've already made headway toward something like this with artificial blood substitutes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    No known reason, maybe.
  - rsheridan6 17y ago
    You would have to have a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide or you would die of respiratory acidosis. CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3 -> H+ + HCO3-
rimantas 17y ago
Psychology is yet to answer how brain is capable of simulating future, how does it work with time or just the "simple" question—why we sleep among other things. Kurzweil overestimates our understanding of how we work.
anigbrowl 17y ago
Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: This is the UK equivalent of 'Writing in the National Enquirer...'. I like Kurzweil, I own a few of his books, but most Sun readers think a transhuman is a man who wears dresses. Here is the entire Sun 'story' Robo-swot 'will arrive' by 2028 MACHINES will “soar past” human intelligence within two decades using a combination of computers and biology, a visionary scientist claimed yesterday. Dr Ray Kurzweil said nano-robots – microscopic units of artificial intelligent hardware – will eventually become “deeply integrated” in the environment, our bodies and brains, he told a meeting of top boffins in Boston, US. Speech recognition pioneer Dr Kurzweil said two dozen regions of the brain had already been modelled and simulated by “reverse engineering” intelligence. Better informed now? No, didn't think so. BTW, a swot is a nerd and a boffin is a professional scientist, in UK gutter-speak.
arketyp 17y ago
This kind of scares the shit out of me. To me, the human condition seems like a very fragile thing; more so than many seem to appreciate. With predictions like Mr Kurzweil's, I wonder and worry that our possibilities will grow too large too fast and beyond control. I usually assure myself in optimistic spirit that "the humane will prevail". But it's no absolute truth. I'm reminded of an interview with Douglas Hofstadter that I think was posted here on HN, on a similar topic. http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview
bbgm 17y ago
Hmmm, we barely understand how human biology works, and won't be able to cure most current deadly diseases in that time. The more we learn about human genetics, the more we realize the less we know. In other words immortality is only 20 years away in the minds of those who believe in their own hype.
yannis 17y ago
Although he hasn't proposed a total replacement of human parts the hint is there, consider this: - the inevitable happens and technology has progressed to the level where everything in one's body has been replaced by 'cyborg parts'. - You are now living past 500 years. - After 500 years your brain has a total revamp and replaced by chips, it is now more powerful and would only need replacements every x years. - eventually your total brain is replaced with new technology, ensuring all memories are kept etc. - In 1000 years there is nothing original in your body except some old 'data'. - Now that the 'original you' is totally replaced IMHO you have d i e d and a Cyborg took over your identity! As a corollary this Cyborg has now took over your consciousness also! One consolation would be that if these events materialize at some point the Cyborg would try to use some of your Lisp stored 'data' and suffer infinite recursion and die too! :)
jimfl 17y ago
Seen on a T-Shirt: Ray Kurzweil must die.
grhino 17y ago
The organisms currently composed of organic nanobots (cells) are a beautiful, complicated mess. It'll be some feat to augment that mess in the ways he predicts and as quickly as he predicts. A human is like a giant software package that's been patched for billions of years. It's had a long time to get pretty complicated and to take advantage of every physical phenomena we've yet to understand.
jpcx01 17y ago
Seems like with technology, each of our life spans can be maximized. So if any organ fails, it can be replaced (or maybe preemptively replaced so it lasts longer). However, the biggest problem is going to be our brain cells. After 100-120 years, our brains are just about used up. Doubt its worth persisting much longer after that. Maybe in 500 years they'll figure out a solution to that, but I wont hold my breath.

20 points by keltecp11 17y ago

Would be a pity if Kurzweil's predictions follows the path of fusion energy - always, eternally, twenty years away. At any rate, I question the practicality of /physical/ immortality. If we're swapping out blood and organs with effectively superior equivalents, why shouldn't we reexamine the necessity of a fully human-equivalent body? If the entire purpose is to establish life support for the brain and preserve and augment the human sensorium, then why keep blood? Or the liver? Or the stomach?

aarongough 17y ago
I agree... I think it's quite likely that once we have the tech to replace all the components of the human body the possibility will also exist to do away with it entirely. I would definitely opt-in for a robotic body! I think I would prefer if it still looked human, but we can debate that in 30 years or so!
- JCThoughtscream 17y ago
  People'll pay for a humaniform body for at least the first few decades. Then the Grinders get involved, and the cultural body image paradigm starts to shift ever so slightly...
  - oconnor0 17y ago
    Grinders?
    - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
      Grinders, modders, etc - "Grinders" is Warren Ellis's term for it, and I've been rereading his stuff recently, so... Basically, anybody who starts tinkering with the physical form itself - whether by small modifications, such as improved eyesight, or large modifications, like swapping your legs out for a tank chassis.
Anon84 17y ago
Why not just build a clone and "flash in" the contents of your brain?
- JCThoughtscream 17y ago
  Because a clone will take about two decades to mature? And if it's a full clone, will in all likelihood have its own ideas about who occupies its head? And will probably physically develop different from you, as development is partially environmental? All sorts of problems with the cloning path to immortality.
  - Anon84 17y ago
    Or you can assume that by the time you figure out how to download the contents of a brain, you'll have figured out how to speed up the cloning process. Or just start growing a "mindless" clone when you're 30 and start inhabiting it when you turn fifty and then repeat the process. Technically, these are all doable. Now, ethically and morally... that's a completely different story.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      This is all nonsense anyway, but if you're going to do it then I would suggest a way that does not introduce generational noise between copies, or you might find after 'n' generations that you are not immortal after all. Best to keep 'cloning' from your original cells, not from the ones that have gone through possibly many such cycles.
      - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
        Alternatively, save the entirety of your genetic code as a data file and update it to the latest storage medium every few decades. Even the best-preserved original cells will become unusable after a while.

peterwwillis 17y ago

In 20 years i'll have my own jet pack and rocket car too. Rosie, can you get the door please?

rsheridan6 17y ago

The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. This means that the methods for making us immortal would have to be perfected in 10 years, at most. The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week. Meanwhile, in the real world, medicine has made only incremental advances in the past few decades. Witness the fact that pharma is falling off a cliff because they haven't come up with many blockbusters recently: http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-approaching/2009-01-03 http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-a... Kurzweil is 61. He's fantasizing that something will be ready in 20 years, which is about his life expectancy at this point. Sad.

steveplace 17y ago
>The drug approval process alone would take up most of those 20 years. That's for U.S. regs only, right? They could (dangerously) release for broader testing in other countries.
- eru 17y ago
  Yes. Though Europe is just as bad.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  They could, but AFAIK they don't (not that I pay much attention to the drug market in Lower Elbonia). Roughly speaking, the looser a country's drug regulations, the smaller its market. There's not really that much time to be saved here anyway, not compared to the time frame we're talking about. Look at figure 2.1 here: http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&source=bl&ots=NE1UZ-k6dT&sig=Q2GTPTS-TZ0ky9WiUFV2qQtfCw8&hl=en&ei=x0i5StKVM9ev8Qb548meDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#v=onepage&q=&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=zlzwOEtDu4IC&pg=PA11&#3... If you skip the Phase III trials and the red tape, you save maybe 5 years. Probably not enough to do much for a codger like Kurzweil, any more than it did for a couple of other dead people who loudly proclaimed that they would live forever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson

reasonattlm 17y ago

I think the best argument contra Kurzweil's timescale is that business organization and the human element in infrastructure processes is incompressible below a certain threshold. I make this argument here: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p... and here: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.ph... I don't think there's a good argument to be made contra what Kurzweil expects to happen. At this point a transhumanist society of enhanced, long-living humans+ seems fairly inevitable, arriving in probably three to four decades rather than two.

jacquesm 17y ago
Please. This is such an outrageous claim to make that you need evidence to back it up, calling anything on this scale 'inevitable', let alone to stick an upper limit on it less than two centuries into the future is not very realistic. So, instead of looking for all the excellent arguments that have already been made 'contra' Kurzweil, the biggest of which is that nobody can predict the future, let's hear some of the reasons why this is 'inevitable' that do not contain any qualifications or build upon other technologies that we do not have today.

pg 17y ago

I'm suspicious of anything said to be 20 years away. It's far enough in the future that you can be a little hand-wavy about how it's going to happen, but not so far that no one would care. A variant of Occam's razor implies that when something is described in a news article as 20 years away, the 20 came from the demands placed on news articles rather than the nature of the subject.

Aron 17y ago
"Generally the prediction comes as far as possible in the future while still being within the lifetime of the predictor." I don't recall the source of this paraphrase.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Sustainable nuclear fusion has been twenty years away for the last fifty years or more. It still is twenty years away. That's a long twenty years.
- ivankirigin 17y ago
  Saying a research project is X years away is silly, given that you could get it done faster by throwing money at the problem. The moon landing should have been 30 or 40 years away from Kennedy's famed announcement, but it was given a high priority. Nuclear Fusion hasn't gotten enough funding, imho. Solar too.
  - wlievens 17y ago
    Somewhat true, but there's an important difference between an engineering challenge and a research challenge. I know next to nothing about nuclear science, but I guess that fusion will require breakthroughs. Moon landings - while not particularly easy - simply require a lot of quality engineering. Engineering like that is mostly a function of the bags of money you throw at it.
    - ivankirigin 17y ago

tphyahoo 17y ago

it's gonna get crowded.....

blhack 17y ago

This quote speaks to the validity of the person making this claim. From TFA: Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen. BATBOY FOUND!! Page 33! NEW PICS!

aarongough 17y ago
If your blood replacement (whatever it might be) was able to store 50 times the amount of oxygen per volume vs real blood then there's no reason why things like this might not be possible. They've already made headway toward something like this with artificial blood substitutes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycyte
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  No known reason, maybe.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  You would have to have a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide or you would die of respiratory acidosis. CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3 -> H+ + HCO3-

rimantas 17y ago

Psychology is yet to answer how brain is capable of simulating future, how does it work with time or just the "simple" question—why we sleep among other things. Kurzweil overestimates our understanding of how we work.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: This is the UK equivalent of 'Writing in the National Enquirer...'. I like Kurzweil, I own a few of his books, but most Sun readers think a transhuman is a man who wears dresses. Here is the entire Sun 'story' Robo-swot 'will arrive' by 2028 MACHINES will “soar past” human intelligence within two decades using a combination of computers and biology, a visionary scientist claimed yesterday. Dr Ray Kurzweil said nano-robots – microscopic units of artificial intelligent hardware – will eventually become “deeply integrated” in the environment, our bodies and brains, he told a meeting of top boffins in Boston, US. Speech recognition pioneer Dr Kurzweil said two dozen regions of the brain had already been modelled and simulated by “reverse engineering” intelligence. Better informed now? No, didn't think so. BTW, a swot is a nerd and a boffin is a professional scientist, in UK gutter-speak.

arketyp 17y ago

This kind of scares the shit out of me. To me, the human condition seems like a very fragile thing; more so than many seem to appreciate. With predictions like Mr Kurzweil's, I wonder and worry that our possibilities will grow too large too fast and beyond control. I usually assure myself in optimistic spirit that "the humane will prevail". But it's no absolute truth. I'm reminded of an interview with Douglas Hofstadter that I think was posted here on HN, on a similar topic. http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

bbgm 17y ago

Hmmm, we barely understand how human biology works, and won't be able to cure most current deadly diseases in that time. The more we learn about human genetics, the more we realize the less we know. In other words immortality is only 20 years away in the minds of those who believe in their own hype.

yannis 17y ago

Although he hasn't proposed a total replacement of human parts the hint is there, consider this: - the inevitable happens and technology has progressed to the level where everything in one's body has been replaced by 'cyborg parts'. - You are now living past 500 years. - After 500 years your brain has a total revamp and replaced by chips, it is now more powerful and would only need replacements every x years. - eventually your total brain is replaced with new technology, ensuring all memories are kept etc. - In 1000 years there is nothing original in your body except some old 'data'. - Now that the 'original you' is totally replaced IMHO you have d i e d and a Cyborg took over your identity! As a corollary this Cyborg has now took over your consciousness also! One consolation would be that if these events materialize at some point the Cyborg would try to use some of your Lisp stored 'data' and suffer infinite recursion and die too! :)

jimfl 17y ago

Seen on a T-Shirt: Ray Kurzweil must die.

grhino 17y ago

The organisms currently composed of organic nanobots (cells) are a beautiful, complicated mess. It'll be some feat to augment that mess in the ways he predicts and as quickly as he predicts. A human is like a giant software package that's been patched for billions of years. It's had a long time to get pretty complicated and to take advantage of every physical phenomena we've yet to understand.

jpcx01 17y ago

Seems like with technology, each of our life spans can be maximized. So if any organ fails, it can be replaced (or maybe preemptively replaced so it lasts longer). However, the biggest problem is going to be our brain cells. After 100-120 years, our brains are just about used up. Doubt its worth persisting much longer after that. Maybe in 500 years they'll figure out a solution to that, but I wont hold my breath.