The New York Times | Ray Kurzweil says we’re going to live forever
January 25, 2013
Source: The New York Times — January 25, 2013 | Andrew Goldman
As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy.
To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality. The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, “Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever,” because it’s never forever.
You have described microscopic nanobots of the future that will be able to shape shift into anything, even gather into patterns that mimic familiar life-forms. So millions of nanobots will be running around that look just like Ray Kurzweil? This idea of creating a whole virtual body with nanobots, that’s more like a 2050 scenario. But by the 2030s we’ll be putting millions of nanobots inside our bodies to augment our immune system, to basically wipe out disease. One scientist cured Type I diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device already. [...]
Comments (5)
by asiwel
Am I the only one who was NOT pleased with this NYT interviewer’s questions? ..dud, futurist, can you predict the day you will die? What kind of question is that to start an interview off with? What about you and your wife? What would you do if you had a terrible disease? Well, why not start doing that for everybody else now? …. Give me a break. This was a hostile, obnoxious (at best) interview. There are so many wiser, more thoughtful questions to ask.
by henrik yde
Just months ago Kurzweil AI Newsletter featured an article stating people live a bit longer – but NOT with a higher degree of comfort or functionality, but rather less so. Consequently we need to focus on wiping out the same diseases we’ve been fighting from decades, centuries and millenniums.
I suggest scientist focus on A) developing methods to effectively – once and for always – killing any bacteria, virus and fungus – instantly – and B) effective methods for triggering the body’s own mechanisms of potential Radical Life Extension (RLE), such as Telomeres extension and continued glandular hormone excretion (testosterone, HGH etc).
The more biology is part of the equation – as primary generator of RLE – and the less bots (as anything but delivery mechanisms – of clean up and bio-stimulation) the likelier it seems to me that RLE will work to which ever degree possible.
by Gare
From this article, it appears we have accelerated greatly in past 100 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time
by Whittaker
But not exponentially.
by Richard M. Garber
Today in 2013, how much time are we adding to our life expectancy each year? How has this number been trending for the past 50 years or so?