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Topics: Science, Technology, Life, Weird
Tom Wood
Topics: Science, Technology, Life, Weird
Human beings might be able to achieve immortality in the next eight years, according to an expert on the future.
Of course, there’s a lot of guesswork involved in being an expert in things that haven’t happened yet.
In fact, you could call someone who makes a living through gambling an ‘expert on the future’, although they’re still wrong probably almost as many times as they are right.
But – as any gambler will tell you - it’s those times that you were right that are the most important.
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With that in mind, perhaps Ray Kurzweil is one such expert whose opinion might be worth our time.
He’s had some big wins in the past, including predicting that back in 1990, a computer would be able to beat the world’s best chess player by the year 2000.
In 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, making that statement true.
Kurzweil also said in the past that mobile handheld devices such as smartphones would be the future.
It’s fair to suggest that – given what you’re probably reading this on – he got that one spot on as well.
Anyway, he has also made some significant predictions recently on artificial intelligence and human immortality.
He reckons that an AI will beat the Turing Test – which was created to show whether machines can exhibit intelligent ‘human-like’ behaviour – before 2030.
We’ll have to wait for that, but AI isn’t that far away from convincingly acting as human, you’d have to say.
But, will humans ever achieve immortality?
He believes that will happen by the end of this decade, which would be a turn up for the books.
Would we even want immortality?
That’s an existential question for another day, but let’s see what Kurzweil says about it himself.
He told Futurism: “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.
“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.”
On a podcast with scientist Lex Fridman, he added that he believes we’ll be able to ‘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 exactly would we do this?
Well, Kurzweil has said that it could be through nanobots roaming through our blood vessels checking how we’re getting on, as well as uploading thoughts and memories onto the cloud.
Does that sound like something you’d be interested in? It doesn’t sound dystopian or terrifying at all, does it?
We’ll just have to see how the science progresses.