Immortality in 20 years
Yeh right
The futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil, is claiming (again) that by 2020 nanobots and other nanotechnologies, including massive computing power, will be behind our ability to halt and reverse the ageing process – ie living forever.
See yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph article. He also got a mention in the various editions of the train commuter’s bible – MX.
But Kurzweil is repeating what he said in 2004 (which coincidentally was when he released his last book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.). So this isn’t exactly new news.
He now has a new book out on this stuff, so I “suspect’ he is, in a very unsubtle way, flogging the book in the best way he knows. Having said this Ray Kurzweil has done some cool stuff in the IT and field of artificial intelligence, but I can’t find a any real scientific consensus to back his claims about immortality and hordes of tiny nanobots repairing our bodies and boosting brainpower by 2020.
Replay
Here is some of what he said in a 2004 interview with PC World
“The killer app for nanotechnology, about twenty years away, is nanobots. Inside our bodies and brains, nanobots will provide radical life extension by destroying pathogens and cancer cells, repairing DNA errors, destroying toxins and debris, and otherwise reversing aging processes.” And on being brainier: “Nanobots in the capillaries of our brains will interact with our biological neurons to vastly expand our biological intelligence. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains…it will grow in capacity by at least doubling every year…The crossover point will be in the 2020s. By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.”
Back to earth
There is no doubt nanotechnologies and advances in computing power will probably lead to radical changes in society in the next 10-20 years, but considering it can take up to 10 years to get any sort of drug or clinical treatment through the research and clinical trial process, and that we are still grappling with the basic research in this area, I feel Kurzweil’s timeframe may be a bit out. But then in 1990 it took 13 years to sequence the human genome. Now it takes about one month.
Personal caveat I have yet to read his book, so the media version may be taking Kurzweil’s concepts out of context.
Further reading
Jason Major
gntis-australia@unimelb.edu.au