
Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029 - lambersley
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-chief-futurist-thinks-we-could-start-living-forever-by-2029-2016-4
======
cko
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
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

~~~
melling
He’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.

~~~
cko
I mean, I certainly hope so. If they could also restore my skin turgor. And
gait function.

------
weeksie
Religion 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.

~~~
msamwald
Which is not a bad thing.

Religion developed to cope with the unavoidable misery of human existence
through a coordinated belief in an imaginary afterlife free of that misery.

Enlightenment, science and technology showed us that most of this misery could
be alleviated by advancing our technologies and social structures, while also
revealing the imaginary nature of ideas of an afterlife.

The tragic thing is that we might live in the worst time of all: religion is
obsolete, yet the transformative changes possible through technology might
very well stay out of reach during our lifetimes.

~~~
Balgair
> Religion developed to cope with the unavoidable misery of human existence
> through a coordinated belief in an imaginary afterlife free of that misery.

Maybe. Gobekli Tepe is turning out to be _very_ surprising, and it's only 10%
uncovered. There may be even more paradigm shifting things in that rubble. I'd
treat your thesis as theory for now and wait to see what we'll dig up. Not
saying you are wrong at all, but big things are afoot in religo-paleontology

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)

~~~
wu-ikkyu
What about Gobekli Tepe indicates otherwise? It is supposed that it was
constructed by hunter-gatherers, which typically worshipped the animals they
hunted as idols. Such animals have been found engraved into the ruins.

~~~
Balgair
My reply was to say that such strong statements about humans and religion are
perhaps unwise at this time, considering we may be going through a paradigm
shift in our understanding at this time. The statement is not wrong, per se,
but caution is advised.

------
jknoepfler
As 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
Yeah, 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
While 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
Didn'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
I mean if people start living forever we would have to start killing them. So
it's kinda moot anyway.

~~~
T-A
Why? If you are concerned about population growth, a one child policy would be
quite sufficient (1+1/2+1/4+1/8+... = 2).

~~~
vorotato
I'm not, I'm concerned with the ability to collect power and resources in a
capitalist society, and how that ability grows with age.

------
briga
What 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
10E65 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
I'll pass.

------
shams93
Actually 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.

------
Asdfbla
I 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
Imagine 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
s/adultery/adulthood

------
rsync
There 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.

------
iamonkara
That'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.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> within

Within _what_ , exactly? If there's a _within_ , what and where is the barrier
or boundary that separates it from _without_? How does one reconcile that
separation with a cosmic/unity consciousness?

~~~
iamonkara
Within your own self. The first layer of "within" can be easily understood. In
between 2 successive thoughts is a state of "no thoughts". Can we like a
scientist hypothesize that we are more than the thoughts? To prove or disprove
it we need to observe/experience this state of thoughtlessness, initially they
are just few milliseconds long but with practice will be seconds and minutes
in length.

And remember if we are always observing through the filter of our thoughts
then we are changing the thing being observed - just like in quantum physics
"act of observing affected what is observed".

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> Within your own self.

I don't know what that is.

> The first layer of "within" can be easily understood. In between 2
> successive thoughts is a state of "no thoughts".

That doesn't match my experience at all. There are times when I don't pay
attention to my thoughts, or my thoughts aren't distinct enough to grasp, but
that's not an absence of thought. For me, the concept of "between 2 successive
thoughts" makes about as much sense as "between two drops of water in a
river".

The only way I can relate your description to anything I understand is to
suspect that what you're describing is shifting your attention away from your
thoughts to interoceptive sensations, and then reifying your
integration/synthesis of those sensations into a distinct entity rather than a
representation of your body. But maybe I just haven't read enough Deepak
Chopra to "get it".

------
just_steve_h
Ray 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.

~~~
msamwald
I 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.

------
drzaiusapelord
>, 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.

------
netsharc
By "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
Ray 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-
kurz...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/21/ray-kurzweill-
climate-change)

I actually kind of agree with him on that - go solar cells and robots.

------
norswap
While I'm totally on board with the idea of making humans live longer or even
forever, wishing hard won't make it so.

~~~
eplanit
I'm curious, what's the plan for food supply, housing, waste/pollution, etc.
in a world that accumulates non-dying human beings?

~~~
ben_w
Given 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.

------
hungerstrike
The 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.

------
sulam
In other news, Ray Kurzweil will turn 81 in 2029, should he live so long.

------
almonj
The 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.

------
aurelianito
Who wants to live forever?
[https://youtu.be/_Jtpf8N5IDE](https://youtu.be/_Jtpf8N5IDE)

Ray

~~~
ronilan
Well, not everybody is a genius years ahead of their time.

 _Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?_

------
reasonattlm
Kurzweil'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.

------
modi15
When AI takes over, mankind will loose meaning. When mankind looses meaning,
extending life will appear pointless.

