
Ray Kurzweil - Immortality Only 20 Years Away - keltecp11
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6217676/Immortality-only-20-years-away-says-scientist.html
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pg
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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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
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
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
From my limited understanding, it is just iterative improvements in fusion
that are required. You shoot a laser at something compressed in a strong
magnetic field, and use the dissipating heat from fusion to boil water to spin
turbines to power the laser and magnet. This whole process already works, but
doesn't net energy gains. Improvements in efficiency of the laser, magnets, or
power gen could make it tip into net energy gains. It's still an engineering
problem from then on, as you need to compete on $/Kwh.

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rsheridan6
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-a...](http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/bail-faster-patent-cliff-
approaching/2009-01-03)

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
>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.

~~~
rsheridan6
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...](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)

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/Robert_Anton_Wilson>

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JCThoughtscream
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
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
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
Grinders?

~~~
JCThoughtscream
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.

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anigbrowl
_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.

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

------
yannis
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! :)

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blhack
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
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>

~~~
rsheridan6
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-

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arketyp
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>

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bbgm
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.

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reasonattlm
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.p...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php)

and here:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.ph...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/nanotechnology.php)

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
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.

------
rimantas
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.

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jpcx01
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.

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grhino
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.

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

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tphyahoo
it's gonna get crowded.....

