Ray Kurzweil believes humans will soon be able to live forever. Are you willing to bet against him?
Kurzweil was a certifiable genius before the word was trivialized to include football coaches and mutual fund managers.
This is the man who invented the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. And let’s not forget he also invented, at the request of Stevie Wonder, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. You get the idea. He has founded nine successful companies and has more patents than I have fingers and toes.
So when Ray Kurzweil says in his new book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, that we will, in fact, be able to live forever, well frankly, I sit up and take notice.
Recently, during a conversation in his modest Wellesley office, he explained that advances in mapping the human genome, the exponential growth of computer processing, and advances in nanotechnology will not only allow humans to stop the aging process, but even reverse it. He envisions nanobots (molecule size robots) being sent into the bloodstream to target cancer cells or repair damaged tissue. And he envisions this within the next 20 years!
Which brings us to how we live long enough to get to this medical milestone. For Kurzweil, it means altering his biochemistry by taking 250 different supplements a day, exercising and eating sensibly. He says that while his chronological age is 57, tests of his biochemistry show his biological age to be just 40! Maybe 60 really is the new 40.
On a more esoteric note, Kurzweil envisions nanotechnology allowing us to live in virtual worlds, travel to virtual places, and interact with other people participating in the same virtual reality. He kind of lost me there, but near as I can figure, envision Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie “Total Recall.” Okay, so sometimes Kurzweil’s a little hard to understand – geniuses are funny that way.
Kurzweil is also one of the world’s leading resources on artificial intelligence. Well, there’s nothing artificial about his success, or the fact that he has created and predicted some of the most significant scientific advances of the past four decades. So if Ray Kurzweil says we’ll soon be able to live forever, I think the least I can do is eat my vegetables. What about you? Are you willing to bet your life that Ray Kurzweil is wrong?
