TECH NEWS – Ray Kurzweil, who predicted back in 2005 what we could expect, still stands by his statement and since he predicted the development of artificial intelligence very accurately in his book Singularity is Near, humanity may indeed be heading towards transhumanism.

In his book, Kurzweil wrote that by 2029, AI will reach the level of human intelligence, and by about 2045, our brains and artificial intelligence will be intertwined. His 2005 book has now been followed by another, Singularity is Nearer. For this, The Guardian interviewed Kurzweil, who is employed by Google and is the tech company’s AI visionary.

He continues to see the future in transhumanism, where humanity will push the limits of its own abilities through technology (that’s what the term means), and believes that humans can become much smarter, be equipped with nanobots (then Hideo Kojima couldn’t have been so wrong with Metal Gear Solid…), raise the dead and live forever. If we can live that long.

“We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence, and it’s going to be all in one. This will be enabled by brain-computer interfaces, which will ultimately be nanobots – robots the size of molecules – that will go noninvasively into our brains through the capillaries. We’re going to increase intelligence a million times by 2045, and it’s going to deepen our awareness and consciousness. People say ‘I don’t want that’, but they thought they didn’t want cell phones either! When cell phones were new they were very expensive and did a terrible job, now they’re very affordable and extremely useful. About 3/4 of the world has one. This problem is going away with time.

We need to be aware of the potential here and monitor what AI is doing, but just being against it makes no sense: the benefits are so profound. All the big companies are putting more effort into making sure their systems are safe and in line with human values than they are into creating new advances, which is positive. In the early 2030s, we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity, where every year of life we lose to aging we get back from scientific progress, and as we go beyond that, we’ll actually get more years back. It’s not a solid guarantee that you’ll live forever (accidents still happen), but your chances of dying won’t increase from year to year. The ability to digitally bring back people who have died will raise some interesting social and legal issues.

My first plan is to stay alive and reach longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to stay healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback. I also intend to create a replicant, an afterlife AI avatar of myself, which is an option I think we’ll all have in the late 2020s. I did something like that with my father, where I collected everything he had written in his life, and it was a little bit like talking to him. It’s not going to be us against AI: AI is going to be in us,” Kurzweil said.

Exciting and scary, but worth thinking about!

Source: PCGamer, The Guardian