I’ve read and enjoyed one of Ray Kurzweil’s books (this one). He is a futurist and often gets a lot of flak about how wild his predictions are. That’s how futurists make money I guess.
I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.
Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:
I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.
95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.
On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.
Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.
Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?
Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.
I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.
You look like you’re in good shape.
Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.
What do you do to slow the aging process?
I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.
It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]
Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?
Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.
You may be right about being too close to have a good perspective. Makes me think of Hawking’s opinion about the end of physics coming soon. Kurzweil is an optimist about several things, which ain’t such a bad thing. Look at the synthesizers the man invented. Great stuff. I’m sure some very interesting things will come about in the next century for sure.
While I like the idea of living to 1000, if I am allowed to keep my mind sharp and have a decent amount of physical activity (that should be enough time to get better at tennis), I am horrified at the idea of the spike in populations (already at exponential growth) that are going to come soon, and the disparity in the life-spans (and their quality) between the rich and poor. I hate to rely on pandemics and various technological dystopias to balance out the population, but people are stunningly stupid in the large. What we need is more research on making humans more intelligent across many scales of population size.