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Who wants to live forever?

Futurists are people who study and predict the future on the basis of current trends, and should not be confused with other famous ‘predictors of the future’ like Nostradamus or your local psychic who told you that a ‘dark man will unlock your inner beauty’.

These ‘scientific soothsayers work to advise private and public organizations on matters of global trends, possible scenarios, emerging market opportunities, and risk management. But every now and again they come up with a ‘prediction’ that does seem a bit outside of the box. One of these people is a computer scientist and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, who has declared some very specific timelines for when humanity will achieve immortality, and artificial intelligence (AI) will reach the singularity.

Kurzweil has a reasonable track record of making predictions about technology, correctly predicting in 1990 that a computer would beat human world chess champions by the year 2000, the rise of portable computers and smartphones, the shift to more wireless technology, and foreseeing the explosion of the Internet before that was obvious to everyone.

Kurzweil is famous for having reviewed his own predictions in 2010 and finding that out of the 147 predictions he made in 1990, 115 proved to be “entirely correct” with only 3 being entirely wrong. So I guess it’s safe to say he has a pretty good track record. That doesn’t mean he is always right, but the scientist has been able to make predictions with incredibly accurate timelines.

According to IFLS, he now believes that humanity will be able to achieve immortality, or as he puts it “advance human life expectancy” by “more than a year every year”. Part of his prediction is based on the belief that nanobots will be flowing through our bloodstream, making repairs and linking our brain up to the cloud for monitoring. Along with this, he believes we will be able to upload videos and emails directly from our brains, as well as back up our memories.

So, did he watch one too many Matrix movies or is he onto something? As with everything these days, AI seems to be involved.

“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”

The technological singularity is ‘the point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to a future in which machines can create their own technology.’

Below is a great video that explains Kurzweil’s ‘prediction’:

As tempting as immortality might seem to a lot of people, I just wonder how the French are going to take it considering they want to burn Paris down because the retirement date has been moved by 2 years.

[source:ifls]