the three step immortality program
Just three steps to everlasting life? Here I was, thinking there would be a lot more than that but apparently all we need to do is live until 2045, use mysterious nanotechnology that will somehow slow down or reverse the aging process, and then integrate with computers so much so, we’ll become immortal. It’s simple, easy and missing about a few hundred steps that will be needed to overcome all the technical challenges involved with taking over for nature and managing our lifespans through cutting edge science. It’s not that the idea of trying to use technology to radically extend our lives is a bad one or would never work. It’s just that we need realistic blueprints instead of vague plans based primarily on wishful thinking and sweeping assumptions.
When I was working with IT projects, these kinds of ideas used to drive me up a wall because they make no consideration of what it really takes to get from one major step to another. Ray Kurzweil is a “big idea” sort of person and little issues like the actual research and development are things he expects to simply be there as per his schedule. But that’s not how it works in the real world. The problems he dismisses so casually in his prognostications take a long time to be properly resolved. Humans are very complex organisms. Using a vast swarm of microscopic machines to maintain our bodies on a nearly molecular level is much easier said than done. Not only are we dealing with very advanced biology, we’re also working with chemistry and physics. To build and test the requisite technology, work out all the bugs and carry out all the necessary studies to confirm whether it has the desired effects, would take a lot more than a few decades.
Maybe sometime in the far future, when we truly know and understand the fundamentals of how we age, what we can do to mitigate the effects of the process, how we can effectively change genetic wiring for a fully grown person and understand how to cheaply create trillions of nanobots on demand, we’ll be able to make some of Kurzweil’s dreams a reality. I know pushing this into the far future makes me seem like a close-minded killjoy, but all I’m saying is that we need to realize the sheer complexity of the task at hand before we start predicting when exactly we won’t have to worry about death by natural causes. Instead of trying to shoot the idea of trying to give humans unlimited lifespans down, I want to point out the real challenges we’ll have to face so we know what to tackle in our efforts to make it happen. And I would really appreciate it if futurists and the reporters who breathlessly run to cover their bold announcements, would at least mention a few of them as well…
Raymond Kurzweil is starting to get more and more press these days and, personally, I think that’s a great thing. There will be a greater number of people questioning his assumptions and looking at all of the steps he is missing. I agree with you that most likely the things he predicts will not happen for a long time (hundreds of years or more) and some of them might not ever happen. It’s not being a killjoy, it’s really just being realistic. The world is complex and exponential curves don’t make it any less complex.
Or….you could just get intimate with a vampire…:)
You remain interesting.
Thanks!
Well you could go the vampire route but those fang marks never heal right.
And since stalking mortals to drain them of blood for your sustenance is illegal in most countries, feeding on a regular basis may present a slight problem. Until you find a few willing donors that is…
“Well you could go the vampire route but those fang marks never heal right.
And since stalking mortals to drain them of blood for your sustenance is illegal in most countries, feeding on a regular basis may present a slight problem. Until you find a few willing donors that is”
Ack!
Kurzweil may just have the chops to back up his ‘big ideas’ Greg, he’s the inventer of mechanisms that read print for blind people, optical scanners and a synthesizer that mimics orchestral instruments;
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
So it’s no wonder that he believes technology will reach a point where it changes everything in a few short decades.
Geniuses tend to look at things differently than us ordinary folk.
I know that Kurzweil is a brilliant tech expert and actually, I do agree with his basic premise even though that may be pretty hard to discern from most of my posts on the subject. Using technology to give us potentially unlimited lives and the ability to travel through space at our leisure are awesome concepts. In my interview with Occult of Personality, I not only backed this premise but spent some time trying to convey how a society like he envisions could work and what problems it would face.
But with my background, I’m looking at this from an implementation standpoint. Just being able to think of big ideas isn’t enough to make you a genius. You need to come up with a detailed plan of how to get there and base it on sound science. Kurzweil hasn’t done that yet. Instead, he’s sitting back, selling the hundreds of supplements he drinks with medically questionable intentions and expects others to to do heavy lifting for him.
Sort of like quite a few CIOs in major tech companies…
I like the idea of living forever very much, but I have a few problems with Kurzweil.
1) He actually has no idea how this is going to happen, he just sort of assumes it will. It’s kinda like how a lot of people assumed their had been an economic paradigm shift in the late ’90s and the tech bubble would never burst.
2) If we’re going to live forever, we need to stop having kids, who in turn will also live forever. Even when we expand into space etc etc as Kurzweil predicts we will run into hard resource limits.
3) Kurzweil doesn’t just talk about immortality, he talks about a basically infinite expansion in intelligence. We would be smart enough to figure out everything in a pretty short amount of time. So we would be infinitely intelligent immortals with nothing to think about. To me, that would be more like a hell than a utopia.
I think Mr K. might be planning and hoping (dare I say praying?) that he will spur on research from others who will make his dreams and desires a reality before his mortal time is up…