Futurist with 'track record of being right' predicts humans can achieve immortality by 2030
People love predicting the future - good or bad.
Either the world is going to end in two years due to climate change unless we take radical action, or AI will be part of our everyday lives and life will look a whole lot different.
It's hard to decide what to believe and who to trust.
Well, one futurist who's been correct 86% of the time has made some bold predictions, claiming that by 2030, the human race will achieve immortality.
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That certainly sounds a lot better than being taken over by robots.
Speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil said by the year 2030, we will be able to "advance human life expectancy" by "more than a year every year".
The futurist claimed we'll soon achieve "longevity escape velocity", suggesting that people in their 20s and 30s today "might have a shot" at eternal life.
If this is true, it'll be music to biohacker and tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson's ears who currently invests $2 million a year to preserve his youthfulness.
Kurzweil has a pretty solid track record when it comes to making predictions about technology.
Back in 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat human world chess champions by the year 2000 - which it did in 1997. Wild, ey?
But it is also wise to be skeptical of these things. After all, Kurzweil has been wrong in the past like when he previously predicted self-driving cars would be on the roads by 2009.
Furthermore, in a separate interview with Futurism in 2017, Kurzweil added: "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."
The scientist said that he's set the date 2045 for the 'Singularity' event which is when "we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion-fold by merging with the intelligence we have created."
For Kurzweil, the singularity isn't something to fear, but rather something that will improve us humans, eventually making us "godlike".
"If I want to access 10,000 computers for two seconds I can do that wirelessly," he explained, "and [my computational power] multiplies itself in the cloud ten thousand fold. That's what we're gonna do with our neocortex," Kurzweil described.
If true, I'm sure Elon Musk will be the first to say something about it as his tech company Neurolink is making advancements towards controlling computers with our minds.