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A renowned futurist claims humans will soon be able to live up to 1,000 years through the use of biotechnology, AI, and nanobots.
As Raymond Kurzweil, who was honored in 1999 with the Presidential National Medal of Technology and Innovation, explains in his new book The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, the exponential growth of technology “will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever.”
“We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges,” he wrote in a new article for Wired. “In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.”
Kurzweil believes that, based on the current trajectory of research in this area, medical nanobots will be one of the main keys to extending human life.
He thinks nanobots, which operate at a molecular level, will give us “the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues.”
“To maintain our bodies and otherwise counteract health problems, we will all need a huge number of nanobots, each about the size of a cell,” he writes. “The best available estimates say that the human body is made of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we augment ourselves with just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, this would amount to several hundred billion nanobots. It remains to be seen, though, what ratio is optimal.”
With enough nanobots in our system, we will then be able to halt degrading organ performance and eventually replace biological organs completely.
They can also be used to “adjust concentrations of various substances in our blood to levels more optimal than what would normally occur in the body” such as hormones used to promote energy, healing, and sleep.
“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized body at will: We’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil claims. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly, we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”
To those who don’t believe extending human life that drastically is a good idea, Raymond Kurzweil says “people generally do not want to end their lives at any point unless they are in enormous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they were to absorb the ongoing improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean vastly improving it.”