One of the most epic claims Ray Kurzweil makes in his new book The Singularity Is Nearer is that the first person who will live to 1,000 may have already been born. That’s because, he writes, by 2030, humans will attain “longevity escape velocity,” and science will have figured out how to add more than a year to lifespan for each year that passes thanks to AI-led medical and pharmaceutical innovations.
Of course, Kurzweil is no stranger to outrageous predictions about the future and there are many more here, some of which, were they to pass, would make the prospect of such incredible longevity a little more palatable. By the late 2020s, he writes, data-driven vertical farming will cause the cost of food to plummet and 3-D printing will make housing shortages a thing of the past. “In the 2030s,” he asserts, “it will be relatively inexpensive to live at a level that is considered luxurious today.”
Kurzweil hasn’t changed his tone or expectations much over the past 20 years. In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, he predicted that the “singularity”—the term applied to the theoretical threshold when technology would outpace its human creators, resulting in an unpredictable, possibly uncontrollable explosion of superintelligent machines—would arrive by 2045. Now he writes it will arrive some time in the 2040s.
AI will change the way we approach a fundamental question: “Who am I?”
Early on in the new book, Kurzweil clarifies that his definition for the “singularity” differs somewhat from other conceptions. While many futurists consider it the moment AI becomes capable of self-guided replication and growth, Kurzweil conceives of it as more of a fusion between tech and humanity, a time when “this technology will let us merge with the superintelligence,” allowing us to be “freed from the enclosure of our skulls” by artificial augmentation to our biology, “ultimately expanding our intelligence millions-fold.”
Along the way, he claims, several key innovations will happen. His new book essentially charts the path this snowballing technological revolution will take, providing rough estimates for when we may encounter certain landmark developments.
On that note, he explores at length present concerns about the future of work, claiming that, “As AI unlocks unprecedented material abundance across countless areas, the struggle for physical survival will fade into history.” Instead, “our main struggle will be for purpose and meaning,” and by “the 2030s, we will be able to create meaningful expressions that we cannot imagine or understand today.”
Around that same time, he writes that we will master the concept of “atom-by-atom” placement which will let us reorganize matter as we see fit, essentially allowing us to “print” clothing, furniture, solar panels, hot meals, and even human organs. Within a decade, this micro-manipulation will extend to medical nanobots who will regulate and repair our bodies from within, and by the 2040s and 2050s, “we will rebuild our bodies and brains to go vastly beyond what our biological bodies are capable of.”
This is the singularity as Kurzweil imagines it, when “the AIs will become part of us, and thus it is we who will be doing those things.”
At the heart of Kurzweil’s framework is the suggestion that AI’s progressive arrival will change the way we approach a fundamental question: “Who am I?” This technology, he claims, will through both its material and conceptual impacts alter the way we think of ourselves.
Consider our phones, which already augment the otherwise limited capacity of our memories. You don’t need to remember driving directions, because they’re stored in the cloud. Increasingly, writes Kurzweil, we will exist more and more in or even as this cloud, especially when the biological crutches afforded by AI become integrated into our bodies via implants and nanobots. Who are you if your identity is partially stored in the cloud, and if it can even be restored into a newly fabricated body in the event of accidental death?
If Kurzweil is even remotely right, then 10 years from now our lives—our very society—will be totally unrecognizable.
One shortcoming of Kurzweil’s vision, of course, is that he seems to believe that technological progress proceeds in a straight line, when its history is chock full of diversions and dead ends—a criticism levered at his earlier work.
And then there is the question of his enthusiasm itself. In Nearer, Kurzweil is unabashedly optimistic about the potential benefits afforded by AI. While he does devote some 20 pages to its perils—notably a misalignment of programming values resulting in undesirable AI behavior, the misuse of AI-powered biotech by terrorists to create novel viruses or other large scale hazards, or nanobots loosed to violent ends or perhaps even total, if accidental, planetary devastation—he dismisses these as unlikely incidentals on the way to our grand utopia.
Wide-eyed optimism and inattention to the nonlinear path of progress aside, it’s hard to escape the appeal of Kurzweil’s vision. Nanorobots keeping us all healthy forever on our techno-quest for meaning? Sounds exciting on paper! And who doesn’t want to believe in the powers of science to improve, enhance, and extend our lives?
But look back in time as far as you like, and you will see that history is decidedly short on utopias. 
Lead image: DannyOliva / Shutterstock
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