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Excerpt from TIME February 21, 2009
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
Original article is here.
Sin.gu.lar.i.ty
n: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
(At age 17, Kurzweil appeared on 1965 TV Show I've Got A Secret, showcasing a computer that composes music --his own invention)
(on artificial intelligence)
"... Kurzweil would spent much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence."
"...We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brains by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity --never say hes not conservative-- at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of the same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today."
Ray Kurzweil Explains the Coming Singularity (from YouTube channel BigThink)
(on life extension)
".. After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension, biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable. Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarians ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.
For example, it's well-known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular noncancerous cells with telomerase? In November, the researchers at Harvard medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a goup of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger.
Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."
.
Excerpt from TIME February 21, 2009
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
Original article is here.
Sin.gu.lar.i.ty
n: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
(At age 17, Kurzweil appeared on 1965 TV Show I've Got A Secret, showcasing a computer that composes music --his own invention)
(on artificial intelligence)
"... Kurzweil would spent much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence."
"...We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brains by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity --never say hes not conservative-- at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of the same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today."
Ray Kurzweil Explains the Coming Singularity (from YouTube channel BigThink)
(on life extension)
".. After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension, biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable. Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarians ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.
For example, it's well-known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular noncancerous cells with telomerase? In November, the researchers at Harvard medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a goup of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger.
Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."
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