Do you want to live forever? Be patient for 35 years!
Eternal virtual life will come in 2045
Natalia Bokareva, BFM.roo
2045 — a person becomes immortal. This forecast is made by the American inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, a proponent of the theory of technological singularity. Merging with the machine, a person will find a new form of existence, which is not afraid of old age and even death. The American magazine TIME writes about the theory of singularity and the search for immortality.
Kurzweil, who has received 39 patents and received honorary doctorates from 19 higher educational institutions, is known as one of the pioneers in the field of optical text recognition and computer speech recognition technologies. He is sure that the time will come soon when computers will be smarter than humans. When this happens, the human body, the human mind and the very structure of civilization will be completely and irrevocably transformed. And this moment is not only inevitable, but very near. According to Kurzweil's calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it today is expected in 35 years.
According to one theory, humanity expects to merge with smart machines and turn into supercyborgs, for whom computer technology will become a continuation of intellectual functions. Artificial intelligence may allow you to cope with aging and extend your life indefinitely. It is possible that we will be able to scan consciousness into computers and live inside them, like software, forever, virtually. Or computers will rise up against humanity and destroy it. Be that as it may, all these theories assume one common transformation, the name of which is the singularity. The concept of singularity describes a hypothetical explosive increase in the speed of scientific and technological progress, presumably resulting from the creation of artificial intelligence and self-replicating machines, the integration of humans with computing machines, or a significant increase in the capabilities of the human brain due to biotechnology.
A whole community of supporters is forming around the idea of the singularity, it's almost a subculture. For the third year in the USA, there is a Singularity University created by NASA and Google. Singularity is also studied at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in San Francisco, which organizes annual conferences on this topic, reminiscent of the atmosphere of the Davos Forum and congresses of ufologists.
The idea itself is by no means new. Back in 1965, the British mathematician Hood described the "intellectual explosion", defining the concept of a superintelligent machine that significantly surpasses the best minds of mankind in any kind of intellectual activity. Since the development of machines is also one of such activities, it means that a superintelligent machine is able to create an even more perfect system. So there is an explosive growth of intellectual resources and a person is far behind. The last necessary invention of his will be the first system of superhuman intelligence.
In favor of theories about the creation of a super machine, arguments are made that the speed of computers is growing rapidly, and it is growing faster and faster. And there is no reason to think that the development of computer power should stop sometime. Thus, at some point they will surpass human intelligence.
In the 1980s, Kurzweil tried to determine the pace of technological progress from pragmatic goals. While doing his research, he thought about the fact that even great inventions can fail if they appear before their time. At that time, Kurzweil knew about Moore's law, according to which the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Gordon Moore came to the conclusion that if this trend continues, the power of computing devices can grow exponentially in a relatively short period of time. Kurzweil began to build another curve, comparing the power parameters of computing systems that can be purchased for $ 1,000. He compared performance indicators in millions of instructions per second (MIPS).
It turned out about the same as Moore's. The speed, correlated with the price of $ 1,000, doubled every two years. Exponential curves were obtained on the graphs. The pattern was invariably observed, even when Kurzweil expanded the range of analysis for the pre-transistor period up to the 1900s.
He found the same dynamics in other fields of science. The number of Internet hosts and patents in the field of nanotechnology is growing exponentially, and the cost of wireless access services is also sharply decreasing. Progress has an exponential nature, not a linear one, the scientist realized.
Based on the exponential theory of progress, Kurzweil predicts that by the mid-2020s it will be possible to reverse engineer the human brain, that is, analyze the mechanisms of its functioning in order to reproduce. By the end of the decade, computers will reach the intellectual potential of man. Kurzweil attributes the moment of the singularity to 2045. Due to the significant increase in computer power and their significant reduction in price, by that time the volume of artificial intelligence created will be billions of times greater than the total intellectual resource of humanity that exists today.
At last year's singularity summit, the second most popular topic after artificial intelligence was increasing life expectancy. The limitations of the capabilities of the human body, which we consider to be final and unchangeable, are perceived by singularists as a solvable problem. The same applies to death. Aging is a kind of disease, which means it needs to be treated.
It is known that one of the causes of physical changes in the body as a result of aging is associated with telomeres. This is the name of the protective end sections of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres contract until they are completely depleted, then the cell can no longer reproduce and dies. But there is an enzyme telomerase that stops this process, which explains in particular the resistance of cancer cells. So why not treat healthy cells with telomerase? A similar experiment was reported in November in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard University Medical School. They conducted an experiment with telomerase in mice that showed age-related changes in the body. The signs of aging have been eliminated. The result was not only an improvement in the condition of mice, but also a rejuvenation of the body.
One of the world's leading experts on the problems of increasing life expectancy, geneticist Aubrey de Grey, considers aging as an accumulation of wear and tear, which he divides into seven categories, for each of which restorative medicine must one day find some solution.
The human body is a machine that has a set of functions and which naturally gradually wears out. In principle, this wear can be periodically eliminated, de Gray believes.
Kurzweil is also serious about life extension issues. Together with Dr. Terry Grossman, he published two books in which he revealed his approach prescribing 200 different pills and active supplements per day. He says that he has practically recovered from diabetes and at the age of 62 feels 20 years younger. Kurzweil wants to live up to the era of the singularity.
Why not get away from the painful imprisonment in which the soul is chained to the mortal body of an animal, and not connect it with an immortal robot? Kurzweil says that the idea of prolonging life meets even more resistance in his audience than exponential growth curves going to infinity. It is difficult for us to predict and imagine it, because thinking naturally tends to linear forecasting, which a person uses, for example, escaping from a predator and determining where the beast may be in 20 seconds.
"There are those who can accept the idea that computers will become smarter than people. But the idea of a sharp increase in life expectancy causes particular difficulties. People put a lot into shaping their philosophy of life and death," says Kurzweil.
Perhaps some of the brain functions cannot be reproduced by any resources of even the most powerful computing machines. The neurochemical structure that creates ephemeral chaos, which we call consciousness, is analog in nature and may be too complex to be replicated in a digital semiconductor circuit.
Biologist Dennis Bray is sure that despite the fact that biological structures function like electrical circuits, the difference between them is huge due to the huge number of possible organic states.
As a result of numerous biological processes, multiple chemical modifications of protein molecules arise, which also differ due to belonging to certain structures in different cells of the body. The combinatorial variety of possible states of the living provides an almost infinite resource for storing information about the past and present and a unique opportunity to prepare for future events. Against this background, computer zeros and ones seem to be too raw material, Bray believes.
And even if we recognize the singularity as a possible prospect, a number of unsolvable questions arise. If I can scan consciousness into a computer, will it still be me? What are the geopolitical and socio-economic aspects of the singularity? Who decides who is immortal? If we come to immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, does life lose its meaning? Having conquered death, do we not lose our human essence?
Kurzweil admits that the singularity carries fundamental risks already because we do not know what a highly developed artificial intelligence will do once it settles on planet Earth. Therefore, scientists want to be sure that artificial intelligence will not only develop, but will be friendly. You don't need to be a superintelligent cyborg to understand that the introduction of a higher form of life in your own biosphere is a fundamental mistake that violates Darwinian evolution.
At the same time, Kurzweil is sure that preventing the singularity by prohibiting the development of technology is not only impossible, but unethical and possibly dangerous. "Such a ban would mean a totalitarian system. It won't work. The technologies will simply go underground, and the scientists from whom we expect to develop protection will not have access to the necessary tools," Kurzweil believes.
Kurzweil himself does not see any fundamental difference between organic flesh and silicon material, which does not allow the latter to become thinking. He is not ready to prostrate himself before the power of the human brain and does not believe that it is impossible to simulate neuromechanism or create software that would not be inferior to it in power and flexibility.
Since 2005, an ambitious Blue Brain project has been underway at the Polytechnic School in Lausanne, whose goal is to create a poneuronal simulation of the mammalian brain using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. At the moment, it was possible to simulate one of the structures of the rat brain, consisting of 10 thousand neurons. The head of the project, Professor Henry Markram, claims that a fully functional artificial human brain can be created in the next 10 years.
By definition, the future after the singularity is unknowable for our linear-chemical-animal brain, but Kurzweil has a lot of theories on this score. He forces himself to think big.
According to Kurzweil's concept, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies will allow a person to control his body and the surrounding world at the molecular level. Progress is hyper-accelerated. We discard Darwin's theory and take evolution into our own hands. The human genome becomes a code that needs to be tested, optimized, and, if necessary, rewritten. The endless continuation of life becomes a reality, people die only if they want to. We will be able to scan consciousness into computers and move to a virtual existence or change the physical shell — from a mortal body to an immortal robot. This, according to Kurzweil, will be the fate of man as a species.
Or it won't. Anyway, the more we hear about the singularity, the more we encounter its evidence in the most unexpected directions. Five years ago, there was no such thing as 600 million people communicating in a single computer network. Now there is Facebook. Five years ago, no one "memorized" routes and conversations using a portable device like an iPhone. Is it really impossible to imagine the next step, when the iPhone will not be in a person's hand, but in the skull?
Already today, 30 thousand patients with Parkinson's disease have been fitted with neuroimplants. Google is experimenting with computer systems that can drive a car. 2,000 robots have been sent to Afghanistan... Perhaps even the ideas of Kurzweil and de Grey will one day seem old-fashioned. Nothing becomes obsolete as quickly as the future, writes TIME.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru21.02.2011