Immortality is attainable by 2030: Google scientist

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Do you really want to live forever?

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that humans will achieve immortality in just seven years.

The 75-year-old computer scientist and former Google engineer, who received the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002, made this shocking prediction — and many others — in recent decades.

Now, as the fated date approaches, Kurzweil’s comments on immortality have resurfaced in a two–part YouTube series by tech vlogger Adagio.

Kurzweil has accurately prophesied technological achievements in the past — including the widespread use of laptops and an IBM computer’s win over the world chess champion Garry Kasparov — inspiring a cult following among other future-thinkers.

Adagio’s new videos, which have collectively racked up 87,000 plus views, revisits claims that Kurzweil made in this 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near,” in which he predicted that technology will allow humans achieve to everlasting life by 2030.

“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid [Alan] Turing test,” Kurzweil told Futurism in 2017 — referring to experiments that challenge computers to think like us — “and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence.”

“I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billionfold by merging with the [artificial] intelligence we have created.”

Kurzweil has previously suggested that, in less than a decade, humans will have created technology to fend off aging and illness with microscopic robots, sent to repair our bodies on a cellular level. And, indeed, medical engineers are currently fast at work on these disease-fighting bots.

He also claims that such nanotechnology will allow people to eat whatever they want while staying thin and energized.

“Nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, call for needed additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local area network, and send the rest of the food we eat on its way to be passed through for elimination,” Kurzweil suggested in a 2003 blog post.

While Kurzweil’s predictions seem a bit far-fetched to some, many of his previous claims have come true.

In fact, in 2010 the scientist claimed in a report he himself authored (presumably also serving as his own fact-checker) to have hit an 86% accuracy rate with 147 predictions he made in the 1990s.

Among a long list, he accurately predicted that consumers will be able to design their own clothes with precise measurements and style requirements from their home computers by 1999; that the world’s best chess player would lose to a computer by 2000; that people would primarily use portable computers, in a wide range of sizes and shapes, by 2009; and that the majority of the world would have high-bandwidth wireless internet access at all times by 2010.

Silicon Valley billionaires including Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos have meanwhile put a lot of stock in Kurzweil’s predictions, dedicating their careers to developing technology that will enable humans to live well into their hundreds.

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