Will humans be able to achieve immortality by 2030? Ex-Google engineer believes so!

Since forever, humans have been obsessed with the idea of immortality. This fixation with outsmarting death can be seen in old stories, myths, and scientific writings, going as far back as ancient Egypt. Guess what? Ray Kurzweil, the ex-Google engineer, says we’ll crack the immortality code by 2030, and he’s got a pretty impressive track record, with 86 percent of his 147 predictions turning out to be spot-on.

Kurzweil had a chat on the Adagio YouTube channel, where he talked about how advancements in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are all set to bring us those nifty age-reversing “nanobots.” So, these little robots are gonna swoop in and fix up our worn-out cells and tissues as we get older, and they’ll even give us superhero-like immunity to stuff like cancer.

Kurzweil was the brains behind a bunch of groundbreaking inventions. He cooked up the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first all-angles optical character recognition, a reading machine for the blind that turned print into speech, the initial text-to-speech synthesizer, a music synth that could mimic a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and even the first speech recognition system with a big vocabulary that hit the market. Quite the inventor, huh? So, will his prediction about immortality come true?

Also Read: Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain-implant venture gains human trials nod: For better or worse?

Is it possible to achieve this in just 8 years?

People are buzzing and raising their eyebrows about the idea that we could pull this off by 2030. The notion of curing all the really bad diseases sounds like a stretch, according to the Daily Mail.

Google scooped up Kurzweil back in 2012, telling him to dive into some cool stuff with machine learning and language processing. But just so you know, he’s been making tech predictions way before that.

Back in 1990, he called it that a computer would outplay the world’s chess champ by 2000, and guess what? It actually went down in 1997 when Deep Blue took down Gary Kasparov. Kurzweil dropped another mind-blowing prediction in ’99, saying that by 2023, a thousand-buck laptop would match the computing and storage capacity of a human brain.

So, this ex-Google tech whiz thinks that technology is on the verge of being so darn powerful that it’ll basically let us live forever, and they call this whole shebang the singularity.

Will AI take over?

The singularity, according to LifeBoat, is that crazy moment when AI becomes smarter than us humans and totally shifts the course of our evolution. Kurzweil, who calls himself a futurist, threw out a prediction that the technological singularity would roll in by 2045. He also said that AI would ace a legit Turing test by 2029.

This test checks if a machine can act as smart as a human, so much so that you can’t even tell the difference. Kurzweil also mentioned that machines are already boosting our intelligence, and if we hook them up to our neocortex (that fancy part of our brain), it’ll make us even smarter thinkers.

“The singularity will allow us to transcened these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want.”

Despite what some folks are worried about, he’s all about the idea that sticking computers in our noggins will actually make us better.

“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” he said. “We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.”

Also Read: Can AI really help us address climate change?

Will AI and humans join forces?

Forget that scary future where machines rule the world, according to Kurzweil. He’s all about this vision where humans and machines team up, creating a combo that’ll actually improve us. You know, the idea of tiny nanomachines getting put inside our bodies has been a staple in sci-fi for ages. Think about Star Trek, where they had these minuscule robots called nanites that swooped in to fix up busted cells in the body.

Over a decade ago, the US National Science Foundation made a prediction that “network-enhanced telepathy,” which is basically sending thoughts over the internet, would become a real thing by the 2020s.

Even though this prediction might sound straight out of a sci-fi flick, Kurzweil has a track record of making some pretty spot-on forecasts. For instance, he called that a computer would beat the world chess champ before 2000, predicted that by 2009, we’d mostly be using all sorts of portable computers, and foresaw that by 2010, almost everyone would be wirelessly linked into an info network. It’s like he’s got a crystal ball or something!

When you look at all the progress happening in artificial intelligence and companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, BrainCO, or MindMaze, Kurzweil’s predictions don’t seem all that crazy. But the big question remains: will we really achieve immortality? Well, waiting is the only option!