Futurist Ray Kurzweil says AI could drastically extend our lifespan

We are beginning to use AI in both drug and intervention discovery and design, and by the end of the 2020s, biological simulators will be advanced enough to generate some important safety and efficacy data in hours rather than the years typically required for clinical trials.The move from human trials to simulated in silico trials will be driven by two forces working in opposite directions.

On the one hand, there are legitimate concerns about safety: we don't want simulations to miss relevant medical facts and lead to dangerous drugs being falsely declared safe. On the other hand, simulation trials can use much larger numbers of simulated patients, studying a range of comorbidities and demographic factors and telling doctors in detail how new treatments may affect different patients.

Moreover, many lives could be saved by getting life-saving drugs to patients faster. The move to simulcast trials will be fraught with political uncertainty and bureaucratic resistance, but ultimately the efficacy of the technology will likely prevail.

As a result of these technologies, the old linear models of progress in medicine and lifespan will no longer be appropriate. Our natural intuition and retrospective view of history suggests that progress in the next 20 years will be roughly the same as the past 20, but this ignores the exponential nature of the process. Knowledge that dramatic lifespan extension is on the horizon is widespread, yet most people, physicians and patients, are still unaware of this major revolution in our ability to reprogram our outdated biology.

Ray Kurzweil: “Combining AI and the Singularity is Near”

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

The 2030s will see another health revolution. In my health book (co-authored with Terry Grossman, MD), I call this the third bridge to radical life extension: medical nanorobots. This intervention will greatly extend our immune system. Our natural immune system, including T cells that can intelligently destroy hostile microbes, is so effective against many types of pathogens that we wouldn't survive for long without it.

But this virus evolved at a time when food and resources were very limited and most humans had short life spans. If early humans reproduced young and died in their 20s, evolution had no reason to favor mutations that bolstered our immune systems against threats that primarily appear later in life, such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases (often caused by abnormal proteins called prions). Similarly, our evolutionary ancestors, who existed before animals were domesticated, did not develop strong defenses against viruses, because many viruses originate from livestock.

Nanorobots will not only be programmed to destroy all kinds of pathogens, but they will also be able to treat metabolic diseases. Many diseases result from the malfunction of major internal organs, except for the heart and brain, which pump and remove substances into the bloodstream. For example, type 1 diabetes occurs when the islet cells of the pancreas are unable to produce insulin.

Medical nanorobots will monitor the blood supply and increase or decrease various substances such as hormones, nutrients, oxygen, carbon dioxide, toxins, etc. to augment or replace organ function. Using these technologies, disease and aging will be largely eradicated by the end of the 2030s.

The 2020s will be a decade of increasingly dramatic pharmaceutical and nutritional discoveries, driven in large part by advanced AI. While they won't be enough to cure aging on their own, they will be enough to extend many people's lifespans to the third bridge. So by around 2030, the most hardworking and informed people will reach lifespan escape velocity, a tipping point that allows them to add a year or more of their remaining life expectancy for every calendar year that passes. The sands of time will start to flow in, rather than out.

The fourth bridge to dramatically extending lifespan is the ability to essentially back up who we are as well as all the digital information we carry with us on a daily basis. If we extend our biological neocortex with a realistic (but much faster) model of the neocortex in the cloud, our thinking will become a hybrid of the biological thinking we are familiar with today and its digital extensions. The digital part will expand exponentially and eventually become dominant. The digital part will become powerful enough to fully understand, model, and simulate the biological part, and will be able to back up all our thinking. This scenario becomes more realistic as we approach the singularity in the mid-2040s.

The ultimate goal is to take our fate into our own hands, not to live as long as we want and leave our metaphorical fate to its own devices. But why do people choose to die? Research suggests that people who commit suicide are often in excruciating physical or psychological pain. Advances in medicine and neuroscience cannot prevent all such cases, but they do make them much rarer.

How on earth can you die once you have backed yourself up? The cloud already stores many backups of all the information you contain, and this capability will be greatly enhanced by the 2040s. Destroying all copies of yourself may be nearly impossible. Designing a mind backup system to allow people to easily choose to delete their files in order to maximize personal autonomy would inherently create security risks, as people could be tricked or coerced into making such a choice, increasing vulnerability to cyber attacks.

On the other hand, limiting people's ability to control their most personal data would infringe on important freedoms, but I am optimistic that we can put in place appropriate safeguards, just as we have successfully protected nuclear weapons for decades.

If we were to restore our mental files after biological death, would we really be restoring ourselves? This is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one that most people already alive today have to grapple with throughout their lives.

Finally, some have ethical concerns about fairness and inequality. A common objection to such predictions about lifespan is that only the wealthy can afford radically life-extending technologies. My answer is to point to the history of the cell phone. As recently as 30 years ago, you certainly had to be wealthy to have a cell phone, and the device didn't work very well. Today there are billions of phones, and they do a lot more than just make calls. They are now memory-expanding devices that give us access to almost all of human knowledge. Such technologies start out expensive and limited in functionality. By the time they are perfected, they are affordable to almost everyone. The reason is the exponential price-performance increase inherent in information technology.

Excerpted from The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI by Ray Kurzweil, published by Viking. Copyright 2024 Ray Kurzweil. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House.

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