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Google's Ray Kurzweil Wants To Live Forever, and He Thinks It Includes Nanobots (playboy.com)
Reader Esther Schindler writes: Whatever else he is (author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, Google employee), Ray Kurzweil is undeniably fascinating, with intriguing predictions about the future -- some of which might be accurate. In an interview, he discusses life extension and technology, as well as how he thinks they'll be connected. "When people talk about the future of technology, especially artificial intelligence, they very often have the common dystopian Hollywood-movie model of us versus the machines. My view is that we will use these tools as we've used all other tools -- to broaden our reach. And in this case, we'll be extending the most important attribute we have, which is our intelligence." Part of what I like is that he sees ways to use technology for good and not for evil. "By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud. So we'll have an additional neocortex, just like we developed an additional neocortex 2 million years ago, and we'll use it just as we used the frontal cortex: to add additional levels of abstraction. We'll create more profound forms of communication than we're familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes. We'll be funnier. We'll be sexier. We'll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments."Kurzweil also thinks his diet can help him live forever. Kurzweil claims that he spends "a few thousand dollars per day" (or roughly a million dollar a year) on diet pills and eating right. According to a Financial Times report from last year, Kurzweil's breakfast includes:Berries (85 calories for a cup), Dark chocolate infused with espresso (170 calories for an ounce), Smoked salmon and mackerel (100 calories for a 3-ounce serving), Vanilla soy milk (100 calories for a cup)
Stevia (zero calories), Porridge (150 to 350 calories for half a cup, depending on ingredients and cooking method), and Green tea (zero calories). Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day (down from 250 a few years ago, technology has advanced, you see) for "heart health" to "eye health, sexual health, and brain health."
He's going to die just like the rest of us
...and probably from liver damage, considering he takes 100 pills a day.
He may be a nut, but he's doing something different than most people, so it constitutes a meaningful experiment, albeit not a very good one. No one can say for sure at the moment that his diet won't work for extending life, but should it eventually be the case that he lives an extraordinary length of time, it will be reasonable to suggest that his diet may have had something to do with it. It seems unlikely, but if he wants to do the experiment on himself, I'll be interested to see how it turns out.
Ray never responded to the Slashdot interview that was begun in December. https://features.slashdot.org/...
That's actually WHY Slashdot hates Transhumanism - it conflicts with a lot of other dreams. Goodbye economic equality, goodbye natural offspring, goodbye 100% human DNA, goodbye gender, goodbye environmental preservation, goodbye most religions, goodbye unhackable organs... It's one of the most dangerous ideas in history, echoing back to the Nietzschean superman - which won't itself even be a man.
If we're going to get a Star Trek future, it will be one in which Khan wins.