Is This Our Future?
Google’s Chief Engineer: People Will Soon Upload Their Entire Brains To Computers
By RT
 |
There are around 377 million results on
Google.com for the query “Can I live forever?” Ask that question
to company’s top engineer, though, and you’re likely to hear an
answer that’s much more concise.
Simply put, Google’s Ray Kurzweil says
immortality is only a few years away. Digital immortality, at
least.
Kurzweil, 64, was only brought on to Google late
last year, but that hasn’t stopped him from making headlines
already. During a conference in New York City last week, the
company’s director of engineering said that the growth of
biotechnology is so quickly paced that that he predicts our
lives will be drastically different in just a few decades.
According to Kurzweil, humans will soon be able
to upload their entire brains onto computers. After then, other
advancements won’t be too far behind.
“The life expectancy was 20, 1,000 years ago,”
Kurzweil said over the weekend at the Global Future 2045 World
Congress in New York City, CNBC's Cadie Thompson reported. “We
doubled it in 200 years. This will go into high gear within 10
and 20 years from now, probably less than 15, we will be
reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone
by because of scientific progress.”
"Somewhere between 10 and 20 years, there is
going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine,"
he said.
In his 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near,”
Kurzweil predicted that ongoing achievements in biotechnology
would mean that by the middle of the century, “humans will
develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves,
either biological or nonbiologicial,” so that people can
have “a biological body at one time and not at another, then
have it again, then change it.” He also said there will soon
be “software-based humans” who will “live out on the
Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them,
including holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected
bodies and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms.”
Those nanobot swarms might still be a bit away, but given the vast capabilities already achieved since the publication of his book, Kurzweil said in New York last week that more and more of the human body will soon be synced up to computers, both for backing up our thoughts and to help stay in good health.
"There's already fantastic therapies to
overcome heart disease, cancer and every other neurological
disease based on this idea of reprogramming the software,"
Kurzweil at the conference. "These are all examples of
treating biology as software. ...These technologies will be a
1,000 times more powerful than they were a decade ago. ...These
will be 1,000 times more powerful by the end of the decade. And
a million times more powerful in 20 years."
In “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil
acknowledged that Moore’s Law of Computer suggests that the
power of computer doubles, on average, every two years. At that
rate, he wrote, “We're going to become increasingly
non-biological to the point where the non-biological part
dominates and the biological part is not important anymore.”
“Based on conservative estimates of the
amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human
brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a
billion-fold,” The Daily Mail quoted Kurzweil.
Kurzweil joined Google in December 2012 and is a
1999 winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
In the 1970s, Kurzweil was responsible for creating the first
commercial text-to-speech synthesizer.
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