Am I dating myself by thinking Kurzweil is still relevant?

2029: Human-level AI

2045: The Singularity - machine intelligence 1 billion times more powerful than all human intelligence

Based on exponential growth in computing. He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits. His track record is mixed, but 2029 looks more credible post-GPT-5. The 2045 claim remains highly speculative.

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williamcotton 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The biggest problem I've had with Kurzweil and the exponential growth curve is that the elbow depends entirely on how you plot and scale the axis. With a certain vantage point we have arguably been on an exponential curve since the advent of Homo Sapiens.

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somenameforme 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I lost all respect for him after reading about his views on medical immortality. His argument is that over time human life expectancy has been constantly increasing * and he calculated that based on some arbitrary rate of acceleration, that science would be expanding human life expectancy by more than a year, per year - medical immortality in other words, and all expected to happen just prior to the time he's reaching his final years.

The overwhelming majority of all gains in human life expectancy have come due to reductions in infant mortality. When you hear about things like a '40' year life expectancy in the past it doesn't mean that people just dropped dead at 40. Rather if you have a child that doesn't make it out of childhood, and somebody else that makes it to 80 - you have a life expectancy of ~40.

If you look back to the upper classes of old their life expectancy was extremely similar to those of today. So for instance in modern history, of the 15 key Founding Fathers, 7 lived to at least 80 years old: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, John Jay. John Adams himself lived to 90. The youngest to die were Hamilton who died in a duel, and John Hancock who died of gout of an undocumented cause - it can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

All the others lived into their 60s and 70s. So their overall life expectancy was pretty much the same as we have today. And this was long before vaccines or even us knowing that surgeons washing their hands before surgery was a good thing to do. It's the same as you go back further into history. A study [1] of all men of renown in Ancient Greece was 71.3 [1], and that was from thousands of years ago!

Life expectancy at birth is increasing, but longevity is barely moving. And as Kurzweil has almost certainly done plentiful research on this topic, he is fully aware of this. Cognitive dissonance strikes again.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

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modeless a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is true, and I tend to believe that indefinite human lifespan extension will come too late for anyone who is already an adult today including myself. But I do think that it will come, mostly as a consequence of advanced AI accelerating medical research. It may be wishful thinking to believe that it will happen within our lifetimes, but that doesn't mean it won't ever happen.

	▲	somenameforme 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		While it'd be absurd to say it's impossible, the one thing I'd observe is that it's almost certain that a precursor to anything like this would be achieving something comparable in a simpler species. And that would likely come long before we might be able to see something similar in humans. For instance the fruit fly has been studied and experimented on extensively, particularly for aging, for over a century now. But the results remain modest. The biggest breakthrough was in the 80s when somebody was able to roughly double their life expectancy from 2 months to 4 through artificial selection. But the context there is that fruit flies are a textbook 'quantity over quality' species, meaning that survival is not generally selected for, whereas humans are an equally textbook 'quality over quantity' species meaning that survival is one of the key things we select for. In other words, there was likely a lot more genetic low hanging fruit for survivability with fruit flies than there is for humans. So I don't know. We need some serious acceleration and I'm not seeing much of anything when looked at with a critical eye.

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asah 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is backward looking. Future advances don't have to work like this

Example: 20ish years ago, stage IV cancer was a quick death sentence. Now many people live with various stage IV cancers for many years and some even "die of sending else" these advancements obviously skew towards helping older people.

	▲	somenameforme a day ago \| parent [-]
		Your claim doesn't argue against the issue. Even if we accept that you're correct there, you're again speaking of more people getting to their 'expiration date' rather than expanding that date itself. If you cure cancer, heart disease, and everything else - we're still not going to be living to a 100, or even near it, on average. The reason humans die of 'old age' is not because of any specific disease but because of advanced senescence. Your entire body just starts to fail. At that point basically anything can kill you. And sometimes there won't even be any particular cause, but instead your heart will simply stop beating one night while you sleep. This is how you can see people who look like they're in great shape for their age, yet the next month they're dead.

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2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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Barrin92 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's curious that Kurzweil's predictions about transcending biology align so closely with his expected lifespan. Reminds me of someone saying, if you ask a researcher for a timeline of a breakthrough they'll give you the expected span of their career.

Hegel thought history ended with the Prussian state, Fukuyama thought it ended in liberal America, Paul thought judgement day was so close you need not bother to marry, the singularity always comes around when the singularians get old. Funny how that works

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akomtu a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits.

The merge with a machine 1 million times more intelligent than us is the same as letting AI use our bodies. I'd rather live in cave. Iirc, the 7th episode of Black Mirror starts with this plot line.