Spare me the Kurzweil acolytes.
Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, is known for his wildly-accurate predictions — back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing information via the internet, among many other spot-on forecasts.
Now, his latest prediction is that humans are going to live forever, and he thinks it’s going to happen as soon as 2029.
He’s like the Amazing Criswell, isn’t he?
I lived through the 1980s, too, and those predictions were so mundane I could have made them. That’s the thing: he says a lot of trivial stuff that is already accepted knowledge (“Computers will get faster! Medicine will treat diseases in new ways! I will get older!”) that allows him to build a baseline of success that encourages people to think his other, wilder predictions will also come true. They won’t. Like Criswell, he says a lot of vague bunk, and his failures are just ignored…like those of any common ‘psychic’.
His prediction that we’ll live forever if we can just make it to 2029 are simply laughable. Modern medicine shows no such trend at work. The basis for his claim is aburd:
“By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system,” he said. “Our immune system is great, but it evolved thousands of years ago when conditions were different.”
thousands of years ago
? What did our ancestors do a hundred thousand years ago?
He believes that nanobots — microscopic, self-propelled robots — will act as T cells, which are blood cells involved in our immune responses. Using T cells to attack cancer cells is already an idea that researchers are using in some cancer immunotherapy, but Kurzweil wants to take it a step further. Instead of harnessing the body’s own T cells, he wants to send in nanobots to do the job.
“They’re the size of a blood cell and are quite intelligent,” he told Hochman. “I actually watched one of my T cells attack bacteria on a microscope slide. We could have one programmed to deal with all pathogens and could download new software from the internet if a new type of enemy such as a new biological virus emerged.”
That is painfully naive. Does he even realize that there are multiple kinds of T cells, that they are part of an integrated network of cooperating cells, that they have to carry out a delicate balancing act of working against some antigens while not triggering on others? He seems to be imagining sending in a robot with a laser to kill ‘bad’ cells.
Plus, his tiny nanobots are going to be ‘programmed’ (how?) to deal with ‘all pathogens’ (is there a list somewhere?) and can ‘download new software from the internet’. The ignorance just makes me want to cry. But this is his schtick: he just borrows terms and ideas current in the culture right now, and claims we’ll be doing exactly the same thing, only with another tech buzzword, ‘nanobots’. He’s an idiot. He’s a clever idiot, though, who has fooled a lot of gullible people, and has even bamboozled Google.
He also claims this:
Kurzweil is 67 years old, but claims his “biological age” is in the late 40s, courtesy of his “Immortality Diet.”
Nope. He looks his age, just as I do. He’s had the advantage of the privileged life of a well-off office worker, which does help stave off the worst ravages, the product of a hard life, but there’s nothing especially young about his appearance. He looks to be of an age with Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is 75.
But then, religious leaders do get that kind of praise from their followers, no matter how decrepit they get. I’ve been in a room full of young Mormon women telling me how youthful and virile and sexy Ezra Taft Benson was…when he was in his 90s, feeble and vacant, and doomed to die a few years later. Same thing.
If we lived forever that would really complicate retirement planning.
” I predict!………..”
thanks for reminding me of the great Criswell, after you mentioned him I was not sure who you were talking about until you mentioned the f’n diet and how old / young he looks
Criswell, now he was pretty funny!
uncle frogy
To be fair, I don’t think that’s necessarily hard- you just have to spout the bullshit the bros running Google (or for that matter, many members of the CEO classes) want to hear.
I love how predictions about living forever always place the achieve by dates within the lifespan of the futurist and/or the lifespans of their fans.
2029, huh? It feels like he’s moved the date up – didn’t it used to be in the 2030s? Maybe the fear of death is getting too near for his liking (although he’s said that if he dies, he wants to be cryogenically frozen).
Yuck. I can thankfully say that as a Mormon (now atheist) growing up when Hinckley was President of the Mormon Church, I never heard anyone describe him as sexy.
About 10 years ago, maybe a little more, not less (reported online by an eyewitness but I dont have a link to hand), Kurzweil gave his spiel and asked an audience member how old they thought he was, just based on looks. “Late 50s” came the instant reply, and Ray was visibly upset.
About sixty years ago Father Divine used to release photographs of himself, showing that he was getting younger every year. Then he died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Divine
[His wife, Mother Divine, is still running the old church.]
My thought about updating my immune system via the internet…
“Holy crap, do you realize how badly you could mess up my health with a computer virus or buggy software?”
Any attempts to turn me into a cyborg will not include wi-fi. All the futurists don’t seem to think about all the ways you can mess with software connected to human bodies, let alone the logistic ability to do this.
“back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics”
I suppose I shouldn’t quibble with the genius predictor guy, but neither of those things actually exist as real world items. Should those really be counted as fulfilled predictions?
Kinda like Atticus O’Sullivan’s Immortali-tea, eh? If he actually had an immortality diet, he wouldn’t need all the nifty tech to keep him alive, would he?
Setting aside any questions of feasibility, that could end very, very badly.
HTTP Error 404: Antibody Not Found
You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have nanobots with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. Now evidently our tentacled hordemaster informs me that that can’t be done.
Can you remind me what we pay PZ for?
I’ve been involved in HIV vaccine research as a member of a community advisory board. I am very familiar with the slow pace of researching novel technologies. Given that we are barely able to make nano sized gears and nowhere near to creating autonomous nanobots, and given that we are still learning how the immune systems work, how they mesh together and how they can go wrong…. It ain’t gonna happen, not in the next 15 years.
I once wasted an afternoon making my own carefully cherry-picked technology chart (as Kurzweil has done) including inventions such as:
– Taming fire
– Alliance with the dog
– Taming horses
– The knife
– Bread
– Agriculture
– Irrigation
– The plow
– The ox yoke
And
– The spear
– The sword
– The bow
– The lost wax process
etc…
Then down to:
– Paper
– Movable type
– The crane
and eventually:
– Bessemer process
– Bacterial model of infection
– Steam engine
– Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixing process
and recently:
– Those toilets that take 5 flushes to get the poo down
– The internet of things (internet toothbrush)
– iTunes
– Java
– Microsoft office
We’re fucked, I tell ya! Humanity is heading off a cliff!!! We used to invent really important stuff and now we can’t even invent an mp4 player that doesn’t require a supercomputer’s processors to run it.
The problem with these “futurists” is that they always want to make a bunch of predictions NOW NOW NOW, hoping a few of them will come true so they can make a rep while they’re still alive to cash in on it.
Sci-fi writers usually are a bit more cautious. I think the nanobot prediction may well come true — but probably not until the 22nd century when none of us will be around to benefit.
Sci-fi writers usually are a bit more cautious
The good ones are.
I enjoy Charlie Stross’ diary/blog and its commentariat. He does think about this stuff and I love his perspective. He has some high horsepower weirdos and other professional writers that frequent the discussion so it’s often pretty interesting.
Hmmmm. Kurzweil Kruzweil Krizwel Crizwel Criswell
Well, he’s probably not completely wrong, that’s the problem with predictions. Just look at the progress we’ve made in the last 50 years, do you think that’s going to stop anytime soon. I think engineered antibodies and similar tech are all but inevitable (unless superseded by even better methods). But in 10 years? Nah.
Six Million Dollar Man aired in the 1970’s and there were plenty of books with similar ideas, so he was long beaten to the punch on predicting the advanced prosthetics bit which still are not readily available for most people needing them. Various forms of auto-pilot have been in use for quite some time and self-driving cars are still not commercially available. Has he never heard of any of Gerry Anderson’s shows like Thunderbirds? They had wristwatch video communicators.
I’ll play long and assume he’s right. Lets say that by 2029 there will be an amazing medical breakthrough and people will live forever. But, there’s a catch (isn’t there always?) Assuming I’m still alive, I’ll be in my mid-70s. Unless he’s also predicting turning back the clock — I’d happily go back to being my 30 year old self– this begins to take on Swiftian overtones. Yes, Mr Foster, here’s your injection. You will now be 75 forever. Err, no thanks
MattP … @ # 20: … Thunderbirds? They had wristwatch video communicators.
The original Dick Tracy newspaper comic strip had those in the early ’60s, maybe sooner. Not to mention those weird one-man [sic] antigravity cans with armpit-crutch supports.
Where are our jetbelts & Batcopters, Comrade Kurzweil?
“As soon as 2029”? Isn’t that interesting though?
They key to any immortality claim, what’s called the hook, it’s always just within most people’s reach. Without that hook you can’t grift the suckers.
If anyone claimed that we’d have immortality in the next millenium. Well then, who gives a rats ass, what good will that do me? People will throw their money at something else that’s making promises of attainable results.
Religious cults have been offering immortality to the gullible for a very long time. There are some quibbles about how it’s done but it’s the same basic idea.
But as long as one remains alive he cannot call himself “immortal” because no matter how long one lives you never get to “forever” just as if you count 1,2,3… you will never get to infinity however long you keep at it. There are still as many years ahead as you have lived. He is resolving to count to infinity! What a boring thing to do.
Personally I think he is still chasing that magic goody that’s supposed to lie ahead of of us in something we call the “future”. But if we are forever chasing the future we won’t live, we will just endlessly postpone living. As someone you quoted in a long ago poste said, more or less, life is not a task to be completed, it is a dance to be danced.
Think of the course of history if we had gotten to the bread before the knife! Wars would be fought with baguettes!
Oh, just btw, that aint “his latest prediction,” he’s been goofing on that shit for decades. Seems to have worked quite well for him in the short term.
Infinitesimals, that’s my answer. Live in the moment, and pretty soon another one will come along. And then another. And finally you’ll get woken from your meditative trance by the bill collector beating down the door. And then you die. Tough old world.
I can’t think of many things worse for the future of the planet than humans living forever.
#19
“I think engineered antibodies and similar tech are all but inevitable (unless superseded by even better methods)”
They already have engineered antibodies, that is what companies like Genentech do, it saved my life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetuximab
Fuck this claim. Our immune systems didn’t magically stop fighting off infections just because we built cities. We’re still running like the Red Queen, just like every other critter on this planet. If our immune systems stopped evolving, we’d be extinct.
How can anyone listen to this arrogant, ignorant asshole?
Internet of things? Nah. It’s the Internet of Shit now.
I have just spent an amusing hour or so googling “Amazing Criswell”.
How is it possible that no one has made a movie or TV show about him?
He is Made Of Awesome!
matt @4,
Literally older than steam.
@keithb #29: Wow, we’re there already? Cool. Glad to hear you pulled through.
@8 Becca Stareyes
ISTR that there are implants that are to be accessed wirelessly by your health care specialist and that IT security people already warn about their nonexistent security.
I question the clarity of thinking of a journalist who would use the phrase “wildly accurate” just because “wildly inaccurate” exists. Extreme accuracy does not strike me as a particularly wild kind of thing.
Transhumanism, Singularitarianism, and whatever else Internet STEMlord meme movements are out there:
They’re all just Scientology with the space aliens replaced by magic computers or the all-powerful god Tech.
If this technology existed, we’d have to restrict either who gets to be immortal or who gets to procreate (murder, accidents, and war would still happen, so we’d still need babies).
Neither would end well.
I was sorting through old books a few years ago, and I found Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). Here are actual predictions he makes in that book for the year 2009.
One might give him partial credit for considering drone warfare, but even now, seven years after his target, “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle” is rather an exaggeration.
Has he, though? Google can certainly afford to employ a non-productive futurist. And, given that Google sees itself as a major player in building the future, I could see why they might want to keep him in a position where he won’t make predictions which paint Google’s work in a bad light. Better to have him in the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
is known for his wildly-accurate predictions — back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted
Yes?…
self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing information via the internet, among many other spot-on forecasts.
Okay, I have to admit that was probably the most anti-climatic sentence resolution I’ve read in months. PZ, you *could* have predicted those? I’m surprised you didn’t. I did. Just about every single person I knew back then did too.
@9 catburglar.
I’d say it’s safe to predict self-driving cars are a few years in the future although what degree of saturation they will have is still up in the air. But self-driving cars have been predicted since at least the 50s.
I’ll admit prosethics for amputees are better than I would have predicted. But I’m under the impression, prosthetics for parapelegics are no closer now than they were in the eighties.
How long has useful fusion been ’30 years away’ now?
Same chapter, different verse maybe?
*ducks*
#39
@Blake Stacey
Using continuous speech recognition to generate LaTeX? Ugh!
If the transhumanist want to red some really impressive predictions about the future, they should start with Lem. Only his predictions are nowhere near as optymistic as the platitudes Kurzweil dishes out….
drewl, Mental Toss Flycoon@42: Useful fusion has arrived in the last few years.
We still can’t run our own reactor, but we finally cracked the problem of energy collection.
Blake Stacey@39: “online chat rooms of the late 1990s … [replaced by VR]” => Ultima Online was released in 1997, CoD and Second Life in 2003, WoW in 2004, etc. So he got that “prediction” pretty well by just not being asleep. As long as orcs satisfy your need for full realism. If not, today’s VR explosion is 7 years late by his reckoning, but I have great difficulty believing that putting on a VR mask and hanging out at the virtual café is ever really going to be a thing.
“the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence” — at the end of the Clinton era, this may have seemed reasonable, but then Bush got elected and neutralized public assistance. So much for that brave prediction.
“Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system” — from what I hear, expert systems are a good training tool, but physicians rarely fire one up — certainly not with the patient present. But that was the case in the early 90s already.
“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.” — we’re halfway there, but again, we were already halfway there by the early 90s. The US, Israel, Russia, etc fly planes that drop bombs on humans; even by the Bush Sr Gulf War, the pilot was several kilometers from where the bomb was going, and very rarely is in any danger at all. However, it turns out (not exactly shockingly) that you can’t occupy a country just by bombing them from afar; if you want legitimacy you need physical presence.
“Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion” — nailed it.
“Cables are disappearing.” — for personal devices, yes, but yet again, that was true in 1999 already: laptops with wifi, and cell phones, were pretty common gear by then. For major infrastructure, quite the opposite, humanity is building power cables and telecom cables and fossil fuel pipelines like never before.
“grammar checkers are now actually useful” — in English this has panned out, whereas in French is has regressed (it was useful by the early 90s). Autocorrect is useful on the phone, and by the structure of English, the autocorrect is doing grammar. It’s doing it badly, probably no better than in the early 90s, but that level of grammar ability has become useful for something. I somehow doubt that’s what Kurzweil was actually getting at.
“Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.” In Europe, yes. They’re called trains. In the US, no, and there’s no reason to believe they’re happening anytime soon. The cars are instead becoming smart enough to deal with the roads as they exist.
“The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software” — not yet, and I doubt ever, because how would anyone get any work done in an open-plan office if everyone was talking at their computers? That said, speech recognition is starting to be useful, e.g. Siri.
“Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.” — no grey goo yet, sorry.
So everything he got right was already happening in 1999. Much impressed.
“Cables are disappearing.”
Power cables are multiplying.
Kurzweil is an outstanding example of someone who is really, really afraid of death.
Well, the first 5 words are pretty accurate, but the method was…off.
sorry, I can’t read this over your comic sans font.