Humas merging with machines and dead people coming back to life as simulations are just some of the disturbing predictions made by a leading tech expert.
American computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil has made these predictions in a new book called “The Singularity is Nearer”.
Kurzweil’s premise is that singularity is the idea that AI will eventually surpass human intelligence, fundamentally altering human existence. “Babies born today will be just graduating college when the Singularity happens. Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud,’ writes Kurzweil in his book, reported the Daily Mail.
Kurzweil believes that while AI technology will initially hold the promise to ‘bring back’ the dead in the form of simulations, eventually it will bring them physically back to life.
Kurzweil’s notes that his attempts to ‘bring back’ his father, who died when Kurzweil was 22, using AI started more than 10 years ago.
He created a replicant of his father by feeding an AI system with his father’s letters, essays and musical compositions.
“We are already creating through our digital activities enormously rich records of how we think of what we feel. And during this decade our technologies for recording, storing and organizing this information will advance rapidly.”
By the end of this decade, Kurzweil expects ‘highly realistic’ non-biological recreations of people.
“Eventually replicants may even be housed in cybernetically augmented biological bodies grown from the DNA of the original person.”
Those replicants, predicts Kurzweil, will move into artificial bodies “more advanced than what biology allows”, and that by the 2040s the technology will advance to the level where it will be possible to make an entire copy of a person.
Apart from recreating people, AI technology will also get immensely more intelligent. Kurzweil says that we are about to enter the ‘fifth epoch’ of intelligence, where man merges with machines. This phenomena is being driven by the arrival of human-level AI and brain chips such as those of Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
He says that after 2029, human intelligence will multiply millions of times over by human beings connecting directly to machines. “A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud which will directly extend our thinking. In this way, rather than AI being a competitor it will become an extension of ourselves,” writes Kurzweil.
With the advancements in AI, people will begin cheating death itself. They will achieve ‘escape velocity’ for immortality by 2030.
By 2030, AI biological simulators will complete clinical trials in hours rather than years leading to new drugs and longevity treatments. “The long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators and possibly energy sources.”
Eventually, human brains will be upgraded by ‘nanotechnology’ and will allow you to put “every thought in someone’s head into yours.”
Brains will also be upgraded by “harmless nanoscale electrodes inserted into the brain through the bloodstream. Freed from the enclosure of our skulls and processing on a substrate millions of times faster than biological tissue, our minds will be empowered to grow exponentially, ultimately expanding our intelligence millions-fold.”
Lending credence to his claims of the future of AI are that Kurzweil had predicted the iPhone era in advance and also the fact that a computer would beat a human at chess by 1998.
Recent breakthroughs in AI such as ChatGPT, he contends, show that his 2005 predictions in his first book “The Singularity is Near” were correct.