A fascinating concept that has captured the imagination of all humanity for centuries, immortality still raises questions. Although at present no method is known to allow human beings to live forever, the various advances in science and technology could potentially make immortality possible in the near future.
Standard-bearer of a total transformation of the human species, in the era of intelligent machines, Ray Kurzweil is a well-known thinker in the United States. Originally from Queens, this American author, engineer, researcher and futurologist is a pioneer of inventions, each crazier than the next, like his theories. Involved in health and artificial intelligence, he is described as “an ultimate brain machine” and even as “the best person to predict the future of artificial intelligence” according to none other than Bill Gates. Since 2012, he has been director of engineering at Google, but also a researcher for the very prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he has contributed to the development of character recognition for blind people and voice recognition for which he worked hard for Google.
Rarely interviewed by the media (fruit of his will), Raymond Kurzweil, now 75 years old, is certainly criticized, controversial and mocked, but most of his predictions have turned out to be true. In 2011, the journalist for France 2, Monique Atlan had the opportunity to meet this extraordinary man as part of an international investigation into the changes in the representation of the human being caused by new technologies. He develops during this interview and thereafter, the idea that it becomes possible to consider the modeling of our brain, then in the long term the final migration of our existence in hard disks rather than organic bodies.
In an article published by Les Échos, we discover the extraordinary personality of this man who both fascinates and disturbs, especially when he defines the human: “I consider that human existence does not depend on a body biology. Biology itself is just a set of nanomachines. All these tiny mechanisms in the brain, in our cells, in reproduction are the basis of our thoughts.”
Released in 2005, his book “Humanity 2.0” (“The singularity is near” from its original title) is the subject of an astonishing prediction. According to Kurzweil, we would be very close to achieving immortality since, according to him, this will be possible by 2030. Advances in robotics and genetics would be the key to confirming his words. He continues by determining that humans will develop nanorobots capable of moving inside our organism.
But what are these nanorobots? Tiny robots (of nanometric size) could be able to prevent the appearance of various diseases, repair cells to prevent aging or even cancel the harmful effects of certain foods on our body. These would therefore allow us to be able to stay healthy regardless of our diet. The futurologist’s predictions indicate that these nanobots will run through our veins and even connect our brains to the cloud. We will thus have the ability to send files directly from our brain, and even to make backups of our memories. By 2030, humans will therefore be able to increase human life expectancy by more than one year per year.
Although these claims may make us think of a sci-fi movie, Ray Kurzweil is someone to take seriously. Among his successes, he predicted that a computer would be able to beat a human at chess by 2000 or that we would all be equipped with small laptops that we would take everywhere by 2009.
Conversely, some of his predictions turned out to be partially or completely wrong. Among them, he predicted in 2009 that translation phones (speech-to-speech translation) are commonly used for many language pairs. Or that the movement of neo-Luddism would progress.
If we take stock of the predictions of Ray Kurzweil in 2009, three of them came true out of twelve.