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Computer expert claims he can live for ever

by on02 December 2013



Well that is his cunning plan

A 65-year-old computer scientist and inventor thinks he can develop the technology which will allow him to live for ever.

Talking to The Slate, Ray Kurzweil said that he thinks he has an 80 per cent chance of pulling it off. Kurzweil is a part-time adviser to Google’s Calico venture, which is focused on finding a cure for aging. He is also working on a a project called “Google Brain.” His goals at Google, which include teaching machines to understand language.

He believes in what the mathematician John von Neumann called the “singularity”—a point in human progress at which our machines become as smart as we are. This will stop them rising against as Battlestar Galactica predicted because they will be part of us.

Kurzweil forecasts that we’ll eventually be implanting computers and nanobots in our bodies and brains to enhance their natural functions. He thinks that by 2045 we’ll have machines so sophisticated that we will essentially be able to back up our minds to the cloud. 

His life is a race against the clock. If he and his fellow scientists and software engineers make the right moves, he could live to see the 22nd century, and then the 23rd. If not, he will have blown his one shot at immortality.

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