The book ‘Down and out in the Magic Kingdom’ by Cory Doctorow presents us with a future in which the ‘problem’ of death has been overcome: people are immortal . Of course it is a science fiction novel , but it turns out that we are not really far from it.
Experts in medicine and technology work with two approaches: curing aging and turning awareness to artificial intelligence (AI).
Cure Aging
Microsoft has announced that in 10 years it will cure cancer. It is curious that it is a software company and not a biomedical company that makes this announcement, but in an increasingly multidisciplinary world this should not surprise us so much. Microsoft intends to crack the genetic code of cancer cells and reprogram them. For this they will need three things: a great computational capacity, the best biologists and the best programmers.
Once this milestone is achieved, curing aging will not be too difficult. In fact, cancer cells are, in some way, immortal , since what they do is reproduce without control, bypassing the process of apoptosis or programmed cell death. Once we understand this carcinogenic process well, curing immortality will be quite straightforward. Raúl Rojas, a world expert in AI, predicts that aging will be resolved in 20 years.
Turn to an AI
Moore’s Law has been in place since 1965 to the present day. Basically this law comes to say that the computational capacity doubles every two years. It is predicted that between 2020 and 2040, artificial computational capacity will exceed the computational capacity of the human brain. This moment is known as the technological singularity. From then on, computers will become increasingly ‘ intelligent ‘, at a rate infinitely higher than the slow evolutionary rate of our brains .
Once at this point it will be possible to download all the information of a human being, including their knowledge, thoughts, memories, emotions, etc … to an artificial intelligence system. Advances in neuroscience, nanotechnology and other areas will allow us, in theory, to replicate the brain of a human in a machine.
Of course this idea of uniqueness is highly controversial. Among its most staunch defenders we have the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has changed his lifestyle to try to live long enough to get to this moment and therefore be immortal. Among his detractors we have the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who thinks that AI may be humanity’s worst mistake and that it could spell the end of the human race. Kind of like when Skynet takes over the Terminator , or like when the Matrix wins the war against humans …
Alejandro Riera writes in Neuroelectrics
