Great site about immortality and new discoverieshttp://www.kurzweilai.net
Why We Can Be Confident of Turing Test Capability Within a Quarter Century
by Ray Kurzweil
The advent of strong AI (exceeding human intelligence) is the most important transformation this century will see, and it will happen within 25 years, says Ray Kurzweil, who will present this paper at The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The next 50 years (AI@50) on July 14, 2006.
Published on KurzweilAI.net July 13, 2006. Excerpted from The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil.
Consider another argument put forth by Turing. So far we have constructed only fairly simple and predictable artifacts. When we increase the complexity of our machines, there may, perhaps, be surprises in store for us. He draws a parallel with a fission pile. Below a certain "critical" size, nothing much happens: but above the critical size, the sparks begin to fly. So too, perhaps, with brains and machines. Most brains and all machines are, at present "sub-critical"—they react to incoming stimuli in a stodgy and uninteresting way, have no ideas of their own, can produce only stock responses—but a few brains at present, and possibly some machines in the future, are super-critical, and scintillate on their own account. Turing is suggesting that it is only a matter of complexity, and that above a certain level of complexity a qualitative difference appears, so that "super-critical" machines will be quite unlike the simple ones hitherto envisaged. —J. R. Lucas, Oxford philosopher, in his 1961 essay "Minds, Machines, and Gödel"1
Given that superintelligence will one day be technologically feasible, will people choose to develop it? This question can pretty confidently be answered in the affirmative. Associated with every step along the road to superintelligence are enormous economic payoffs. The computer industry invests huge sums in the next generation of hardware and software, and it will continue doing so as long as there is a competitive pressure and profits to be made. People want better computers and smarter software, and they want the benefits these machines can help produce. Better medical drugs; relief for humans from the need to perform boring or dangerous jobs; entertainment—there is no end to the list of consumer-benefits. There is also a strong military motive to develop artificial intelligence. And nowhere on the path is there any natural stopping point where technophobics could plausibly argue "hither but not further. —Nick Bostrom, "How Long Before Superintelligence?" 1997
It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve. Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating. Additionally, a superintelligence could give us indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through the use of nanomedicine, or by offering us the option to upload ourselves. A superintelligence could also create opportunities for us to vastly increase our own intellectual and emotional capabilities, and it could assist us in creating a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to joyful game-playing, relating to each other, experiencing, personal growth, and to living closer to our ideals —Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence," 2003
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. —Marvin Minsky, 1995
Even if alex's rings don't work, probably people who are now young will live forever or near to it:
Reprogramming your Biochemistry for Immortality
An Interview with Ray Kurzweil by David Jay Brown by Ray Kurzweil
Scientists are now talking about people staying young and not aging. Ray Kurzweil is taking it a step further: "In addition to radical life extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion. The nanobots will be able to go inside the brain and extend our mental functioning by interacting with our biological neurons."
Our Bodies, Our Technologies
Ray Kurzweil's Cambridge Forum Lecture (Abridged) by Ray Kurzweil
In the 2020s, we'll see nanobots, blood-cell-sized devices that can go inside the body and brain to perform therapeutic functions. But what happens when we have billions of nanobots inside the capillaries of our brains, non-invasively, widely distributed, expanding human intelligence, or providing full-immersion virtual reality?
Originally transcribed from the Cambridge Forum Lecture on May 4, 2005, and reprinted in Science & Theology News. Reprinted on KurzweilAI.net March 16, 2006.
It turns out that information technology is increasingly encompassing everything of value. It's not just computers, it's not just electronic gadgets. It now includes the field of biology. We're beginning to understand how life processes, disease, aging, are manifested as information processes and gaining the tools to actually manipulate those processes. It's true of all of our creations of intellectual and cultural endeavors, our music, movies are all facilitated by information technology, and are distributed, and represented as information.
Evolutionary processes work through indirection. Evolution creates a capability, and then it uses that capability to evolve the next stage. That's why the next stage goes more quickly, and that's why the fruits of an evolutionary process grow exponentially.
The first paradigm shift in biological evolution, the evolution of cells, and in particular DNA (actually, RNA came first)—the evolution of essentially a computer system or an information processing backbone that would allow evolution to record the results of its experiments—took billions of years. Once DNA and RNA were in place, the next stage, the Cambrian explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, went a hundred times faster. Then those body plans were used by evolution to concentrate on higher cognitive functions. Biological evolution kept accelerating in this manner. Homo sapiens, our species, evolved in only a few hundred thousand years, the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
Then again working through indirection, biological evolution used one of its creations, the first technology-creating species to usher in the next stage of evolution, which was technology. The enabling factors for technology were a higher cognitive function with an opposable appendage, so we could manipulate and change the environment to reflect our models of what could be. The first stages of technology evolution—fire, the wheel, stone tools—only took a few tens of thousands of years.
Technological evolution also accelerated. Half a millennium ago the printing press took a century to be adopted, half a century ago the first computers were designed pen on paper. Now computers are designed in only a few weeks' time by computer designers sitting at computers, using advanced computer assisted design software. When I was at MIT a computer that took about the size of this room cost millions of dollars yet was less powerful than the computer in your cell phone today.
One of the profound implications is that we are understanding our biology as information processes. We have 23,000 little software programs inside us called genes. These evolved in a different era. One of those programs, called the fat insulin receptor gene, says, basically, hold onto every calorie because the next hunting season might not work out so well. We'd like to change that program now. We have a new technology that has just emerged in the last couple years called RNA interference, in which we put fragments of RNA inside the cell, as a drug, to inhibit selected genes. It can actually turn genes off by blocking the messenger RNA expressing that gene. When the fat insulin receptor was turned off in mice, the mice ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn't get diabetes, didn't get heart disease, lived 20% longer: they got the benefit of caloric restriction without the restriction.
Every major disease, and every major aging process has different genes that are used in the expression of these disease and aging processes. Being able to actually select when we turn them off is one powerful methodology. We also have the ability to turn enzymes off. Torcetrapib, a drug that's now in FDA Phase 3 trials, turns off a key enzyme that destroys the good cholesterol, HDL, in the blood. If you inhibit that enzyme, HDL levels soar and atherosclerosis slows down or stops.
There are thousands of these developments in the pipeline. The new paradigm of rational drug design involves actually understanding the information processes underlying biology, the exact sequence of steps that leads up to a process like atherosclerosis, which causes heart attacks, or cancer, or insulin resistance, and providing very precise tools to intervene. Our ability to do this is also growing at an escalating rate.
Another exponential process is miniaturization. We're showing the feasibility of actually constructing things at the molecular level that can perform useful functions. One of the biggest applications of this, again, will be in biology, where we will be able to go inside the human body and go beyond the limitations of biology.
Rob Freitas has designed a nanorobotic red blood cell, which is a relatively simple device, it just stores oxygen and lets it out. A conservative analysis of these robotic respirocytes shows that if you were to replace ten percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours. It will be interesting to see what we do with these in our Olympic contests. Presumably we'll ban them, but then we'll have the specter of high school students routinely outperforming the Olympic athletes.
A robotic white blood cell is also being designed. A little more complicated, it downloads software from the Internet to combat specific pathogens. If it sounds very futuristic to download information to a device inside your body to perform a health function, I'll point out that we're already doing that. There are about a dozen neural implants either FDA-approved or approved for human testing. One implant that is FDA-approved for actual clinical use replaces the biological neurons destroyed by Parkinson's disease. The neurons in the vicinity of this implant then receive signals from the computer that's inside the patient's brain. This hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence works perfectly well. The latest version of this device allows the patient to download new software to the neural implant in his brain from outside his body.
These are devices that today require surgery to be implanted, but when we get to the 2020s, we will ultimately have the "killer app" of nanotechnology, nanobots, which are blood cell-sized devices that can go inside the body and brain to perform therapeutic functions, as well as advance the capabilities of our bodies and brains.
If that sounds futuristic, I'll point out that we already have blood cell-size devices that are nano-engineered, working to perform therapeutic functions in animals. For example, one scientist cured type I diabetes in rats with this type of nanoengineered device. And some of these are now approaching human trials. The 2020s really will be the "golden era" of nanotechnology.
It is a mainstream view now among informed observers that by the 2020s we will have sufficient computer processing to emulate the human brain. The current controversy, or I would say, the more interesting question is, will we have the software or methods of human intelligence? To achieve the methods, the algorithms of human intelligence, there is underway a grand project to reverse-engineer the brain. And there, not surprisingly, we are also making exponential progress. If you follow the trends in reverse brain engineering it's a reasonable conclusion that we will have reverse-engineered the several hundred regions of the brain by the 2020s.
By early in the next decade, computers won't look like today's notebooks and PDAs, they will disappear, integrated into our clothing and environment. Images will be written to our retinas for our eyeglasses and contact lenses, we'll have full-immersion virtual reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities; we can see early harbingers of this already. We'll have effective language translation.
If we go out to 2029, there will be many turns of the screw in terms of this exponential progression of information technology. There will be about thirty doublings in the next 25 years. That's a factor of a billion in capacity and price performance over today's technology, which is already quite formidable.
By 2029, we will have completed reverse engineering of the brain, we will understand how human intelligence works, and that will give us new insight into ourselves. Non-biological intelligence will combine the suppleness and subtlety of our pattern-recognition capabilities with ways computers have already demonstrated their superiority. Every time you use Google you can see the power of non-biological intelligence. Machines can remember things very accurately. They can share their knowledge instantly. We can share our knowledge, too, but at the slow bandwidth of language.
This will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to compete with us, it's emerging from within our civilization, it's extending the power of our civilization. Even today we routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology. In fact our whole economic infrastructure couldn't manage without the intelligent software that's underlying it.
The most interesting application of computerized nanobots will be to interact with our biological neurons. We've already shown the feasibility of using electronics and biological neurons to interact non-invasively. We could have billions of nanobots inside the capillaries of our brains, non-invasively, widely distributed, expanding human intelligence, or providing full immersion virtual reality encompassing all of the senses from within the nervous system. Right now we have a hundred trillion connections. Although there's a certain amount of plasticity, biological intelligence is essentially fixed. Non-biological intelligence is growing exponentially; the crossover point will be in the 2020s. When we get to the 2030s and 2040s, it will be the non-biological portion of our civilization that will be predominant. But it will still be an expression of human civilization.
Every time we have technological gains we make gains in life expectancy. Sanitation was a big one, antibiotics was another. We're now in the beginning phases of this biotechnology revolution. We're exploring, understanding and graining the tools to reprogram the information processes underlying biology; and that will result in another big gain in life expectancy. So, if you watch your health today, the old-fashioned way, you can actually live to see the remarkable 21st century.
So that’s the genesis. My interest in life extension stems primarily from my having been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I really consider the diabetes to be a blessing because it prodded me to overcome it, and, in so doing, I realized that I didn’t just have an approach for diabetes, but a general attitude and approach to overcome any health problem, that we really can find the ideas and apply them to overcome the genetic dispositions that we have. There’s a common wisdom that your genes are eighty percent of your health and longevity and lifestyle is only twenty percent. Well, that’s true if you follow the generally, watered-down guidelines that our health institutions put out. But if you follow the optimal guidelines that we talk about, you can really overcome almost any genetic disposition. We do have the knowledge to do that.
David: What do you think are some of the common misleading ideas that people have about health and longevity?
Ray: One thing that I just eluded to is the compromised recommendations from our health authorities. I just had a lengthy debate with the Joslin Diabetes Center, which is considered the world’s leading diabetes treatment and research center. I’m on the board, and they’ve just come out with new nutritional guidelines, which are highly compromised. They’re far from ideal, and they acknowledge that. They say, well, we have enough trouble getting people to follow these guidelines, let alone the stricter guidelines that you recommend. And my reply is, you have trouble getting people to follow your guidelines because they don’t work. If people followed your guidelines very precisely they’d still have Type 2 diabetes. They’d still have to take harsh drugs or insulin.
If they follow my guidelines the situation is quite different. I’ve counseled many people about Type 2 diabetes, and Dr. Grossman has treated many people with it, and they come back and they have completely normal levels. Their symptoms are gone, and they don’t have to take insulin or harsh drugs. They feel liberated, and that’s extremely motivating. In many ways it’s easier to make a stricter change. To dramatically reduce your high Glycemic index carbs is actually easier than moderately reducing them, because if you moderately reduce them you don’t get rid of the cravings for carbs. Carbs are addictive, and it’s just like trying to cut down a little bit on cigarettes. It’s actually easier to cut cigarettes out completely, and it’s also easier to largely cut out high Glycemic index starches and sugars, because the cravings go away and it’s much easier to follow. But, most importantly, it works along with a few supplements and exercise to overcome most cases of Type 2 Diabetes.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the attitude our health authorities. The nutritional recommendations are consistently compromised. There’s almost no understanding of the role of nutritional supplements, which can be very powerful. I take two hundred and fifty supplements a day, and I monitor my body regularly. I’m not just flying without instrumentation. Being an engineer, I like data and I monitor fifty or sixty different blood levels every few months, and I’m constantly fine-tuning my program. All of my blood levels are ideal. My Homocysteine level many years ago was eleven, but now it’s five. My C-reactive protein is 0.1. My cholesterol is 130. My LDL is about 60, and my HDL—which was 28—is now close to sixty. And so on and so forth.
I’ve also taken biological aging tests, which measure things like tactile sensitivity, reaction time, memory, and decision-making speed. There are forty different tests, and you compare your score to medians for different populations at different ages. When I was forty I came out at about thirty-eight. Now I’m fifty-seven—at least for a few more days—and I come out at forty. So, according to these tests, I’ve only aged two years in the last seventeen years. Now you can dispute the absolute validity of these biological aging tests. It’s just a number, but it’s just evidence that this program is working.
ABOUT AGING AND SUPPLEMENTS, VERY INTERESTING:
David: What are some of the most important nutritional supplements that you would recommend to help prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease?
Ray: We spell all that out in the book. Coenzyme Q10 is important. It never ceases to amaze me that physicians do not tell their patients to take coenzyme Q10 when they prescribe Statin drugs. This is because it’s well known that Statin drugs deplete the body of coenzyme Q10, and a lot of the side-effects such as muscle weakness that people suffer from Statin drugs are because of this depletion of coenzyme Q10. In any event, that’s an important supplement. It is involved in energy generation within the mitochondria of each cell. Disruption to the mitochondria is an important aging process and this supplement will help slow that down. Coenzyme Q10 has a number of protective effect including lowering blood pressure, helping to control free-radical damage, and protecting the heart.
A lot of research recently shows the Curcumin, which is derived from the spice turmeric, has important anti-inflammatory properties and can protect against cancer, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
Alpha-Lipoic acid is an important antioxidant which is both water and fat-soluble. It can neutralize harmful free radicals, improve insulin sensitivity, and slow down the process of advanced Glycation end products (AGEs), which is another key aging process.
Each of the vitamins is important and plays a key role. Vitamin C is generally protective as a premier antioxidant. It appears to have particular effectiveness in preventing the early stages of atherosclerosis, namely the oxidizing of LDL cholesterol.
In terms of vitamin E, there’s been a lot of negative publicity about that, but if you look carefully at that research you’ll see that all of those studies were done with alpha-Tocopherol, and vitamin E is really a blend of eight different substances—four tocopherols and four Tocotrienols. Alpha-Tocopherol actually depletes levels of gamma-Tocopherol, and gamma-Tocopherol is the form of vitamin E that’s found naturally in food, and is a particularly important one. So we recommend that people take a blend of the fractions of vitamin E, and that they get enough gamma-Tocopherol.
There are a number of others that are important to take in general. If you have high cholesterol, Policosanol is one supplement that is quite effective, and has an independent action from the Statin drugs. Statin drugs actually are quite good. They appear to be anti-inflammatory, so they not only lower cholesterol but attack the inflammatory processes, which underlie many diseases, including atherosclerosis. But as I mentioned it’s important to take coenzyme Q10 if you’re taking Statin drugs.
There are others. Grape seed proanthocyanidin extract has been found to be another effective antioxident. Resveratrol is another. We have an extensive discussion of the most important supplements in the book.
David: What sort of suggestions would you make to someone who is looking to improve their memory or cognitive performance?
Ray: Vinpocetine, derived from the periwinkle plant, seems to have the best research. It improves cerebral blood flow, increases brain cell TP (energy) production, and enables better utilization of glucose and oxygen in the brain.
Other supplements that appear to be important for brain health include Phosphatidylserine, Acetyl-L-Carnitine, Pregneneolone, and EPA/DHA. The research appears a bit mixed on Ginkgo Biloba, but we’re not ready to give up on it.
We provide a discussion in the book of a number of smart nutrients that appear to improve brain health. There are also a number of smart drugs being developed, some of which are already in the testing pipeline, that appear to be quite promising.
David: What do you think are the primary causes of aging?
Ray: Aging is not one thing. There’s a number of different processes involved and you can adopt programs that slow down each of these. For example, one process involves the depletion of phosphatidylcholine in the cell membrane. In young people the cell membrane is about sixty or seventy percent phosphatidylcholine, and the cell membrane functions very well then—letting nutrients in and letting toxins out.
The body makes phosphatidylcholine, but very slowly, so over the decades the phosphatidylcholine in the cell membrane depletes, and the cell membrane gets filled in with inert substances, like hard fats and cholesterol, that basically don’t work. This is one reasons that cells become brittle with age. The skin in an elderly person begins to not be supple. The organs stop functioning efficiently. So it’s actually a very important aging process, and you can reverse that by supplementing with phosphatidylcholine. If you really want to do it effectively you can take phosphatidylcholine intravenously, as I do. Every week I have a I.V. with phosphatidylcholine. I also take it every day orally. So that’s one aging process we can stop today.
Another important aging process involves oxidation through positively-charged oxygen free radicals, which will steal electrons from cells, disrupting normal enzymatic processes. There are a number of different types of antioxidants that you can take to slow down that process, including vitamin C. You could take vitamin C intravenously to boost that process.
Advanced Glycation end-products, or AGEs, are involved in another aging process. This is where proteins develop cross-links with each other, therefore disrupting their function. There are supplements that you can take, such as Alpha Lipoic Acid, that slow that down. There is an experimental drug called ALT-711 (phenacyldimenthylthiazolium chloride) that can dissolve the AGE cross-links without damaging the original tissues.
Atherosclerosis is an aging process, and it’s not just taking place in the coronary arteries, of course. It can take place in the cerebral arteries, which ultimately causes cerebral strokes, but it also takes place in the arteries all throughout the body. It can lead to impotence, claudication of the legs and limbs, and like most of these processes, it’s not linear but exponential, in that it grows by a certain percentage each year.
So that’s why the process of atherosclerosis hardly seems to progress for a long time, but then when gets to a certain point it can really explode and develop very quickly. We have an extensive program on reducing atherosclerosis, which is both an aging process and a disease process. We cite a number of important supplements that reduce cholesterol and inflammation—such as the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA—as well as the Statin drugs. Supplements like Curcumin are helpful. Supplements that reduce inflammation will reduce both cancer and the inflammatory processes that lead to atherosclerosis. There are a number of supplements that reduce Homocysteine, which appears to encourage atherosclerosis. These include Folic Acid, vitamins B2, B6, and B12, magnesium, and trimethylglycine (TMG).
So you can attack atherosclerosis five or six different ways, and we recommend that you do them all, so long as there aren’t contraindications for combining treatments. But generally these treatments are independent of each other. If you go to war, you don’t just send in the helicopters. You send in the helicopters, the tanks, the planes, and the infantry. You use your intelligence resources, and attack the enemy every way that you can, with all of your resources. And that’s really what you need to do with these conditions, because they represent very threatening processes. If you are sufficient proactive, you can generally get them under control.
I don't have diabetes, ray kurzweil had it.
