[extropy-chat] Re: Methuselah Foundation Offers Once-in-a-Lifetime Lunch with Luminary Ray Kurzweil

[Damien Broderick]

>>Dr. Ray Kurzweil, recipient of the U.S. National Medal of
>>Technology, and author of numerous books including "Fantastic Voyage: 
>>Live Long Enough To Live Forever"

Here's my rather over-simplified and non-critical pop sci review for the 
Weekend ustralian newspaper, published last weekend:

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
By Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D.
Rodale, 452pp, $US 24.95

Reviewed by Damien Broderick


In 1994, a beauty pageant entrant made a fool of herself by blurting out 
something that almost everyone believes. Miss America's host asked Miss 
Alabama: "If you could live forever, would you, and why?" Thinking aloud, 
she replied: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, 
because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, 
but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."

This apparently circular word salad makes her seem an airhead. But that's 
unkind. Her impromptu analysis, read charitably, makes perfect sense from 
either a Bible Belt or an evolutionary viewpoint. Here's her logic, 
de-garbled: "It'd only be right to want eternal life if that were part of 
God's or nature's plan. Actually, though, we're mortal beings, that's part 
of our very nature. So it would be wrong to wish to escape death, and I 
don't." This suddenly looks like a perfectly sensible appraisal. Haven't 
humans evolved to live, mature, grow old and die, leaving the world to our 
children, and they to theirs?

Luckily, as philosophers have known for several centuries, that really 
isn't a good argument after all, any more than the claim that if God or 
Darwin had wanted us to fly, we'd have propellers. Intelligence often finds 
ways to improve on nature, even if our limitations sometimes botch the job. 
It's no sin against deity or natural selection to swallow an aspirin, get a 
tooth filled, or watch television beside a cooling fan. The main problem 
with living forever is just that nobody has worked out yet how to do it. 
Snake oil salesmen once promised endless health, but they're buried 
alongside their gullible customers.

But science did enable a couple of Ohio bicycle builders to fly, an 
otherwise impossible dream, and within a single lifetime flung humans to 
the Moon. It now seems likely that powerful research programs will let us 
first slow and then halt the major causes of death--heart disease, cancer, 
stroke, infections--and then, perhaps, reverse ageing itself, that slow, 
terrible corrosion of our youthful flesh and lively minds. Or is this no 
more than wishful thinking? If it's not, is it at least wicked thinking, 
ruinous for individual and society alike? These are increasingly urgent 
questions. Kurzweil and Grossman explore them from many angles in their 
significant new book. As a bonus, they suggest ways to stave off the Grim 
Reaper until the longevity doctor arrives.

Ray Kurzweil is a highly awarded inventor and computer expert, not a 
medical researcher, but his insights into the pace of change are what drive 
this collaboration with medico Grossman. Knowledge is doubling and 
deepening at a prodigious rate, and even that rate is itself accelerating, 
something the book rather immodestly calls "his most profound observation". 
It's not a true scientific law, of course, and could suffer setbacks in its 
pace due to global terrorism, environmental collapse, or political 
opportunism directed against research (such as current US government 
hostility to stem cell work). If this "Law of Accelerating Returns" does 
hold up, though, Kurzweil projects a future where ageing will become an 
unthinkable horror of the past, as polio and smallpox are today. Some of 
those alive now might thrive indefinitely, kept youthful by the same 
recuperative processes that build brand-new babies from aging sperm and ova.

Are the rest of us doomed to be the last mortal generation? Perhaps not, if 
a kind of maintenance engineering can be applied to our ailing bodies. The 
remedy might be complicated: genomic profiling, pills, supplements, 
stringent diet, more exercise than we care for, and even intravenous shots 
of hormone top-ups and entirely new pharmaceuticals. But many of us already 
take daily doses of Lipitor, to lower bad cholesterol, and drugs to fight 
hypertension. In the slightly longer term, our bodies might be infused with 
swarms of machines not much larger than viruses, nanobots designed to 
scavenge wastes and repair tissue damage at the scale of cells. Unnatural? 
In a sense, as is wearing contact lenses. In another, not at all, since 
modifying our lives in the light of hard-won knowledge is precisely what 
makes us human.

The longevity program recommended by Kurzweil and Grossman is meant to get 
us over the hump, allow us to survive "long enough to live 
forever"--although this doesn't mean we might become literally immortal, 
unable to be killed. It does imply a future where every human will have the 
choice of staying healthily young indefinitely, or of stepping aside, if 
they choose, to make room for a new life--assuming, of course, that we 
linger on this planet, and that we remain strictly human. Some ethicists 
are dismayed at these choices, finding them inhuman and degrading. No doubt 
the arguments will continue for generations until all those opposed to 
endless life have died. Meanwhile, anyone wishing to try for the goal of 
extended life could do worse than study Kurzweil and Grossman's detailed 
prospectus. You might end up looking like a pin-cushion and gulping 250 
pills a day (Aggressive Supplementation, they call it--"Take them all, and 
let your body use what it needs"), but it's more fun than rotting in the 
ground.