Anyone care to take a guess how much the 15TB version will cost?
I disagree however that nobody alive today will live "forever". The technology that might allow us to fix aging is on an exponential curve, look for example at the cost of genome sequencing. So the time is ripe for some breakthrough results in aging research that actually address some causes of aging.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds...
The second thing I got was this: http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf
The tl;dr summary is:
However, given the recent successes and highly emotional nature of life extension research, Aubrey de Grey is not the first, nor will he be the last, to promote a hopelessly insufficient but ably camouflaged pipe-dream to the hopeful many. With this in mind, we hope our list provides a general line of demarcation between increasingly sophisticated life extension pretense, and real science and engineering, so that we can focus honestly on the significant challenges before us.
The improvements have mostly come from violence reduction and public health and dealing with disease though, I agree that those things aren't really part of a life extension technology trajectory.
If you solve all of these things, then lifespan is asymptotically something like 80 years. That is plain as day. We might come up with ways to increase lifespan, but we haven't yet, and none of the data Kurzweil shows are a result of increases in lifespan for people who die of old age.
"Longevity" is the term in the social sciences for average age at death for only people that die of old age. Kurzweil used that word, he said "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; during the nineteenth century we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year."
Life expectancy increased. Longevity did not. It's somewhat common to confuse them, so he could be forgiven for a mistake, except that it wasn't a mistake, he knows the difference, and his graph is evidence. That he included numbers from the 1920s and then skipped to 2000, is impossible to do accidentally, and if you include 1940-1990, you'd see lifespan flatlines. But then he'd have to admit neither life expectancy nor longevity are on exponential growth curves. They're not linear or even sublinear either. Longevity has always been flat, and lifespan has historical dips and bumps.
How many millions of pixels are on my two LCD screens, and they are each individually controllable and none have failed in 8 years?
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-SATA-Internal-MZ-7KE2...