Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will be immortal, identical to AI by 2045 | Hacker News Reader

Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will be immortal, identical to AI by 2045

jpost.com

6 pointselorant16 comments

I really don’t understand the “uploading” thing. Even if it works it’s obviously not you.

Of course I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t use a star trek style transporter.

It's almost like no one has ever seen The Prestige!

There is a sort story where the first successfully uploaded human is used as a cyberslave for customer service and other unpleasant sort of jobs. He comes online, gets trained, does the job for a wile, then goes insane and is reset back to trained state.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Fantastic story I feel very gross and disturbed hahaha

It's good for everyone but you.

Think of it more like having kids, but instead of passing on your nature/nurture, you pass on your exact personality and memories. From everyone else's perspective, you're now immortal, the same way your bloodline has a shade of immortality ("you sound just like your grandmother," "he looks like his father," "we've passed this family tradition down for generations").

Unfortunately, the mortal being that is you will still die, or at least remain mortal (subject to Ship of Theseus arguments).

This guy's been predicting this stuff decades now.. mostly bologna

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968

I'd bet the over tbh

how many times has Kurzweil been correct? Or better yet, what's his success rate?

Quick Google says 147 predictions of which 117 are true. I don't have a good source though, and I'm not sure how strict the criteria for "pass" / "fail" for individual predictions were

I used to like Kurzweil but he kind of jumped the shark with his more goofy predictions

I went to a talk he had in 2010 or so when he was predicting we would ascend to god like digitally uploaded minds by 2030.

Which is a very large leap, because he fails to factor in pressures that could cause societal collapse, where the technology would be pushed far enough out of reach that nobody would be able to use it.

Digital minds have an off-switch, and digital have-nots could still have axes and guillotines.

But that's beside the point that encoding something has complex as a single human neural system requires several orders of magnitude more computing power than we've yet deployed in totality. Just the "parameters" of the human neural system would be in the 100s of trillions. A single neuron is more complex than most entire neural nets we've built.

We'd have a long way to go, and that's just assuming everything about consciousness and awareness is strictly mechanism.

> Of the 147 predictions, Kurzweil claimed that 115 were "entirely correct", 12 were "essentially correct", 17 were "partially correct", and only 3 were "wrong". Combining the "entirely" and "essentially" correct, Kurzweil's claimed accuracy rate comes to 86%.

Lol I mean, those are the numbers Ray himself has decreed correct…

I'd be very surprised if humans survive until 2045

Assuming you're not being facetious - how do you personally feel about perishing (violently?) in a global apocalypse within 20 years?

Ray Kurzweil has laid out a view on the future that has always been interesting and is feeling increasingly relevant. Incredibly, his prediction for AGI in 2029 seems... conservative? It's too bad this article refers to him as a "former Google engineer" and only bothers to cite a Youtuber talking about his books. He's a fascinating character, has been a prescient futurist for many decades, and his books are very readable - check them out! His big 3 are The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity is Near. The last one is the most recent and popular, and is what I'd point people towards.

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