Ray Kurzweil: We are now able to reprogram our he alth

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Ray Kurzweil: We are now able to reprogram our he alth
Ray Kurzweil: We are now able to reprogram our he alth
Anonim

This is what the famous American futurologist and inventor, the author of many bestsellers, and also the director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, claimed in one of his last interviews. He himself intends to live forever. Perhaps the recently released information about the 6th heart transplant of the 100-year-old Rockefeller is to some extent proof of this. Yes, Rockefeller, he can buy more than one or two hearts, the question is what awaits us as a human species. We, ordinary people, dream of getting rid of bad diseases mostly. What to expect from the technological revolution? Check out an interview with Ray Kurzweil himself, published in a popular Canadian anniversary publication.

Mr. Kurzweil, you say that in the field of medicine humanity is on the threshold of a "great transformation". What do you think is happening now in this day and age?

- Today, biology itself is a process executed by software. There are trillions of cells in the human body that regulate this process. My organism and yours function according to an established "program", which received its development in a completely different era. Each of us has an insulin receptor gene that is supposed to "guard, store every calorie." However, this was necessary 10,000 years ago, when man worked all day and got few calories. Before refrigerators were invented, the body adapted to store these calories in human fat cells. But today, I would like to tell my insulin receptor gene, "You don't have to watch and store my calories anymore," which is what Joslin Diabetes Center did. By turning off the functioning of this gene, laboratory mice under intensive nutrition remained slim. They also did not suffer from diabetes or any heart disease. And their life expectancy has increased by 20%. The center intends to bring this technology to market, so collaborators there are working with various pharmaceutical companies.

Do you have any idea what life expectancy was a thousand years ago?

- A thousand years ago the average life expectancy was 20 years, and 200 years ago - 37 years. We are now able, capable, and at an incredible rate, like the bailout program, to reprogram our he alth and medicine itself. We are developing biology in a new direction for it, implementing information technologies in he alth and medicine. Our intuition tells us that progress will develop linearly, but thanks to information technology, this development will be exponential. My Android phone is literally several billion times more powerful and at the same time hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the computer I used when I was a student. We will observe this same phenomenon in another 25 years. Technologies will have incredible power and at the same time be the size of a blood cell.

You say that immortality is attainable for man. Do you really think so?

- In my last two co-authored he alth books, we describe things like this: we talk about a bridge that leads to another bridge that also leads to another bridge. I would never say, "I achieved this: I lived forever," because that

“never” is forever

In reality, we are talking about the path that will lead us to the next point. People sometimes ask me, “You use a lot of supplements.

Do you really think this will allow you to live a hundred years?”

How many supplements do you use?

- About 150 per day. I check myself, check myself regularly and see that they work. All my metrics are in perfect ranges. To control plaque build-up, I light up my arteries and make sure I don't have atherosclerosis. According to biological tests, I am younger than my actual age. So far so good. But the action of this program has not been read for a very long time. This program can be called the first of the bridges. The goal is to get a person to the second bridge, whose path leads to the biotech revolution. This is the time when we will be able to fight disease by reprogramming biology. And this is not the end, everything is ahead of us. Reaching already the third bridge will allow us to go beyond the boundaries of biology, on the path of the revolution in the field of nanotechnology. At this point, we will have miniature robots, sometimes called nanobots, that will strengthen our immune systems. We will be able to create in ourselves an immune system that will recognize all diseases, and when a new disease appears, it will be possible to reprogram it to counter the new pathogens. People say, "I don't want to live like the typical 95-year-old for a hundred years." But the goal here is not just to extend life. The idea is that we,

people, forever stay he althy

and viable, to expand the possibilities of our viability.

I assume such benefits will only be available to those who can afford it?

- See mobile phones. 20 years ago, you had to be rich to buy a cell phone. And this apparatus was the size of a brick, and its functioning could not be called superb. And nowadays there are seven billion cell phones in the world, more than one billion smartphones. And I assure you that in a few years they will increase to 6-7 billion. Now you can buy an Android or iPhone smartphone that is twice as good as the phone you had two years ago and at half the price. Yes, at an early stage of technology development, when it doesn't even function normally, only the rich will be able to afford to have it. But as their work improves, they will become more and more accessible, until finally they will be completely free. So it will be with he alth technology. We are already witnessing this. Pay attention to AIDS drugs: 20 years ago their cost per patient was 30 thousand dollars per year. To date, the price of this drug has fallen to 80 dollars, while they have become more effective. Look, technology is like a double-edged sword. If bioterrorists develop some new virus, we are not defenseless. I was working on a similar problem with the US Army. The virus was discovered and a very rapid development of means to combat it took place. In part, this was made possible by progress. As I said before, it only took 5 years to determine the DNA and RNA sequence of HIV. Only 31 days were needed for severe acute respiratory syndrome. Now we can beat the virus in one day. In just a few days, we could detect the new virus, determine its DNA and RNA, develop an antiviral drug, and administer it.

What are you doing now at Google?

- I am working on the development of artificial intelligence, and ultimately on making computers understand natural human language. I.e. the machine to capture the meaning locked in the documents. When the computer beat the chess player Kasparov, people said it was fascinatingly interesting, but chess is a logical game. Computers will never be able to understand natural language because it is the subtlest essence of man.

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