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Humans merging with machines and dead people coming back to life through simulations are just some of the ominous predictions made by a leading technology expert.
American computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil made these predictions in a new book called “The Singularity is Nearer.”
According to Kurzweil, the singularity is the idea that artificial intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence, fundamentally changing human existence. “Babies born today will barely graduate from college when the singularity occurs. Eventually, nanotechnology will allow these trends to culminate by directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud,” Kurzweil writes in his book, reported by the Daily Mail.
Kurzweil believes that while AI technology initially promises to “bring back” the dead as simulations, it will eventually bring them back to life physically.
Kurzweil notes that his attempts to “bring back” his father, who died when he was 22, using AI began more than 10 years ago.
He created a replica of his father by feeding an AI system his father’s letters, essays and musical compositions.
“Our digital activities already allow us to create extremely rich archives of our thoughts and feelings. And over the course of this decade, our technologies for recording, storing and organizing this information will advance rapidly.”
By the end of the decade, Kurzweil expects “highly realistic” non-biological reconstructions of people.
“Eventually, replicants could even be housed in cybernetically augmented biological bodies, developed from the original person’s DNA.”
These replicants, Kurzweil predicts, will evolve into artificial bodies “more advanced than biology allows,” and that by the 2040s, technology will advance to a level where it will be possible to make an entire copy of a person.
In addition to recreating humans, artificial intelligence will also become much smarter. Kurzweil claims that we are about to enter the “fifth era” of intelligence, where humans will merge with machines. This phenomenon is being driven by the arrival of human-level artificial intelligence and brain chips such as those from Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
According to him, after 2029, human intelligence will be multiplied by millions if humans connect directly to machines. “A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the higher regions of our neocortex to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking. In this way, rather than being a competitor, AI will become an extension of ourselves,” Kurzweil writes.
With the advancement of artificial intelligence, people will begin to cheat death itself. They will reach the “escape velocity” of immortality by 2030.
By 2030, AI biological simulators will run clinical trials in hours instead of years, enabling the development of new longevity drugs and treatments. “The long-term goal is to create medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamond parts with built-in sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and eventually power sources.”
One day, the human brain will be enhanced with “nanotechnology” and will allow you to put “everyone’s thoughts into your own.”
The brain will also be enhanced with “harmless nanometer electrodes inserted into the brain via the bloodstream. Freed from the confines of our skulls and operating on a substrate millions of times faster than biological tissue, our minds will be able to grow exponentially, ultimately multiplying our intelligence millions of times over.”
His claims about the future of AI are supported by the fact that Kurzweil predicted the era of the iPhone and that a computer would beat a human at chess as early as 1998.
He says recent advances in AI, such as ChatGPT, demonstrate that his 2005 predictions in his first book, “The Singularity is Near,” were correct.