In an article in the Economist, American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist, Ray Kurzweil looks at the benefits of Artificial Intelligence observing “AI is about to make the leap from revolutionising just the digital world to transforming the physical world as well.1“
Kurzweil forecasts the following:
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): By the time children born today are in kindergarten, AI is expected to surpass humans in all cognitive tasks, including science and creativity.
- Transforming the Physical World: AI will revolutionize energy, manufacturing, and medicine, leading to significant benefits and profound implications.
- Energy: AI will accelerate innovations in photovoltaics and batteries, making solar energy abundant and nearly free.
- Manufacturing: AI will lower costs by reducing energy, labor, and raw material expenses, making goods cheaper and more abundant.
- Medicine: AI will turn medicine into an exact science, enabling precise simulations, tailored treatments, and potentially curing diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Kurzweil ends the article with the following:
Today, scientific progress gives the average American or Briton an extra six to seven weeks of life expectancy each year. When AGI gives us full mastery over cellular biology, these gains will sharply accelerate. Once annual increases in life expectancy reach 12 months, we’ll achieve “longevity escape velocity”. For people diligent about healthy habits and using new therapies, I believe this will happen between 2029 and 2035—at which point ageing will not increase their annual chance of dying. And thanks to exponential price-performance improvement in computing, AI\-driven therapies that are expensive at first will quickly become widely available.
This is AI’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings.
The Economist, June 17th 2024
With luck, this is within my life horizon.
But is unending life a good thing? What about Dictators who are “leaders for life”? What if that life never ends? What about people who are said, currently, to be too old to take on the mantle of leadership? Does an endless life mean this is no longer a problem? Will there be both physical and mental longevity?
With the death of people, their ideas, memories, points of view also die. This can be bad, but it can be good too. Death can remove the toxic waste dumps of old prejudices from communities, it can enable new ideas and points of view to grow and take hold.
Who cares if a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, the real benefit is that it opens the sky, lets in light so that new little trees and other things can grow.
- The. (2024, June 17). Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world. Economist (London, England: 1843). https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/06/17/ray-kurzweil-on-how-ai-will-transform-the-physical-world
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