Yahoo News A Scientist Says Humans Will Go Backwards in Time Within Just 5 Years
Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes humanity will achieve “longevity escape velocity” in just five years.
The concept basically states that due to medical and technological advances, we will soon reach a point where our life expectancies lengthen by more than one year per year, effectively giving us time back on the clock.
This is a very controversial concept, and one that—even if possible—would require widespread access to cutting edge medical technology.
Death and taxes—the twin inevitabilities of human life. At least, for the moment. If you ask some of the most prominent futurists in the world, death may not be on that (admittedly short and cliché) list for much longer.
There’s a controversial idea floating around the futurist community of “longevity escape velocity.” It sounds super sci-fi, but it’s basically the idea that as our life extension technology gets better, our life expectancy could increase by more than we age over a set period of time. For example, as medical innovations continue to move forward, we would still age a year over the span of a year. But our life expectancy would go up by, say, a year and two months, meaning we would functionally get two months of life back.
In March of this year, Ray Kurzweil—former Google engineer and prominent AI-centric futurist—told multiple outlets that he believed humanity would achieve longevity escape velocity by 2029.
“Past 2029, you’ll get back more than a year. Go backwards in time,” Kurzweil said in an interview with the venture capital and private equity firm Bessemer Venture Partners. “Once you can get back at least a year, you’ve reached longevity escape velocity.”
That may seem like a remarkably near future, but Kurzweil seems convinced, largely because medical advancement seems to be speeding up.
“We got the COVID vaccine out in ten months,” he said in the interview. “It took two days to create it. Because we sequenced through several billion different mRNA sequences in two days. There’s many other advances happening. We’re starting to see simulated biology being used and that’s one of the reasons that we’re going to make so much progress in the next five years.”
There’s no denying that medical advancement has saved countless lives and demonstrably lengthened life expectancies, especially in the most developed parts of the world. But critically, ‘life expectancy’ is not ‘length of life,’ and the concept of longevity escape velocity is focused on the former. Achieving this concept is not the same as achieving immortality.
“[Achieving longevity escape velocity] doesn’t guarantee you living forever,” Kurzweil said. “You could have a 10 year old and you could compute that he's got many, many decades of longevity, but he could die tomorrow.”
A major reason for that is the unpredictability of life. Unfortunately, we’re probably not, say, curing all cancers in the next five years, and cancer is a disease defined by the randomness of the mutations that cause it. Accidents are also a fact of life, though Kurzweil claims that through technological advances like self-driving cars, the odds of a deadly accident occurring will also go down rapidly in the near future.
Kurzweil is well known in the tech world for his impressive track record of accurately predicting timelines for technological advances. He successfully predicted the proliferation of portable computers (i.e. cell phones and laptops) and WiFi, the existence of cloud computing, and that a computer would beat a chess champion at the game by 1998 (which happened in 1997), among many others. That said, he’s also been wrong many times over. No one can predict the future, even with all the data in the world at their fingertips.
On top of that, it’s important to remember that, at its core, the achievement of longevity escape velocity is based on the statistical calculations of average life expectancies. If it’s even possible to achieve, it would not mean that everyone around the world would suddenly experience dramatically extended lives. That would require everyone to have access to the very height of cutting-edge medical technology and infrastructure, which is highly unlikely to happen in the span of five years. As an example of that unlikelihood, tuberculosis—a disease we have known how to treat and prevent for decades—kills more people per year worldwide than any other infectious disease (with the exception of a three-year period in which it was surpassed by COVID-19). The existence of medical treatments and advances is not synonymous with their widespread implementation.
It’s true that medicine is advancing rapidly, as is technology. And if the past has anything to say about the future, those advances will likely continue to extend average life expectancies. But as enticing as the idea of longevity escape velocity is, it’s still just a prediction for now. Death and taxes, at this point in time, both remain inevitable.
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