Ray Kurzweil: Someday, Humans Will Conquer Death and Live Indefinitely

Would you want to live forever if you could?

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks that eventually, technology will help us reach immortality, at least in some form.

In an episode of PBS’s News Hour last week, Kurzweil said that death, which he describes as “a great robber of meaning, of relationships, of knowledge,” will soon be conquered, and that someday, our species will be able to defeat disease and degeneration, and live “indefinitely.”

Kurzweil has served as director of engineering at Google since 2012, and has written books on  artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, health, and futurism.

He also has an uncanny knack for making amazing predictions about artificial intelligence and the human race with an estimated 86 percent accuracy rate.

Here are a few predictions he made in 1990 that became reality, from SingularityHUB:

…that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. Then in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.

… that PCs would be capable of answering queries by accessing information wirelessly via the Internet by 2010. He was right, to say the least.

… that by the early 2000s, exoskeletal limbs would let the disabled walk. Companies like Ekso Bionics and others now have technology that does just this, and much more.

Kurzweil reportedly joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his declared death, Kurzweil plans to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him.