The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

When people are presented with the prospect of radical life extension, two objections are quickly raised. The first is the probability of running out of material resources to support an expanding biological population. We frequently hear that we are running out of energy, clean water, housing, land, and the other resources we need to support a growing population, and that this problem will only be exacerbated when the death rate starts to plummet. But as I articulated in chapter 4, as we begin to optimize our use of the earth’s resources, we’ll find they are thousands of times greater than we require. For example, we have nearly ten thousand times the sunlight we need to theoretically meet all of our current energy needs.[83] The second objection to radical life extension is that we will become profoundly bored doing the same things over and over again for centuries. But in the 2020s we will have virtual and augmented reality delivered in very compact external devices, and in the 2030s we will have VR and AR connected directly to our nervous systems by nanobots feeding signals to our senses. We will thereby have radical life expansion in addition to radical life extension. We will inhabit vast virtual and augmented realities limited only by our imagination—which itself will be expanded. Even if we lived hundreds of years, we would not exhaust all the knowledge there is to gain, and all the culture there is to consume. AI is the pivotal technology that will allow us to meet...