The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

As de Grey explains, aging is like the wear on the engine of an automobile—it is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation. In the human body’s case, that damage largely comes from a combination of cellular metabolism (using energy to stay alive) and cellular reproduction (mechanisms for self-replication). Metabolism creates waste in and around cells and damages structures through oxidation (much like the rusting of a car!). When we’re young, our bodies are able to remove this waste and repair the damage efficiently. But as we get older, most of our cells reproduce over and over, and errors accumulate. Eventually the damage starts piling up faster than the body can fix it. In a person in their seventies, eighties, or nineties, this damage will likely cause one fatal problem a significant amount of time before it causes several. So if science develops a drug to successfully treat an otherwise fatal cancer in an eighty-year-old, that person might expect to live almost another decade before something else kills him. But eventually everything starts failing at once and it is no longer effective to treat the symptoms of the damage caused by aging. Instead, longevity researchers argue, the only solution is to cure aging itself.