So Kurzweil, an MIT-trained engineer, did what he would with any engineering problem he faced: studied the data—in this case, scientific studies, nutritional research, and statistics about aging and health outcomes—and designed a solution. He drastically cut his fat intake, lost 40 pounds, and, along the way, reversed his diabetes. It was early proof of what would later define his life’s work. “Our bodies and brains are very much machines,” he says. “To a certain extent, we can reprogram them.” We can also train machines to be more like us. That’s what Kurzweil does as director of engineering at Google—he’s helping the Internet giant build smart robots—and it’s this kind of thinking that landed him in the headlines in February, when he predicted that in just 15 years’ time, computers will possess more raw intelligence than humans. An even more controversial prediction: That in our lifetimes, we’ll also cheat death itself. He’s a fit and trim 66, but he still fine-tunes his body like a luxury car, taking scores of supplements each day, part of a nutritional regimen that he designed in the hope of slowing the aging process to a crawl. (This kind of life extension requires multitasking: “I’m actually taking supplements now as we talk,” says Kurzweil, who is a particular fan of vitamin D and phosphatidylcholine, a chemical found in cell membranes that declines as we age.) He eats a diet low in carbohydrates—they make up just one-sixth of his daily calories—and sticks to lean meats and fish, plenty of vegetables, and 8 cups of green tea daily. He walks 30 to 60 minutes a day and fits in basic strength training a few times a week. And he insists on getting a solid 8 hours of sleep, even with a relentless work schedule. “If I’m well rested, I find that very few problems bother me,” Kurzweil wrote in his book Fantastic Voyage. Kurzweil’s suggestion that we can avoid death probably sounds insane to the average person. But since the early 1980s, he’s crunched the numbers and followed the data, even when it’s led to seemingly outrageous conclusions. Mapping the rate of progress in all areas of science and technology, from how fast a computer works to how quickly planes can fly, he determined that technological progress tended to double each year, portending a future that will be unimaginably different from life as we now know it. Beyond that, he imagines something called the Singularity, the point at which we’ll finally augment our bodies with the artificial intelligence to enable us—or something like us—to essentially live forever. At Google, by developing smarter machines that are capable of understanding human language, Kurzweil has essentially been hired to hasten the Singularity. Of course, a world without death would present philosophical challenges of its own, because—at least according to every major religion in existence—our limited number of years on Earth helps give life its charge and meaning. But that again is an assumption Kurzweil placidly denies. Death doesn’t give meaning to existence, he says; it’s a fixable design flaw in the human body, and he refuses to bow to it: “Being an entrepreneur, you have to be optimistic, because if you knew all the obstacles you would face, you would never start anything.” This stubborn spirit of borderless thinking has been with Kurzweil since he was a school-age kid living in the New York City borough of Queens. “I was 5, and I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but I remember the feeling that you could create magic by putting things together the right way,” he says. In the years since, he has helped the blind read, developed synthesizers that can play symphonies, and raised two children in Boston with Sonya Rosenwald Fenster, his wife of nearly 40 years. It’s been a beautiful life by any measure, and perhaps that helps explain why his vision of the future is so expansive. Kurzweil doesn’t want to lose a thing.
Here’s what he’s learned: Death doesn’t give life meaing.“The things we can do with life—have relationships, be creative, create knowledge—are what give life meaning. We don’t need death to give time a purpose. We rationalize this great tragedy and convince ourselves that death is a blessing, but it’s a tragedy. It’s a profound loss of knowledge and skill and humanity and relationships. It is a loss of the things that give life significance.” Health is the killer app.“Now that we’re really understanding the fundamental information processes underlying biology and aging, we’re creating much more powerful tools to stop them. There’s no reason we can’t keep rejuvenating the body indefinitely I predict the development of intelligent nanobots that will be able to augment our immune systems, precisely targeting pathogens and even cancerous cells. I used to call it the killer app for nanotechnology. But that wasn’t a good name for a health technology.” Dreams carry answers.“I’ll assign myself a problem as I go to sleep, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, I often will find myself dreaming about it in the kind of unstraightforward way in which dreams are typically composed. The next step is in the morning—and this doesn’t work if an alarm clock goes off—when you’re in that in-between stage. You have access to the dream, ideas, and stories, but you have enough consciousness to be able to rationally evaluate your ideas. And if I can do that for 15 to 20 minutes, I invariably have some new insight. Sometimes I feel that I’m just kind of carrying on my dream’s decisions throughout the day.” Humans, not gods, remake the world.“I remember my grandfather coming back from his first return visit to Europe after fleeing Hitler in 1938, and he described in reverential terms the opportunity to have held with his own hands some original documents by Leonardo da Vinci. These were sacred documents to him, but these were not documents handed down by God. They were created by a person. The message was that human ideas can change the world, and you can overcome any obstacle with the right idea. That was my family’s philosophy.” Don’t fear progress.“Just read Thomas Hobbes or Charles Dickens and you’ll see how desperate life used to be for 99% of humanity. Our lives are measurably better because of technology. A child in Africa has more access to knowledge and information on his smartphone than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. And this kind of technology and artificial intelligence is not in the hands of a few dark intelligence agencies or evil corporations. It’s in the hands of billions.” Do what you want.“Use your brain just like you’re using your muscles. You know what happens to your muscles when you don’t use them, and the same thing is true of your brain. The idea of retirement to me is kind of an oxymoron. In some ways I consider that I retired when I was 5, because I focused on doing only what I wanted to do. And that is what people should do. They should seek to make their careers something they love and have a passion for. But not everyone can do that, and to the extent that they haven’t been able to do that, then retirement can be a great opportunity to start.” More: Are You Too Busy For Love?
