Issue 13.12 - December 2005
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Humans Don't Have To Die 


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So what if we can't get consistent cell service. Within a few decades we'll have reliable nanobots in our bloodstreams and broadband in our skulls. In his new book, The Singularity Is Near, inventor and technofuturist Ray Kurzweil explains why we're well on the way to merging with our machines, an evolutionary leap that will ultimately spread human intelligence across the universe.

WIRED: Your new book's subtitle is When Humans Transcend Biology. Don't we do that every time we pick up the phone?
KURZWEIL: What I mean is that technology is the cutting edge of evolution on this planet today. It completely eclipses biological evolution.

Aren't biological and technological progress very different things?
The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. Once we reverse engineer the human brain, nonbiological intelligence will become more and more intimate, combining the subtlety of human pattern recognition with the ways in which computers are already significantly superior - remembering billions of things accurately, performing complex analysis, and instantly sharing their skills.

C'mon, we haven't even reverse engineered a flea's brain yet.
From one point of view, the complexity of the human brain is beyond imagination. But how complicated is the software that creates it, the genome? Six billion bits, 800 million bytes - not much, in information terms. Once we crack the code, we'll be able to design machines that function the same way.

So, you seriously believe you're not going to die?
We know how to slow down the aging processes much more than people realize. Even aging baby boomers like myself will be able to be in good shape 15 years from now, when we really start to master the information processes in biology and get the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution. That will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution, when we start to rebuild our bodies.

See you in 2105!
I'll be there.

- Spencer Reiss