{"id":107466,"date":"2024-06-25T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-25T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/?post_type=ftm_article&p=107466"},"modified":"2024-07-09T10:38:27","modified_gmt":"2024-07-09T14:38:27","slug":"ray-kurzweil-ai","status":"publish","type":"ftm_article","link":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/robots-ai\/ray-kurzweil-ai","title":{"rendered":"Ray Kurzweil explains how AI makes radical life extension possible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article is adapted from The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI<\/a> by Ray Kurzweil, published by Viking. Copyright \u00a9 2024 by Ray Kurzweil. Reprinted courtesy of Penguin Random House.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of our progress in disease treatment and prevention to date has been the product of the linear process of hit-or-miss efforts to find useful interventions. Because we have lacked tools for systematically exploring all possible treatments, discoveries under this paradigm have owed a lot to chance. Likely the most notable chance breakthrough in medicine was the accidental discovery of penicillin \u2014 which opened up the antibiotic revolution and has since saved perhaps as many as 200 million lives. <\/sup>But even when discoveries aren\u2019t literally accidental, it still takes good fortune for researchers to achieve breakthroughs with traditional methods. Without the ability to exhaustively simulate possible drug molecules, researchers have to rely on high-throughput screening and other painstaking laboratory methods, which are much slower and more inefficient. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair, this approach has brought great benefits. A thousand years ago, European life expectancy at birth was just in the twenties, since so many people died in infancy or youth from diseases like cholera and dysentery, which are now easily preventable. <\/sup>By the middle of the nineteenth century, life expectancy in the United Kingdom and the United States had increased to the forties. As of 2023, it has risen to over eighty in much of the developed world. <\/sup>So, we have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years and doubled it in the past two centuries. This was largely achieved by developing ways to avoid or kill external pathogens \u2014 bacteria and viruses that bring disease from outside our bodies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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