Humans can achieve immortality by 2030, claims ex Google engineer

Ray Kurzweil has received thirteen honorary doctorates and honours from three US presidents.

Human being will achieve immortality by 2023, says futurist Ray Kurzweil in claims that have gotten the internet curious. The comments by the computer scientist and author, who is a former Google engineer, were made several years ago, in his book.

A tech vlogger, Adagio, recently compiled Kurzweil’s claims in videos on YouTube, which have raked up thousands of views.

In his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near”, Kurzweil claimed that technology will allow humans to achieve immortality by 2023, the New York Post reported.

“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid (Alan) Turing test and therefore, achieve human levels of intelligence,” he told Futurism in 2017.

“I have set the date 2045 for the 'singularity' which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”

So what is “singularity”?

Ray Kurzweil writes in his 2005 book that singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

“The singularity will allow us to transcened these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want ( a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever).”

In 2010, Kurzweil, 75, claimed that 86 per cent of the 147 predictions he has made over the years has come true.

Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-front optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesiser capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

In 2012, he was hired as a director of engineering at Google.

He has received thirteen honorary doctorates and honours from three US presidents.