The Singularity Is Nearer

✅AI is the pivotal technology that will allow us to meet the pressing challenges that confront us, including overcoming disease, poverty, environmental degradation, and all of our human frailties. We have a moral imperative to realize this promise of new technologies while mitigating the peril. Ray predicts that The Singularity will happen in 2029. He also thinks that the 2030s will be about nanobots, tiny robots the size of a grain of sand that will connect our neurons to neurons in the cloud. This will let us merge with the super intelligence we are creating. Some ways life has been getting better: life expectancy, electricity, education, literacy, crime, poverty. In 2020 humans slaughtered more than 74 billion land animals for meat, whose products collectively weighed an estimated 371 tons. The United Nations estimates that this accounts for over 11 percent of all annual greenhouse gas emissions by human civilization. Lab-grown meat is going to change this. Except for the heart and brain, our major internal organs put substances into the bloodstream or remove them, and many diseases result from their malfunctions. Nanorobots not only will be programmed to destroy all types of pathogens, but will be able to treat metabolic diseases by the end of the 2030s. By around 2030, the most diligent and informed people will reach "longevity escape velocity," a tipping point at which we can add more than a year to a remaining life expectancy for each calendar year that passes. The fourth bridge to radical life extension will be the ability to essentially back up who we are. As we augment our biological neocortex with realistic models of the neocortex in the cloud, our thinking will become a hybrid of the biological thinking we are accustomed to today and a digital extension. The digital portion will expand exponentially and ultimately predominate. It will become powerful enough to fully understand, model, and simulate the biological portion, enabling us to back up all of our thinking. The scenario will become realistic as we approach a singularity in the mid 2040s. Vertical farming decreases the land needed by 97% A Chinese firm WinSun built ten simple modular houses in 24 hours at a cost of less than $5,000 each. Exponentially improving information technology is a rising tide that lifts all the boats of the human condition. And we are now about to enter the period when this tide surge is upward as never before. The key to this is artificial intelligence, which is now allowing us to turn many kinds of linear advancing technology into exponential information technology, from agriculture and medicine to manufacturing and land use. This force is what will make life itself exponentially better in the time ahead. The 2020’s: combining AI with biotechnology. AI for diseases, viruses, and vaccines are coming soon. Predicting how proteins fold is also a major AI application. Bio simulation is already here and is rapidly increasing the rate at which new research is being done. The 2030’s and 2040’s: developing and perfecting nanotechnology. The future is clear: minds based only on the organic substrates of biological brains can’t hope to keep up with minds augmented by nonbiological precision nanoengineering. Aubrey de Grey: “The first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born.” How will we make our life span longer? The way I see it, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with inward sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. These nanobots will repair and augment our organs. If we can control the nanobots, they can also tweak our hormones, giving us more energy and focus. They could also optimize our sleep so we only need to sleep 7 hours, giving us around 5 more years to live. Adding nanorobots to our brains will go far beyond just better memory or faster thinking. A deeper virtual neocortex will give us the ability to think thoughts more complex and abstract than we can currently comprehend. As a dimly suggestive example, imagine being able to clearly and intuitively visualize and reason about ten dimensional shapes.