Coming Soon: Immortality? -CBS News

[Rose Siding]

snip>
The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.
...
Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots," that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart.

The claims are fantastic, but Kurzweil is no crank. He's a recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, which is billed as a sort of Academy Award for inventors, and he won the 1999 National Medal of Technology Award. He has written on the emergence of intelligent machines in publications ranging from Wired to Time magazine. The Christian Science Monitor has called him a "modern Edison." He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. Perhaps the MIT graduate's most famous inventions is the first reading machine for the blind that could read any typeface.

During a recent interview in his company offices, Kurzweil sipped green tea and spoke of humanity's coming immortality as if it's as good as done. He sees human intelligence not only conquering its biological limits, including death, but completely mastering the natural world.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/13/tech/main673726.shtml

[LostInAnomie]

1. That would be cool

I can't imagine the sociological ramifications of it though.

[Spinzonner]

2. Until the nanobots decide that after all that work

it's really THEIR body.

Not to mention the new viruses that will be gotten from the internet. Just what we need: biotech hackers.

[havocmom]

3. Greed to infinity!

Since the poor, middle class and most of the world's population can't get decent health care to see them through regulation lifespan these days, only the wealthy would be in the running for the little perk of immortality. So, they couldn't get enough goodies in say, 80 or 90 years and want more. Boy, those tax cuts for the top 1% will just keep on giving, won't they!

Pigs