I'm Ray Kurzweil, I'm an inventor, author, and futurist, and I invite you to join me at Global Future 2045, which will be a fabulous congress to explore the brilliant future ahead. We are going to become increasingly non-biological

to the point where the non-biological part predominates and the biological part is not that important anymore. In fact, the non-biological part, the machine part, will be so powerful that it will completely model and understand the biological part, so if that biological part went away, it wouldn't make any difference

because the non-biological part already understood it completely. We will also have non-biological bodies. We can create bodies with nanotechnology, we can create virtual bodies and virtual reality that will be as real as real reality, because the virtual bodies

will be as detailed and convincing as real bodies. We'll have different ways we can create bodies. We do need a body. Our intelligence is directed towards a body. But it doesn't have to be this frail, biological body that's subject to all kinds of failure modes.

I think we'll have a choice of bodies. We'll certainly be routinely changing our parent body in virtual reality, so today you can have a different body and something like a Second Life, but it's just a picture on a screen, although research has shown that people actually

begin to subjectively identify with their avatar. But in the future, it's not going to be a little picture in a virtual environment you're looking at, it'll feel like this is your body, and you're in that environment, and that your body is the virtual body.

and it can be as realistic as real reality. The environment can be as realistic as real reality. So we'll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly as well as our environments in virtual reality, but it will feel very real. We'll ultimately be able to do that

with real reality too, like self-organizing swarms of nanobots that can link themselves up into a virtual body. If we have radical life extension only, we would get profoundly bored; we'd have profound existential ennui, running out of things to do

and new ideas, but that's not what's going to happen. In addition to radical life extension, we're going to have radical life expansion. We're going to have millions of virtual environments to explore. We're going to literally expand our brains. Right now, we only have 300 million

pattern recognizers, organized in a grand hierarchy in our neocortex, but we could make that 300 billion, 300 trillion. We can expand it. The last time we expanded it with the frontal cortex, we created language, and art, and science. Just think of the qualitative leaps

we can't even imagine today when we expand our neocortex again. We'll be thinking grander, deeper, and more hierarchical thoughts than ever before, creating whole new genres of art and science, or even whole institutions like art and science

that we could not articulate. So we're not going to get bored. If that weren't the case, then I think living for hundreds, thousands of years would be a profound philosophical nightmare, but instead we're headed for radical life expansion.

Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045

Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045

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