Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die

Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die Kristen Philipkoski 11.18.02 NEWPORT BEACH, California -- Ray Kurzweil, celebrated author, inventor and geek hero, plans to live forever. No, not just in the history books, but as a living, breathing, healthy human being. Just in case he does happen to die, he'll have his body cryogenically frozen and preserved by Alcor, the company that the late baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams now calls home, to be thawed when the technology to reanimate him has been developed. At 35, Kurzweil was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Unsatisfied with his medical treatment, he stopped taking insulin injections and crafted his own diet and supplement program. Today, at 54, he shows no signs of the disease. He plans to outwit the medical establishment on a grander scale by achieving eternal life. Taking a break from the Alcor Extreme Life Extension Conference in Newport Beach on Sunday, Kurzweil laid out his personal plan for eternal life. Wired News: When do you believe we will have the ability to unfreeze people and bring them back to life? Ray Kurzweil: I believe we'll have the technology for reanimation in 50 years. My best guess would be 40, but probably not more than 50. It is a scary prospect. My biggest concern is the loss of control -- the possibility that the reanimation would be done prematurely. So you'd wake up but you'd really be in an impaired state, like locked-in syndrome. There's a profound loss of control. I mean I have enough trouble looking after my interests when I'm alive and kicking. To look after your interests when you're not only frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen, but don't even have legal status as a person.... Alcor seems like a responsible organization, I think they would not reanimate people before it was going to work, but who knows who's going to be in charge or in control 40 or 50 years from now? But there's not really an argument against it, because the cryonics philosophy is that it's not guaranteed to work. They acknowledge that there's a good chance that it won't work, but there's a chance it'll work, and it definitely won't work if you don't do it. My primary strategy for living through the 21st century and beyond is not to die. I think that's more likely to work than cryonics, but they're not mutually exclusive. WN: Will you have your entire body preserved or just your head? RK: I think there's some part of our identity and valuable information in our bodies. There's more in our brains, but there's some in our bodies as well. It gets into some technical issues. There's a better way of preserving the brain, which they haven't been able to do with the whole body yet. The vitrification process, which does a better job of preserving structural integrity in the cells, they do with the head but not with the body. At any rate, I'd go for the grade A plan. One reason I guess it's hard to think about the decision is it's hard to deal with your own mortality. I think your own death is a profound motivator for a lot of behavior, even more than sex. As I mentioned in my talk I think that that meme is very powerful: The idea that life is short and we're only here for a short time. That's a very powerful meme in human thinking and I don't believe that. I don't think we have to die. And the technology and the means of making that a reality is close at hand. I actually think we have the knowledge right now, today. Not to live forever if knowledge were to stop, but if you combine the knowledge today with the observation that we're actually on the knee of the curve in terms of acceleration of knowledge and these technologies, and that the full blossoming of the biotech revolution will be here within a couple decades, we can remain healthy through that period and then pick up with that technology. In every different aspect of the aging and disease process we have ideas for how to get them under control. I believe we'll do that within a couple of decades. WN: Can you describe your daily efforts toward life extension? RK: My diet is low carbohydrate. Not as low as the Atkins diet, but I pretty strictly avoid high-glycemic-index carbs so my carbohydrates are mainly vegetables. I eat fish and other omega-3 fats and a lot of protein. We actually have invented some food products that are low-fat, low-carbohydrate, no sugar, low-calorie, but have the taste appeal of high-carb products, like cake with frosting, and puddings and breads, hot cereal and things like that. They'll be called Ray and Terry's Health Products (after Dr. Terry Grossman, with whom Kurzweil is writing the book A Short Guide to a Long Life). And also a lot of supplement products to implement the kind of things I talked about. I take about 150 supplements a day. WN: Do you feel healthy? RK: I feel good, I have a lot of energy, I do a lot of exercise, mostly walking and some upper-body weights, but mostly I walk four to five miles a day, which is also time to relax and let my mind think about things in an unstructured way, so it's kind of meditative. I'm very productive, I sleep well, my relationships are going well, my life's going well and I feel good. WN: How does Ramona (Kurzweil's 25-year-old female rock star alter-ego) feel about extreme life extension? RK: A virtual person doesn't have to worry about life extension. When she was first created she was 25 and that was two years ago and she's still 25. In the virtual world they've already mastered remaining at an optimal age. But I do feel that we have other people inside of us. I'm one of the few people who has had the experience of looking in the mirror and seeing a completely different manifestation of themselves. That's what the experience is like. It's like you're looking in the mirror and instead of seeing what I generally see in the mirror I saw this 25-year-old woman. And I could kind of get into being her. I would speak, and I learned to sing somewhat, and my voice would come out as a female voice, and I actually had some coaches to learn how to move and talk like a young female rock singer from New Orleans. It's really quite a trip to become someone else in that way. It really is quite liberating. We have other people inside us that we'd like to express. People's identity becomes very limited and attached to the physical body they have. This experience will be quite ubiquitous I'd say in 10 years from now, until we can go inside the nervous system and actually create virtual reality from within. That's more of a late 2020s scenario. There are many exciting reasons you'd want to do that. First of all it's fun in terms of games and role-playing. It's educational: You can assign a student to be Ben Franklin and make a virtual Constitutional Congress. It's a way of exploring different types of relationships, heterosexual couples could both change their genders, which would be very cool. And we could explore our own psychology and develop more empathy for what it's like to be a different type of person. WN: What's your next project? RK: I've got lots of projects. I've got two books nearing completion: A Short Guide to a Long Life, and ... The Singularity Is Near, which will be a sort of continuation of the series The Age of Intelligent Machines.... It's about the kinds of changes that will take civilization beyond 2029. I do a lot of public speaking, and I write articles. I have a number of other projects. Medical Learning Company is a major venture where we have a simulation of some human bodies in the form of a virtual patient. It's like a sim doctor game and it's actually used for doctor education. FatKat stands for Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies. It's applying my field, which is pattern recognition, to stock market transactions. KurzweilAI.net is another communication project. We have about 500 articles from 70 big thinkers. We're engaged in a joint venture with IDG to launch the Kurzweil report, which will be a paid subscription newsletter, using the editorial staff of KurzweilAI.net. Kurzweil Educational Systems is a reading machine company that I founded. We sold it and bought it back and that's a very successful private company that makes reading systems for the blind and also for kids with dyslexia. It's the leading software product for kids with dyslexia.