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Elena Mataix
15/03/2016

IMMORTALITY BY 2045
To what extent does the Law of Accelerating Return prove Ray
Kurzweils theory: ‘humans will be immortal by 2045?’

Introduction
The animal instinct of surviving has always been part of our nature and since the beginning
of our existence we’ve been trying to find ways to protect ourselves from every kind of
danger
...
But what if we could change this? What if we could be able to
live forever? This essay will answer the question: “To what extent does the Law of
Accelerating Return prove Ray Kurzweils theory: ‘humans will be immortal by 2045?’”
Humans’ curiosity makes us question everything we don’t have an answer for and we are
always trying to respond at them by researching, doing experiments and finding ways to
improve all our inventions to create a better world
...
The
way these technologies are developing shows that technology is not linear, and that is what
the Law of Accelerating Return tries to explain
...
Inc
...
This is all because the argument of this essay states how
technology is accelerating in a massive speed that no one is expecting and that is very hard
for a human to imaging
...

To support this argument, this essay begins with an explanation of what the Law of
Accelerating return is; continues by discussing how he pretends to make us immortal;
discussing if its scientifically possible to make this or not and analysing if the Law of
Accelerating return proves the theory, this will be done by looking at other scientists
opinions and explanations; to conclude, this essay will discuss all the information given and
find an answer to the question
...

Each year, new technologies are invented: apple launches two new phones, windows four
different types of computers with incredible characteristics, Samsung releases a new thin TV
that can be controlled with vision and in which you can watch movies in 3D… And so many
more amazing things (Sagar, 2014)
...
An easy to notice example, is the dates
in which IPhones have been released: The first generation of IPhone, was released on June
2007; the 3G IPhone (the next generation) was release on July 2008, which is 13 months
after
...
But if we look at how long it took to go from the 3G to the 3GS

IPhones, we can see an even faster improvement of just 11 months
...
Therefore, the exponential growth is growing and accelerating (Anon
...

This is just a small example of the acceleration of technology, however, scientists have
looked at this in a historical size, showing how we’ve been creating new things since the
beginning of time and their growth is not linear, but exponential (Anon
...
The
biological evolution, followed a number of different steps
...
After this, by using the creation of the
first step, the next step (The Cambrian Explosion, in which all living things evolved) took only
10 million years, making it 200 times faster
...
Our species evolved in hundreds of thousands of years, then, using
the interaction, evolution was able to get to the next stage by using the “technologycreating species” in this stage we find the first steps in technological evolution (fire, stone
tools, wheels)
...
And we’ve had a continual
acceleration of this process (Neal, 2015)

Figure 1 - Countdown to Singularity (Jason, 2015)
This graph is from the book: ‘The Singularity Is Near’ written by Ray Kurzweil in 2006
...
From it we can see how each time

it takes less time for a new event to occur since there is more background knowledge for it
...
" And therefore, to build this graph he used
lists from 15 different lists that showed the important events of evolution of key thinkers
such us the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Museum of Natural History… and when these were
making these lists, they weren’t trying to make his point
...
However, it is not 100 percent reliable since
it is hard to find out the exact date in which inventions were created millions of years ago,
but instead the recent ones are very precise
...
20 years ago the first mobile phones came
out
...
What’s going to happen in the next 10, 20, 30
years? Magic stuff”
...
However, who would have told a person 20 years ago that they would be able to hold
in their hand and keep in their pockets a dictionary, a video game, music… and apart from
all of that they would be able to call anyone from
any part of the world with it and even see them in a
camera at real time
...
As discussed with the Law
of Accelerating Return, we would use inventions that
we don’t jet have to make this possible and this is
one of the things that makes it so hard to imagine
this to occur
...

And this are not things that only crazy scientists are
saying but also important figures in the science
history such as Stephen Hawking believes that it is
possible to retain a digital version of the brain after the body dies: "I think the brain is like a
program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain
onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death," he told a crowd in Cambridge,
reported the Guardian
...
" (Gomez,
2016)
...
A robotic copy of a human
body has been created and computers are really close to having computers with more

transmitters than neurones in our brain
...
This is a fascinating thing that could even at
some point make machines more intelligent than us, and is showing how each time we are
one step closer to immortality
...

Brain Immortality – Impossible
As explained above, there are different aspects that show that it might be possible to
upload our minds and live in virtual reality environments, however, there are also reasons
that show that there’s a probability that our brain may never be digitized
...
The functions of the brain are not computable
“The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it”
...
Scientists have been trying to duplicate
brains for a lot of years, but the most important problem that they face is that
consciousness features are made by interactions among thousands of cells that can’t
be predicted, is something created by nature that we will never be able to change or
to control and therefore, we can’t replicate it in silicon (Regalado, 2015)
...
It will be unethical to develop
There are philosophical and moral concerns that have to be considered
...
And when it comes
time for the first human to get uploaded, there
could be some important legal and ethical
Figure 3 - Experiments on monkeys
issues to consider (Dvorsky, 2014)
...
Uploaded minds would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse
An uploaded mind is never going to be sure that is safe
...
Even the most strong
security measures can’t prevent hackers’ attacks (Brosche, 2015)
...


Immortality by 2045
This essay has now looked at both the possibilities and the impossibilities for immortality to
become possible one day
...
This shows that we have the needed material to get to create something that can
make us immortal
...

The Law of Accelerating Return explains how we are not going to create the way in which
we are going to upload out minds using the inventions and technological knowledge we
have now, but that we will use the knowledge we will gain with the years to get to that
stage
...
He has faced some of this problems already
and has seen that it is not such a quick process
...


References
Anon
...
Tech Innovation
...
com/2934526/apple-iphone-timeline/
[Accessed 2 March 2016]
...
, 2016
...
[Online]
Available at: http://www
...
com/2240220/human-being-immortal-2045-proof
[Accessed 4 March 2016]
...
, 2015
...
[Online]
Available at: http://countdown-to-singularity
...

Childers, N
...
Motheroad
...
vice
...

Dvorsky, G
...
io9-we come from the future
...
gizmodo
...

Gomez, J
...
, 2016
...
[Online]
Available at: http://www
...
es/ciencia/2014/07/22/53ce5a8cca4741f5328b457f
...

Jason, M
...
When Humans Transcend Biology - The Singularity is Near
...
singularity
...
html
[Accessed 5 March 2016]
...
, 2013
...
[Online]
Available at: http://motherboard
...
com/blog/scientists-are-convinced-mind-transfer-is-the-keyto-immortality
[Accessed 7 March 2016]
...
, 2015
...
[Online]
Available at: http://motherboard
...
com/blog/darpa-is-developing-an-intelligent-machine-thatcan-think-on-its-feet
[Accessed 4 March 2016]
...
, 2015
...
[Online]
Available at: https://www
...
com/s/511421/the-brain-is-not-computable/
[Accessed 11 March 2016]
...
, 2014
...
[Online]
Available at: http://www
...
org/view/article/156452/
[Accessed 2 March 2016]

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