Futurist and former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil said that he believes humans will reach immortality by 2045, according to Youtuber Adagio who discussed Kurzweil's theory in a two-part Youtube series.
Kurzweil believes that humanity is moving toward a singularity in 2045 which is powered by exponential growth - a theory that says that when an industry becomes interesting, more resources are invested into it, meaning that more research can be done and causing the industry to advance at greater speeds as time goes on.
The singularity will come at the end of six epochs, according to Kurzweil who added that we have gone through four: physics, chemistry, DNA and biology and brains and technology. According to the theory, humanity is currently in the midst of the fifth epoch which is human technology and human intelligence.
After humanity achieves the sixth epoch, Kurzweil believes that we will saturate our intelligence into the rest of the universe. He believes that humans, specifically, are intended to do this because the fact that we haven't found proof of alien life yet means that it doesn't exist.
How will people become immortal?
Kurzweil says that because of exponential growth in the fields of genetics, nanotech and robotics, people will eventually have the ability to map the human brain to a high enough resolution that it can be mimicked exactly in artificial intelligence.
The AIs created at this time, Kurzweil predicts, will have minds so similar to humans, that the computational capacity of the two will be equal, and AIs will develop the mental complexity of people as well as emotions.
These advances, Kurzweil believes, will also give humanity the ability to alter their biological makeup at will as well as cure deadly diseases like cancer and heart attacks. These together with an ability to reverse aging will supposedly give humans immortality and make them indistinguishable from the singularity's highly advanced AI robotics.
As to humanity's fear of AI being so advanced it's an exact copy of humans, Kurzweil believes that not only will people develop technology to safeguard their existence, but they will also accept the AI's advanced human-like abilities.
It seems, however, that humans are still not close to accepting AI becoming as advanced as Kurzweil predicts. With the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT, people have marveled at the abilities of AI, but they also have reservations. For some, it's small concerns like AI being used to write students' papers for them, but for others, the concerns are greater.
Bill Gates, for example, recently wrote a blog warning about some dangers of AI including people using it to undermine equality and, more alarmingly, AI developing the ability to overthrow humanity.
So while humanity is constantly advancing in technology and in the AI field specifically, we will have to wait until 2045 to see if humanity can indeed live forever.