In Search of the Sixth Sense

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won’t be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don’t think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it’s a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who’s to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can’t really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google’s stock be three years from now? That’s hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

FC: To the point that we can program our own biology?

Kurzweil: Information technology is affecting almost every field. We’re now understanding biology as information processing; we’re learning to understand the processes underlying these biological pathways. Whereas drug discovery used to be literally that, discovering drugs, which is to say finding something that happened to work. Now we’re entering an area where we actually understand the exact sequence of biological events. We can intervene very precisely by blocking one key enzyme, one key step.

FC: Alright, before we go any further, tell me about your new book.

Kurzweil: It’s an urgent message to my baby boomer peers, 99% of whom are oblivious to this perspective. People have a very conventional sense of the cycle of life. They just don’t have a sense that they could master the biology that’s controlling their progression towards disease and aging. We’re well along in understanding and reverse engineering the dozen or so biological processes that describe aging. It’s not too late for baby boomers to reverse those processes. We have the tools right now to slow down aging sufficiently so that most of us can remain in good shape until we do have the tools. My view is that I’m reprogramming my biochemistry the way I’d reprogram my computers. I’m measuring 60 different levels on a regular basis. It’s definitely working; I would have heart disease otherwise.

The common wisdom is that health is 80% genetics and 20% lifestyle. And that’s true if you take the conventional watered-down approach. If you’re aggressive, you can overcome, well, I wouldn’t say anything -- but almost anything.

FC: Would you want to be immortal if the opportunity presented itself?

Kurzweil: Well, I think the opportunity is presenting itself. Our mortality is something that should be in our hands; it’s something I want in my hands. Science and technology are accelerating. I believe we’ll demonstrate a mouse that doesn’t age within approximately a decade. And within a decade of that we’ll translate that into human therapies.

FC: Birth and death are nice bookends. How will removing them change our philosophy of life?

Kurzweil: It’s already changing. There are lots of people in their 60s who look sexy, who are intellectually vital, who continue to contribute. We’re in an era where people’s contributions are primarily intellectual. Later in life, people have accumulated experience and wisdom, so they’re very much in a position to contribute to society. Our perception of someone 65 earlier in the century was very different. Life expectancy was 37 in 1800. It was 55 in 1900. Now it’s pushing 80. We continually push that back and I think it’s going to change very quickly as we get more powerful tools.

We can talk poetically about how aging is natural, but the reality is if you visit an old-age home you see people who’ve lost their loved ones and have lost their faculties. It’s really a tragic situation and it’s not something I desire. I want to keep my faculties.

FC: What about the costs?How is society going to support the cost of all these people?

Kurzweil: We’ll be creating a great deal of wealth. Not just in dollars, but also in what a dollar can buy. We have 50% deflation in information technology; you can buy the same digital camera today for half the price it was 12 months ago. Same specs. Go out to 2020, what you can buy in terms of information for a dollar will be quite vast. With nanotechnology we’ll be turning information into a wide range of products -- including food -- with very inexpensive materials.