At the MIT conference, not everyone seemed enamored with this idea. During lunch the next day, Daniel McCurdy, chief executive of consulting company ThinkFire Services USA Ltd., said immortality didn't strike him as all that appealing:
"I'm already periodically bored, and I'm only 48. Why would you want to live forever?"
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Kurzweil later conceded that radically extending human life could lead to a "deep ennui" if nothing else changed, but he believes we will grow smarter and vastly improve our quality of life. Nanobots, if we let them swim around our brain capillaries, will boost our brainpower, he said, as they chatter with our biological neurons over a wireless local network and the Internet, creating a hybrid form of super-intelligence.
"This scenario will enable us to expand our mental faculties through these massively distributed neural implants with no surgery required," he added.
Kurzweil said he doesn't think such changes will detract from our humanity. "The emergence of artificial intelligence is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to compete with us," he declared. "Rather, it is emerging from our human civilization."
For baby boomers, though, it's a safe bet many will resist the idea of tinkering with Mother Nature. That's the thinking of McCurdy, who believes part of what makes life a great adventure is knowing it will end.
"I would rather continue the adventure by dying and going into a different plane," he said, "instead of having nanobots running around my brain."
Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.
