A futurist predicts that humanity will be able to stop aging by 2029

Renowned futurist and former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil has made a prediction that challenges our traditional understanding of aging: by 2029, humanity will reach “longevity escape velocity,” a point at which our lifespan will increase by more than a year for every year that passes, allowing us to gain more lifespan rather than lose it.

“After 2029, you’ll gain more than a year back. You’ll go backward in time,” Kurzweil said in an interview with venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. “Once you can gain at least a year back, you’ll have reached longevity escape velocity.”

This claim is based on the concept that medical and technological advances will soon reach such a pace that improvements in treatments and therapies will extend our lifespans faster than we naturally age.

Currently, according to Kurzweil, we regain approximately four months of longevity for every passing year due to scientific advances, but by 2029 this number will reach a full year.

A technological visionary's track record of accurate predictions

Kurzweil is no ordinary futurist. His reputation is built on decades of surprisingly accurate technological predictions. He correctly anticipated the proliferation of laptops, the arrival of Wi-Fi, the existence of cloud computing, and that a computer would beat a world chess champion by 1998, which happened in 1997.

His methodology is based on what he calls the "law of accelerating returns," which states that technological progress proceeds at an exponential rate. A chart he has developed since 1939 shows computing power per dollar, revealing a 20-quadrillion-fold increase in computing power for the same amount of money over more than 80 years.

"This is an example of the exponential pace of technology," Kurzweil explained. "In 1999, I predicted we would have things like large language models now, and here we are."

Parallel Scientific Advances: Nuclear Clocks and the Ability to “Pause” Life

While Kurzweil is making his predictions about longevity, scientists around the world are developing technologies that seem straight out of science fiction. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Colorado Boulder, and UCLA have made significant progress in building nuclear clocks, the most precise time-measuring devices ever created.

These nuclear clocks would lose just one second every 300 billion years, outperforming today's most advanced optical atomic clocks by a factor of ten. Their extreme precision is due to the fact that they operate using processes within the atomic nucleus, which are less sensitive to environmental changes such as electric and magnetic fields.

“Since the nucleus is small, the forces involved are very, very strong, and the energy scales are much higher,” physicist Thorsten Schumm of the Vienna University of Technology explained to Popular Mechanics. This superior stability could revolutionize everything from earthquake detection to satellite navigation systems.

The Discovery of the “Pause” in Human Development

In parallel, scientists have discovered that humans retain an ancestral evolutionary ability to “pause” embryonic development. Researchers working with human stem cells and blastocyst models found that by inhibiting a series of chemical reactions known as the mTOR signaling pathway, they could induce a diapause-like state.

Diapause is a natural phenomenon in many mammals where a fertilized embryo temporarily delays implantation in the uterus until conditions are favorable. “This potential may be a vestige of an evolutionary process that we no longer utilize,” noted Nicolas Rivron, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Cell.

This discovery could have significant implications for reproductive health treatments such as in vitro fertilization, providing broader time windows to assess embryonic health and better synchronize implantation.

The fusion of brain and artificial intelligence

Kurzweil's predictions go beyond longevity. By the early 2030s, he anticipates that humans will be able to merge their neocortex with the cloud, overcoming the biological limitations of the human brain.

“We have a fixed capacity in our neocortex. It may seem vast, but it's actually limited,” Kurzweil explained to Bessemer Venture Partners. “R2-D2 could speak two million languages. I haven't met a human being who can do that yet.”

The main obstacle to this fusion is bandwidth, but Kurzweil believes it won't be necessary to connect the entire neocortex to external electronics. “You only have to interact with the top layer,” he said, referring to the rows of neurons that have the greatest capacity and connect with all the others.

Limitations and Challenges of Futuristic Predictions

Despite his optimism, Kurzweil acknowledges the inherent limitations of his predictions. “Reaching longevity escape velocity doesn't guarantee you'll live forever,” he cautioned in the interview. “You could have a 10-year-old child and calculate that they have many, many decades of longevity, but they could die tomorrow.”

The unpredictability of life, from accidents to diseases like cancer, remains a determining factor. Furthermore, unequal access to cutting-edge medical technology raises questions about who would truly benefit from these advances.

As an example of this disparity, tuberculosis, a disease we've known how to treat and prevent for decades, continues to kill more people per year globally than any other infectious disease, with the exception of a three-year period when it was surpassed by COVID-19, as reported by Popular Mechanics.

The acceleration of medical research

Kurzweil points out that medical development is accelerating dramatically. “We produced the COVID vaccine in ten months. It took two days to create it, because we sequenced several billion different mRNA sequences in two days,” he told Bessemer Venture Partners.

This speed of development stands in stark contrast to the traditional statistic that cutting-edge medical research takes approximately 19 years to reach clinical practice. “That’s an old statistic. We’re constantly accelerating that,” Kurzweil stated.

The futurist also cites the increasing use of simulated biology as one of the factors that will drive significant progress in the next five years, along with the development of more efficient algorithms for handling large volumes of medical data.

Technology as an extension of human thought

For Kurzweil, artificial intelligence does not represent an external threat, but rather a natural extension of human capacity. “Technology is an extension of human thought,” he stated. “People are very worried about us versus AI, as if it were an intelligence from another planet. But it's created by human beings.”

This optimistic outlook is reflected in his new book, "The Singularity is Nearer," which will be published in May as a follow-up to his most famous work, "The Singularity is Near," written 20 years ago. In it, Kurzweil continues to explore how the convergence of exponential technologies will fundamentally transform the human experience.

Kurzweil's predictions about longevity escape velocity and brain-AI fusion represent some of the most controversial, yet potentially transformative, concepts in the field of technological futurism, based on decades of analyzing exponential growth patterns in computing and medicine.