March was one of the nicer times of year to be in Washington, D.C.—as long as you discounted the politics. It was generally free of the oppressive swamp heat and shirt-soaking humidity of summer, when the throngs clogged the National Mall and the endless procession of tour buses belched and threaded their way through the capital. In early spring the weather grew mild with the cherry blossoms on the cusp. But that wasn’t the case on March 14, 2000, as Ray Kurzweil blithely made his way to the East Room of the White House wearing a dark suit and a muted red tie. Today it was cool, with a stiff breeze out of the south blowing bright cumulus clouds above the city’s grand monuments.
Life was good for Raymond Kurzweil as he dipped his toes into the shallow waters of the 21st century. He was on his way to spend some time with the president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, who would that day hang the National Medal of Technology around his neck. Not only was he being feted at the White House, but he also had finally begun fusing his prescriptions for immortality and artificial intelligence with the publication of his latest book the previous October, The Age of Spiritual Machines. That was 29 years after his father’s death and 32 years after he created his first computer. Apparently, even for Ray Kurzweil, big ideas took time to percolate.
Kurzweil wouldn’t be alone that day when he received his medal, of course. He would be joining 16 other scientists who were also receiving theirs. (One award was posthumous: Bob Swanson, co-founder of Genentech, who had died of brain cancer only a few months earlier.) Craig Venter would not be among the awardees either. He wouldn’t win his National Medal for another eight years. Nevertheless, all of the explorers assembled in the room that day could feel Venter’s presence. Three and a half months from now he would, at the very same podium, in the very same room at the White House with Clinton, make his human genome speech—the one the whole world would watch. Anyone listening closely enough, in fact, might have thought the National Medal ceremony was more about the Human Genome Project than the collective accomplishments of the scientists assembled. On that day, Clinton—before distributing the heavily ribboned medals—announced that the United States and Britain had agreed that very morning that all genetic information, once the Human Genome Project finally shared it, must be, “Free to scientists everywhere for people everywhere.” Clinton felt this was crucial because the advances would not simply change science; they would change everything.
The project’s findings were already revealing the genetic links between scourges like leukemia, schizophrenia, and kidney disease, and Clinton felt that soon they would do the same for cancer and heart disease and all the rest. The mysteries of human weakness and mortality, he said, would be laid bare, and then the solutions would follow.
If it had crossed their minds, any number of the bemedaled attendees in the East Room could have switched out the names of all the maladies Clinton had just mentioned and substituted only one: aging. Had they done that, they would have glimpsed an insight that had already begun simmering in Ray Kurzweil’s mind five years earlier, in 1995.
The insight was simply this: Unless a meteor struck Earth, the human genome was, one way or another, going to be sequenced. What’s more, it was obvious that the genetic information pouring out of the HGP was doubling every year, while at the same time the cost of its creation was dropping by half. This meant advances in computer science and biology were merging; in their way, humans and machines had begun to meld. He knew all of this because he had written about it in his books.
So now, as he sat perfectly erect with the other honorees in front of the podium, smiling up at the commander in chief that March morning, Kurzweil thought to himself, They are finally getting it. And of course they had to because the Law of Accelerating Returns made it so.
THE LAW OF ACCELERATING RETURNS, or what Ray Kurzweil came to call LOAR, had begun to dawn on him as early as the 1980s, but wasn’t really codified until the publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines. It started out mostly as a practical matter; he needed a system for timing the rollout of all of those technologies he was continually creating. In Kurzweil’s universe there was never a shortage of concepts—but what good did it do to conjure a good idea, or even a well-executed invention, if there wasn’t a market for it? Timing was paramount.
By the 1980s, Kurzweil had gotten pretty good at foreseeing the future. He predicted a computer would beat the world’s best human chess players by the year 2000—and lo and behold, in May 1997 it happened. IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated Garry Kasparov, the chess world champion, in one of the highest profile competitions ever. The world gasped.
Kurzweil also foresaw the explosive growth of the internet in the early 1990s, when the world’s total population of users was a mere 2.6 million. In 2017, that number would clock in at 3.7 billion, more than a thousandfold increase. Smartphones, cloud computing, and self-driving cars were also among his predictions. Not that he was always right, but he clearly foresaw something in this idea of digitizing the human genome, and all the exponential business that went with it.
In his efforts to predict the future, Kurzweil had turned to Moore’s law. Gordon Moore was one of the founders of NM Electronics, which later became the Silicon Valley juggernaut Intel Corporation. By 2000, it easily stood as the world’s most dominant manufacturer of advanced silicon chips. In a 1965 article for Electronics magazine, Moore noted, almost in passing, that the number of components in the integrated circuits of the day—things like transistors, diodes, and capacitors—appeared to be doubling every year, and probably would continue to do so for at least the next decade. (In 1975, he amended his insight, and changed the rate to every two years.) The point was: Change—at least when it came to integrated chips—was advancing, exponentially. This discovery became the very foundation of Silicon Valley and the explosion of ideas, money, and transformation it generated over the next 40 years.
While Kurzweil pondered Moore’s law, he began to suspect it was part of a much larger trend that began not with the invention of the silicon chip, but with the big bang itself. The universe, he argued, had been accelerating its own organization from its first milliseconds right up to the present. First there was the formation of galaxies and stars, and then planets. Next, with the emergence of life on Earth, self-organization took another leap in the form of biological evolution and the natural selection that drove the diversification of the world’s life-forms from the first single cells to elephants. Another surge came with the advance of intelligence, human consciousness, and the technologies that a symbol-creating, self-aware creature could conjure: words, language, writing, art, mathematics, and eventually software code, computers, robots, even genetic engineering—each gathering speed as they built on the foundations and developments before them. The more organized it all became, the more quickly it continued to organize. This made Moore’s law a subset of a much larger evolutionary vision: the Law of Accelerating Returns—LOAR.
Kurzweil enthusiastically shared all of this thinking with the world. On stages or in conference rooms, he would reveal on great graphs how LOAR played out across the cosmos. It was an adult version of the same thinking he shared as the junk-collecting kid from Jackson Heights: I’m going to change the world! He would reveal the benchmark moments of history, and illustrate the way they took the shape of a hockey stick, where advances rose in a perfect exponential curve from the flat surface of the stick’s blade to a sudden rocketing up the nearly vertical slope of its shaft.
That’s what exponential growth did: It started out slowly and looked almost flat until it reached what he called “the knee of the curve,” an inflection point that suddenly shot upward. The human race was now approaching that inflection point, Kurzweil would say, and events that had so long looked level and slow over the incomprehensible epochs were now poised to stagger upward almost vertically. What had been accomplished in 20 years during the 20th century would soon be accomplished in the first 14 years of the 21st, and within 7 years more after that, and 3 and a half after that and so on. By the end of the 21st century, human technology would advance the current equivalent of 20,000 years! It was all writ large in everything from the chemical and molecular interactions that shaped the early universe right up through the advent of DNA, genes, language, and mathematics. And it was gathering speed with the absolute reliability of a Swiss watch.
As proof, Kurzweil still likes to show pictures of Martin Cooper walking around holding the world’s first cell phone back in 1973. The thing was huge—like a giant loaf of bread with an antenna on it—and hardly worked at all. But the next thing you know, flip phones are everywhere looking just like the Star Trek communicator. Then Apple invents the smartphone, which quickly becomes much more than a phone. Suddenly everyone is carrying around a handheld computer linked to the Cloud with all of its untold knowledge and information right there at their fingertips. Early on, the idea of lugging around some big clunking phone would have seemed like the world’s stupidest idea. Kurzweil would often smile wryly at this. Because soon, people found they couldn’t imagine life without these things. And then they would say, “Ahh, that’s not really a big deal; it’s been around for years.” They feel that way because of something called recency bias, the sense that a new thing is quickly perceived as old hat because it’s become so indispensable. Think of fax machines, microwaves, streaming television, and car doors that open with a gesture.
The race for immortality will behave very much the same way, Kurzweil says. Costs will start high, and the idea of living radically long will look as cockamamy as mobile phones, or self-driving cars. But then costs will plummet. And when they do, that is when they will actually work—because history shows that the only people who pay through the nose for technology that doesn’t work are the wealthy. They are the early adopters because they can afford to be. But they are also the only ones who lower the costs of new technology enough that the rest of us can afford them.
Thus, in March 2000, there in the East Room, Kurzweil could see that the world was glimpsing an indestructible fact: Human biology was going binary, and that would create a new world. And that, in turn, would lead, one step at a time, to life everlasting.
PART OF RAY KURZWEIL’S BELIEF in his vision of a supremely long life began one year before his visit to the White House. He was in the lunch line at a nanotechnology conference at K. Eric Drexler’s Foresight Institute and struck up a conversation with Terry Grossman, a slim, hardy-looking doctor who ran the Grossman Wellness Center in Golden, Colorado. Grossman had recently written a book of his own, The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever, and the two men immediately connected. Grossman’s Wellness Center was all about youth and health, and he had developed a variety of prescriptions for a longer life, including supernutrients, wellness diets, exercise, and chelation therapy to remove toxic metals from the body.
Kurzweil was fascinated with Grossman’s work for the simple reason he agreed with it. In the early 1980s, he had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, mainly because of his poor diet. During one of his early entrepreneurial meetings right out of college, he needed to put on a suit. But when he pulled one out of the closet and tried it on, he was forced to leave it buckled but unbuttoned; he had gained that much weight. When drug treatments for the diabetes only seemed to make matters worse, Kurzweil researched and then attacked the problem on his own. He radically changed his eating habits, reduced all sugar, lost weight, consumed large quantities of selected supplements, and published his second book in 1993, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease.
After their initial meeting, Grossman and Kurzweil exchanged no fewer than 10,000 emails in the ensuing months. That led to a new book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which hit bookstores in November 2004. The book’s goal was unabashedly optimistic: Do away with death. Others might be satisfied to grow old and die, but Kurzweil was not among them, and neither was Grossman. If anyone wanted to think their prescriptions were kooky or unrealistic, let them take the Fantastic Voyage and refute their arguments.
At this point, Kurzweil was approaching age 60; the very idea that death was somehow good, that it gave life meaning, rankled the hell out of him. Aging robbed you of your mental agility, whittled your sensory acuity, and burgled your sexual desire. In time, everything was taken from you until there was not a scintilla of life left to give.
Fantastic Voyage revealed to readers how death would be avoided—and one of the truly big breakthroughs was the Human Genome Project. The HGP would unlock the ins and outs of genetics, reveal why we died and how, and lead to new treatments tailored to each of us. Science would even find ways to grow fresh organs or supercharge old ones or reprogram human genes to reverse the ravages that aging had already wrought. Even foods using recombinant DNA might soon be created that could treat diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS. The possibilities were unlimited!
Kurzweil and Grossman laid out how everyone could live forever using what they called their “three bridges” strategy. Each bridge would be a little like skipping across a creek from one rock to the next. In Bridge One, readers were asked to live a smart, healthy lifestyle to take advantage of Bridge Two, which constituted breakthroughs in biotechnologies largely based on insights from the human genome. This, in turn, led to Bridge Three, Kurzweil’s favorite: nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) that would replace our “suboptimal” biology and make radically long life a reality.
Each bridge in the book was plotted out with the detail of a scientific coda—which, in a sense, it was, from the supplements, exercise, and medical tests readers should take to cross the first bridge to the “programmable blood” that nanotechnology would make possible during the third. The book included chapters on diet (“Food and Water,” “Fat and Protein”), the scourges that kill us (sugar and inflammation), and ways to overcome it all (hormone therapy, genomics, detoxification, and exercise). It was especially important for baby boomers to stay healthy because Bridge Two, the biotech revolution, had not yet arrived in 2004—and if boomers didn’t take good care, they might not survive long enough to take advantage of the biotechnological advances on the horizon.
Did the human race have the tools and technologies in hand to live forever in 2004? No, the authors had to admit. But remember: A defining trait of the human species was that it insisted upon going beyond its limitations. That was one of Kurzweil’s clarion calls. Science was not in the habit of slowing down. LOAR was advancing exponentially, and by that calculation, within 10 years, the average American would be adding a year of life expectancy for every year lived. All one had to do was survive in good health until 2015 (and avoid being hit by the proverbial bus), and immortality would be in the cards; kind of like a living version of an Alcor cryonaut. Except without the wait.9
THE REACTIONS IN THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD to Fantastic Voyage were polite enough, but less than riveting. At least among his artificial intelligence colleagues, the responses were often more along the lines of Ray is really smart, but these ideas about melding with nanomachines and living forever—well, maybe he’s gone a bit off the rails.
Yet a good deal of evidence supported the general trends Fantastic Voyage foresaw, even if the timing of it all might be in dispute. For years Genentech, with Art Levinson as CEO and chair, had been “pharming” artificial insulin, human growth hormone, and proteins that attacked cancer and kidney disease—even asthma and psoriasis—with increasing speed. And Craig Venter was furiously crunching genes to illuminate genomic mysteries of all kinds. These advances were already emerging.
By the time Fantastic Voyage and its follow-up, Transcend—Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, arrived in 2008, Kurzweil’s ubiquitous prognostications continued to gather interest and credibility, and the titans and cognoscenti of Silicon Valley were taking notice. Why not? After all, Kurzweil’s personal and persistent visions of the future fit into the Silicon Valley vibe as smoothly as a $1,000 pair of Ferragamo loafers. Legendary venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla invested in his companies. Bill Gates called him a visionary thinker, and would invite him over to the manse now and again to have a bit of dinner. Kurzweil had come a long way since his days as the kid determined to build magical machines that saved the world. He had become an oracle in all things technological—which was to say, all things. Kurzweilian concepts that had once seemed so out there began seeping slowly into the public consciousness, becoming sources of insight into the murky future that Silicon Valley wanted so desperately to clarify. Because, as he saw it—and as the Valley was clearly demonstrating—every change in the 21st century was becoming a blazing, exponential bit-stream! And hadn’t he predicted precisely that? Even if there was still an immense amount of work to be done, hadn’t he actually said the words? Life without death was not only possible. It was inevitable.
But, in the early 2000s, Kurzweil was not the only eccentric who was gathering the attention of those riding the bleeding edges of science and radical life extension. A lanky, biblically bearded computer scientist with a prodigious thirst for ale had also emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, from among the musty labs and libraries of the University of Cambridge across the Atlantic. He had even influenced the thinking of Kurzweil himself. This man, too, had a way with words and a penchant for combining science and logic with outrageous pronouncements. And he, too, was hell-bent on redefining the sainted meanings of aging and death. His name was Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, and the world would soon hear of him.