Ray Kurzweil, the American futurist who has spent 50 years making predictions that sounded insane at the time and then annoyingly came true, speculates that humans could hit something called “longevity escape velocity” by about 2029.
The idea goes like this. Right now, every year you live, you lose a year. Medical science claws back about four months of it. But science is accelerating, and Kurzweil says that by around 2029 it will claw back a full year for every year you spend. At which point, mathematically speaking, you stop running out of time.
This fascinates me. So I sat down and tried to map out how it could actually happen.
Step one: Artificial intelligence (AI) gets smarter than the smartest human. Not smarter than me, most AI is probably already smarter than that tiny hurdle, but smarter than the best physicist or biologist who has ever lived. Kurzweil puts human-level AI at 2029 as well, and the people building these systems keep moving their own estimates earlier, not later.
Step two: You copy this super smart AI. You don't get one Einstein. You get 1,000 Einsteins. They don't sleep. They don't take holidays. They don't get into petty feuds over who gets credit, which alone would speed up academic research by roughly 40 years. They just work, all of them, at once, on every problem, around the clock.
Step three: Point them at biology. Ageing isn't one disease, it's thousands of small breakdowns – cells that stop dividing properly, proteins that fold wrong, DNA damage piling up the eye bags under my eyes (I’m so tired). A human researcher might spend an entire career on one of those. A thousand tireless geniuses can run 10,000 experiments in simulation before lunch, design the drug, predict the side effects, and hand the whole package to a lab. Fifty years of medical progress in five. Then the next five, faster.
Step four: It compounds. Every discovery makes the next one quicker. And that super smart AI builds an even smarter AI, which builds another AI smarter than that, and so on and so on, until problems are being solved by armies of hyper intelligent AI. You can see how this would affect a lot more than ageing.
Say it works. Let's say my son grows up in a world where ageing is a treatable condition, where the machines have sorted out energy, food, and most of physics, and nobody actually needs to do anything to survive.
Then what?
Because for the entire existence of our species, survival has been the structure. Find food. Find shelter. Don't get eaten. Later: Go to work, pay the rent, don't get fired. Every human who has ever lived has had their days shaped by necessity. If that’s gone, what’s dictating how people live?
The British economist John Maynard Keynes saw this coming in 1930. He predicted his grandchildren would work 15 hours a week, and he was worried about what came after. He surmised that humanity handling all that free time would be a problem – and he might have been on to something.
Retirement is linked to a higher risk of depression; one British study put the jump at around 40%. Lottery winners famously don't end up as happy as they expected. People without a reason to get up in the morning tend to stop getting up in the morning.
Survival gives us a purpose. So what is the human purpose in a world made easy by AI?
The optimistic answer is that we all take up hobbies. Pottery. Surfing. Learning Spanish, properly this time. And some people would genuinely thrive – the ones who already know exactly what they'd do with a free Tuesday. But most of us don't. Most of us, if we're honest, are held together by obligation, deadlines, bills, and the pure spite of saying I’ll keep going because that’s what I do.
I don't know what we will become without survival to organise us. Maybe something better. Maybe something much, much more bored. A whole planet of immortal bored beings staying alive because the alternative is dying, and even if we’re bored, we’re pretty sure we don’t want to do that.
