With a 40 years timeframe, what will be our life expectancy?

Who are “we”? In the US we are slipping farther and farther down the list of life-expectancy in developed countries as a result of our for-profit health care system, which looks like it is firmly entrenched. Europe, China, Japan and other developed countries may improve significantly.

Depends. How affluent are we? Are we people of color? Do we live in the city or in a town? What do we do for a living? Did we go to college? Are we active? Do we drink/smoke?

I also disagree that progress is exponential. It might accelerate or be accelerating but exponential isn’t quite right. Anyway- health care, politics and culture hasn’t exponentially progressed.

Are biotechnologies actually progressing exponentially? I’ve not heard this one before.

Moore’s Law only technically applies to transistor density, though it has been applied to other computing technologies.

For rich people, I’d expect it to reach the 100 year mark at least. Don’t know if those last few years will be worth it though…

Isn’t exponential in this cse referring to how each advance causes more advances? I think medical care will get better and better but being kept alive by modern medicine if your brain is not will destroy us all, financially.

But biotechnologies don’t have feedback. The advancements in biotechnology do not increase the rate at which biotechnology increases. This is true of computer technology, but biotechnology…..I don’t think so.

According to some people such as Ray Kurtzweil it is infinite.

The current world average is about 67. In 2049 I expect the average to be around 80, which means in some countries it’ll reach an average of around 95. Ray Kurzweil has made many correct predictions in the past. Regarding immortality and superintelligence he will miss, at least in terms of the time frame.

@mattbrowne
why do you say that?

@jackm – Call it a gut feeling. I believe in passing the Turing test before 2030, though. We’ll get great androids, but not an omnipotent singularity. At least not in the 21st century. I’m looking forward to watching Kurzweil’s movie http://singularity.com/themovie in 2010

@mattbrowne
It does seem really weird, but after reading his book he has a pretty good background of facts supporting each claim he makes. I am not saying everything he said will come true, but I think that the pace of advancement will surpass what most people predict today.

@mattbrowne From what I’ve heard there will be a computational density plateau caused by stochastic effects from high heat in semiconductors. We’ve already nearly reached the limit on clock speed in CPUs. It’s only a short matter of time before separate core processing reaches it’s peak as well. The only way to overcome this is by pumping more energy into CPUs. At their current speeds and energy use CPUs only need minimal cooling, but as we get closer to the limit of silicon’s heat tolerance cooling will become a very extravagant ordeal. Not only this but computing will require much more energy than it does currently. Not only will the hardware become more expensive than Moore’s Law predicts but it will cost much more just to run a computer with this hardware.

Basically, there are very few ways to get past this inevitable plateau besides reworking the entire computational architecture and the materials used.

@Shuttle128
You disproved your statement with your last sentence.

Basically, there are very few ways to get past this inevitable plateau besides reworking the entire computational architecture and the materials used.

If it is profitable, people will make it, and people will buy it. If someone has to rework the entire structure to make more money than the other companies, then it will happen.

@jackm If it is possible, people will make it. We have no indication yet that there are any other better architectures or materials. Even if better architectures could be implemented it doesn’t mean that people will be willing to implement them. Multi-core processing is hard enough to get people to program for, imagine trying to get everyone to completely relearn programming and computation for a completely different architecture. By no means will this be profitable any time soon.

We still use gasoline in our cars because everything is built around the architecture of the internal combustion engine. We’ve known for a very long time that we are nearing the end of gasoline’s useful life in road vehicles, yet very few companies are making a big step towards renewable resource based vehicles. It’s not that the technology is not there, it’s that the leap to the next architecture is not profitable.

The exact same applies to computing. There may be technology that can surpass what we are achieving currently but it would require a complete change in the structure of the computing world. There will be a plateau, just as there is an internal combustion engine efficiency plateau now. This plateau will persist until the benefits of more powerful computation outweigh the consequences of reworking the entire structure of computation. Since a great deal of everyone’s daily lives is dependent on computation, I’d have to say that it will most likely be quite some time before this happens.

@jackm – Yes, I also believe that the pace of advancement will surpass what most people predict today. We’ll have widespread brain chips by 2025. The technologically enhanced human will become a common phenomenon. But the superintelligent computer is another matter. Einstein got general relativity right, but his disbelief in the uncertainty principle wrong. There’s no guarantee that Kurzweil is right about everything. We’ll see.

@mattbrowne
At what point to technologically enhanced humans just become super intelligent computers? I see no need to draw such a distinction between the two.

@jackm – The distinction would be minor. A superintelligent computer would not have biological parents. A technologically enhanced human would.

@mattbrowne
You think in 40 years we will still be having children the old fashioned way?

@jackm – Yes and no. Real sex is fun. But frozen embryos are already a reality. Artificial wombs will soon be.

(Then we only need good androids and in principle we are capable of slow interstellar travel)

@mattbrowne
In my opinion we will not have manned interstellar travel.

@jackm – Yes, we’re sending frozen embryos instead (around 2065). Later as science progresses further we’re also sending millions of genomes stored in computers (year 2085 or later). There will be articifial womb translation devices. Input 3.2 billion base pairs (we need 2 bits per base pair) output is a fertilized human egg. Storage isn’t the problem. Even today we could store all genomes of all 6.8 billion people. The easy problem is recording millions of genomes. The hard problem is creating the translation device.

@mattbrowne
That makes sense.