How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change
Ray Kurzweil
page 12 of 15
One of the major objections to radical life extension is the claim that life would be boring if we lived for hundreds of years and that is actually true. If we 
had radical life extension without radical life expansion, life would get boring. It would be an "endless do loop," to use Vernor Vinge's phrase. By merging intimately with our technology, to which we are already getting closer, we will be able to expand our horizons.
That is the promise side of the equation. The peril side is also daunting. I think we can take a measure of comfort from how well we have done with one new form of self replicating pathogen, which is software viruses. When they were first introduced, alarmists said, "This is going to destroy the effectiveness of networks. These first viruses are not very sophisticated, but they are going to get more sophisticated. They will become stealthy, people will place them in various places, and trigger them with different messages." All of that was true; they have become more and more sophisticated, but they have not shut down networks. Nobody has taken the Internet down for even a few seconds. Nobody is saying, "Well let's get rid of the Internet, because the problem with software viruses is so terrible.”
They do cause billions of dollars of damage, but the benefit from electronic decentralized communication has been hundreds of times greater than the problems caused by these software pathogens. We have an evolving immune system, a technological system that responds to new threats and that responds very quickly within hours, or days. If there is some very clever new type of software pathogen, there is a response in place very quickly. It does not work perfectly, there is a lot of damage, and it is a very chaotic system. We cannot cross software pathogens off our list of concerns, but this evolving immune system actually has worked very well.
One of the reasons that it has worked well is that this is an area where we have no regulation. There is no certification of practitioners despite the deep influence that software programmers and creators of software and information technology have. There is no certification of products. We put out new aspects of this technological immune system without certification. It is a self-regulating system and the pathogen writers have equal access to the tools of creation, as do the scientists and engineers we rely on to protect us. The system works extremely well.
I will now jump to the biological world, because the concerns come in this order: G,N,R. The revolution that we are in the early stages of now is really the genetic revolution (G). True nanotechnology (N) is not here yet. There are early adoption technology in terms of nanoparticles, but those are not really nanoengineered machines, although there are early experiments with nanoengineered systems. I think nanotechnology is something that we will see in terms of the way with which we intend it in the late teen years and 2020s. But the genetic revolution is with us today and we are gaining the means, as I mentioned, to reprogram biology.