Life Extension

Like many life extension enthusiasts, middle-aged Raymond Kurzweil lives an active life filled with exercise, meditation, and exploring his inner 25-year-old female rock star.

Actually, while life extension proponents believe that one day, science will make it possible to extend the number of active, healthy years in the maximum human lifespan, Kurzweil is of a special life extension group that explores the possibility of creating near-human artificial intelligence (AI) in order to understand and accelerate human intelligence capabilities.

Kurzweil's mantra of life extension is especially notable for his experimentation with AI, or "accelerating intelligence," as he prefers it to be known. Kurzweil claims that he's been able to see within himself, the "virtual" core of his essence that can exist without his deteriorating body, and the person whom he saw within was a woman named Ramona, a 25-year-old rock star who will never need life extension because she's already immortal.

Kurzweil life extension works with digital technology to capture the range of human emotions and impromptu reactions in a digital avatar in the hopes that the findings will serve life extension researchers who expect to be able to improve the capacity of human intelligence with nanotechnology and cell manipulation. Ramona, at least as a program available to the public through Kurzweil's life extension Web site, interacts with the curious as they pose questions to her and travel through Kurzweil's life extension site.

Ramona lives up to her identity as a rock star because Kurzweil's life extension project has created music videos in which Ramona dances and sings-albeit sings with Kurzweil's voice. Kurzweil trained with vocal professionals to be able to sing as his inner identity for the life extension project.

Even without the inner female rock star, Kurzweil is a popular futurist and proponent of the life extension movement. Kurzweil had his first brush with life extension when he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in his mid-thirties but was not satisfied with current medical science's only option of taking insulin.

Kurzweil stopped his insulin treatment and designed his own special low-carb diet and supplement regimen. (Kurzweil claims he takes over 150 supplements each day!) Now, in his late fifties, Kurzweil is completely free of diabetes and completely open to the alternative methods of keeping healthy and living longer that are promoted in life extension.

Like most life extension advocates, Kurzweil believes that future technology will be able to prolong the healthy human lifespan-perhaps even to allow immortality. Kurzweil claims that he will live forever as a flesh and blood being, and he and other life extension supporters have arranged with the organization Alcor to have their bodies cryonically frozen and preserved after death so that they can be revived when the technology is ready.

To interact with Ramona and read more about Kurzweil life extension's experiments with "accelerating intelligence," visit KurzweilAI.net.