The quest for immortality goes back to Adam and Eve, but now some smart people are getting serious about actually bringing it within their grasp. And they’re getting more attention as well. […]  

Like de Grey and his colleagues, futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil has been facing these challenges for years — not as an anti-aging researcher per se, but as a smart guy who has made his name by predicting trends in information technology that bring benefits on an exponential curve rather than a linear progression. He has applied the “law of accelerating returns” to the rise of artificial intelligence, predicting that A.I. will match human intelligence by 2029 and lead to a technological singularity by 2045 — beyond which predictions can’t be made.

Extreme longevity is part of Kurzweil’s vision for accelerating change in the decades to come. The way he sees it, medical scinece is becoming just another form of information technology, thanks to advances in genetics and molecular biology. And he intends to ride those advances all the way to immortality. […]