The future of artificial intelligence is a hot topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week. And while that’s to be expected, given the huge amount of money at stake now that Big Tech is betting its future on generative AI, there’s also an air of desperation in some of the predictions coming out of the conference. Just as an example, the CEO of the AI ​​company Anthropic claimed on Thursday that human life will double within 5 to 10 years, all thanks to artificial intelligence.

Dario Amoedi made the prediction at a panel in Davos titled “World Technology“where the moderator noted that Amoedi seems to have the most optimistic predictions for the speed at which the world will change as a result of the deployment of AI.

“I think that by 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are better than almost all humans in almost all things,” Amoedi said. “I see a lot of positive potential.”

Amoedi says that changes will occur in areas such as the military, workplace technology, self-driving cars, as well as biology and health – the last topic is important because he believes it will lead to more long lifespans.

“If I had to guess, and you know, it’s not an exact science, my guess is that we could make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years if we really get it. let’s do this AI thing,” Amoedi said.

“If you think about, you know, what we can do with humans in an area like biology in 100 years, I think doubling the human life span is not crazy at all. And then if AI can accelerate that, we can get that in five to ten years,” Amoedi continued. “That’s kind of the big vision. At Anthropic, we’re thinking, you know, what’s the first step toward that vision, right? If two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that. “

How realistic is this prediction? Well, Amoedi prefacing it all with “it’s not an exact science,” should tell you all you need to know. Doubling human life in such a short period of time is ridiculous on almost every level, and you don’t need to be an expert to understand why. As Gizmodo recently explained, only 3.1% of girls and 1.3% of boys born in 2019 are expected to make it to age of 100. Doubling the human lifespan means that regular Americans will live up to 160 years, several decades beyond the lifespan achieved by any other human being.

Stuart Jay Olshansky, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke to Gizmodo back in October about the limitations of technology to increase human life span.

“There is a lot of money invested in it now. There is a lot of good science going on. There are also a lot of embellishments and exaggerations, which is something we need to be aware of,” Olshanksy said. “And I hope people will stop exaggerating and telling people they’re all going to live to 100 or 120 or 150 – these kinds of claims of radical life extension are associated with any of these intervention.”

Olshansky and other researchers believe that while technology gets credit for the longer life expectancy we’ve seen in the last century, it may have a hard ceiling.

But it’s easy to see why the rich in the tech world are obsessed with living forever. Everyone dies, no matter how much money they have. And when rich men like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson realize that all the money in the world cannot stop the inevitable, sometimes they get confused in their search for eternal life.

But who knows? AI has actually done some neat magic tricks in recent years like AI generated videos, even if the thing that makes it possible is just plagiarism. And ChatGPT also shows some neat tricks, even if it doesn’t use reasoning and logic like a human. Can tech companies use AI to change lives in significant ways? Definitely. But when it comes to doubling the length of human life, we will believe it when we see it.