Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321
by the time we get to 2045 we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold and it's just very hard to imagine what that would be like the following is a conversation with ray kurzweil author inventor and futurist who has an optimistic view of our future as a human civilization predicting that exponentially improving technologies will take us to a point of a singularity beyond which super-intelligent artificial intelligence will transform our world in nearly unimaginable ways eighteen years ago in the book singularity is near he predicted that the onset of the singularity will happen in the year 2045. he still holds to this prediction and estimate in fact he's working on a new book on this topic that will hopefully be out next year this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's ray kurzweil in your 2005 book titled the singularities near you predicted that the singularity will happen in 2045. so now 18 years later do you still estimate that the singularity will happen on 2045 and maybe first what is the singularity the technological singularity and when will it happen singularity is where computers really change our view of what's important and change who we are but we're getting close to some salient things that will change who we are a key thing is 2029 when computers will pass the turing test and there's also some controversy whether the turing test is valid i believe it is most people do believe that but there's some controversy about that but stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029 i made this in 1999 and my book the age of spiritual machines right and then you repeated the prediction in 2005 2005. yeah so they held international conference you might have been aware of it of ai experts in 1999 to assess this view so people gave different predictions and they took a poll it was really the first time that ai experts worldwide were polled on this prediction and the average poll was a hundred years uh 20 percent believed it would never happen and that was the view in 1999 80 believed it would happen but not within their lifetimes there's been so many advances in a.i uh that the poll of ai experts has come down over the years so a year ago something called meticulous which may be aware of assesses different types of experts on the future they again assessed what ai experts then felt and they were saying 2042 for the drawing test for the turning test so it's coming down and i was still saying 2029 yeah a few weeks ago they again did another poll and it was 2030. so a experts now basically agree with me i haven't changed at all i've stayed with 2029 and they experts now agree with me but they didn't agree at first so alan touring formulated the touring test and right now what he said was very little about it i mean the 1950 paper where he had articulated the during test he there's like a few lines that uh talk about the turing test um and it really wasn't uh very clear how to administer it and he said if if they did it in like 15 minutes that would be sufficient which i don't really think is the case these large language models now some people are convinced by it already i mean you can talk to it and have a conversation with you you can actually talk to it for hours so it requires a little more depth there's some problems with large language models which we can talk about um but some people are convinced by the turing test now if somebody passes the turing test what what are the implications of that does that mean that they're sentient that they're conscious or not it's not necessarily clear what the implications are anyway i i believe 2029 that six seven years from now uh we'll have something to pass this turing test and a valid turing test meaning it goes for hours not just a few minutes can you speak to that a little bit what is your formulation of the touring test you you've proposed a very difficult version of the drawing test so what does that look like basically it's just to assess it over several hours and also have a human judge that's fairly sophisticated on what computers can do and can't do if you take somebody who's not that sophisticated or even a average engineer they may not really assess various aspects of it so you really want the human to challenge the system exactly exactly on its ability to do things like common sense reasoning perhaps that's actually a key problem with large language models they don't do these kinds of tests that would involve assessing uh chains of reasoning but you can lose track of that you if you talk to them they actually can talk to you pretty well and you can be convinced by it but it's somebody that would really convince you that it's a human uh whatever that takes maybe it would take days or weeks but it would really convince you that it's human large language models can appear that way you can read conversations and that they appear pretty good there are some problems with it it doesn't do math very well you can ask how many legs did 10 elephants have and they'll tell you well okay each elephant has four legs and 10 elephants so it's 40 legs and you go okay that's pretty good how many legs do 11 elephants have and they don't seem to understand the question do all humans understand that question no that's the key thing i mean how advanced the human do you want it to be but we do we do expect a human to be able to do multi-chain reasoning to be able to take a few facts and put them together not perfectly and we we see that you know in a lot of polls that people don't do that perfectly at all but um so it's not it's not very well defined but it's something where it really would convince you that it's a human is your intuition that large language models will not be solely the kind of system that passes the turing test in 2029 do we need something else no i think it will be a large language one but they have to go beyond what they're doing now uh i think we're getting there and another key issue is if somebody actually passes the turing test validly i would believe they're conscious and not everybody would say that say okay we can pass a turing test but we don't really believe that it's conscious that's a whole other issue but if it really passes the turning test i would believe that it's conscious but i don't believe that of uh large language models today if it appears to be conscious that's as good as being conscious at least for you in some in some sense i mean consciousness is not something that's scientific uh i mean i believe you're conscious but it's really just a belief and we believe that about other humans that at least appear to be conscious um when you go outside of shared human assumption like our animal's conscious some people believe they're not conscious some people believe they are conscious and would a machine that acts just like a human be conscious i mean i believe it would be but but that's really a philosophical belief it's not you can't prove it i can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious there's nothing that you can do that would be that would indicate that it's like saying a piece of art is beautiful you can say it multiple people can experience a piece of art is beautiful uh but you can't prove it but it's also an extremely important issue yes i mean imagine if you had something where nobody's conscious the the world may as well not exist um and so some people like say marvin minsky [Music] said well consciousness is not logical it's not scientific and therefore we should dismiss it and any answer any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed but when he actually engaged with somebody who was conscious he actually acted as if they were conscious he didn't ignore that he acted as if consciousness does matter exactly whereas he said it didn't matter well that's myron raminsky yeah he's full of contradictions but that's true of of a lot of people as well um but to you consciousness matters but to me it's very important but but i would say it's not a scientific issue it's a philosophical issue and people have different views and some people believe that anything that makes a decision is conscious so your light switch is conscious it's level of consciousness that's low it's not very interesting but but that's a consciousness uh and anything so a computer that makes a more interesting decision still not at human levels but it's also conscious and at a higher level than your light switch so that's one view there's many different views of what consciousness is so if a system passes the turing test it's not scientific but uh in issues of philosophy things like ethics start to enter the picture do you think there would be we would start contending as a human species about the ethics of turning off such a machine yeah i mean that's definitely come up hasn't come up in reality yet but yet but i'm talking about 2029 it's not that many years from now um and so what are our obligations to it uh it has a different i mean a computer that's conscious has a little bit different uh connotations than a human we have a continuous consciousness we're in an entity that does not last forever now actually a significant portion of humans still exist and are therefore still conscious um but anybody who is over a certain age doesn't exist anymore that wouldn't be true of a computer program you could completely turn it off and a copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it and so it has a different type of uh validity you could actually take it back in time you could eliminate its memory and have it go over again i mean it has a different kind of connotation than humans do well perhaps you can do the same thing with humans it's just that we don't know how to do that yet yeah it's possible that we figure out all of these things on the machine first but that doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious i mean if you look at the way people react say three cpo or other machines that are conscious in movies uh they don't actually present how it's conscious but we see that they are a machine and people will believe that they are conscious and they'll actually worry about it if they get into trouble and so on so 2029 is going to be the first year when a a major thing happens right and that that will shake our civilization to start to consider the role of ai yes or no i mean this one guy at google claimed that the machine was conscious but that's just one person right so it starts to happen at scale well that's exactly right because most people have not taken that position i don't take that position i mean i've used uh different things um uh like this and they don't appear to to me to be conscious as we eliminate various problems of of these large language models uh more and more people will accept that they're conscious so when we get to 2029 more i think a large fraction of people will believe that they're conscious so it's not going to happen all at once i believe that what actually happen gradually and it's already started to happen and so that uh takes us one step closer to the singularity another step then is in the 2030s when we can actually connect our neocortex which is where we do our thinking to computers and i mean just as this actually gains a lot to being connected to computers that will amplify its abilities i mean if this did not have any connection it would be pretty stupid it could not answer any of your questions if you're just listening to this by the way where is holding up the uh the all-powerful uh smartphone so we're gonna do that directly from our brains i mean these are pretty good these already have amplified our intelligence i'm already much smarter than i would otherwise be if i didn't have this because i remember my first book the age of intelligent machines there was no way to get information from computers i actually would go to a library find a book find the page that had an information i wanted and i'd go to the copier and my most significant uh information tool was a roll of quarters where i could feed the copier so we're already greatly advanced that we have these things there's a few problems with it first of all i constantly put it down and i don't remember where i put it i've actually never lost it but you have to find it then you have to turn it on so there's a certain amount of steps it would actually be quite useful if someone would just listen to your conversation and say uh oh that's you know so-and-so actress um and tell you what you're talking about so going from active to passive where just permeates your whole life yeah exactly the way your brain does when you're awake your brain is always there right now that's something that could actually just just about be done today where would listen to your conversation understand what you're saying understand what you're not missing and give you that information but another step is to actually go inside your brain yeah and there are some prototypes where you can connect your brain they actually don't have the amount of bandwidth that we need they can work but they work fairly slowly so if if it actually would connect to your neocortex and the neocortex which i described in how to create a mind the neocortex is actually it has different levels and as you go up the levels it's kind of like a pyramid the top level is fairly small and that's the level where you want to connect uh these brain extenders um so i believe that will happen in the 2030s we will actually so just the way this is greatly amplified by being connected to the cloud we can connect our own brain to the cloud and just do what we can do by using this machine do you think it would look like uh the brain computer interface of like neuralink so would it be well never length it's an attempt to do that it doesn't have the bandwidth that we need um yet right right but i think i mean they're going to get permission for this because there are a lot of people who absolutely need it because they can't communicate and i know a couple of people like that who have ideas and they cannot they don't they cannot move their muscles and so on they can't communicate so for them this would be very valuable but we could all use it basically be uh turn us into something that would be like we have a phone but it would be in our minds it would be kind of instantaneous and maybe communication between two people would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language yes spoken word exactly we don't know what that would be although we do know that computers can share information like language instantly they can share many many books in a second so we could do that as well if you look at what our brain does it actually can manipulate different parameters so we we talk about these large language models um i mean i had written that it requires a certain amount of information in order to uh be effective and that we would not see ai really being effective until it got to that level and we had large language models there were like 10 billion bytes didn't work very well they finally got to 100 billion bytes and now they work fairly well and and now we're going to a trillion bytes if you say uh lambda has a hundred a billion bytes what does that mean well what what if you had something that had one byte one one parameter maybe you want to tell whether or not something's uh an elephant or not and so you put in something that would detect its trunk if it has a trunk it's an elephant if it doesn't have a trunk it's not an elephant that will work fairly well there's a few problems with and it really wouldn't be able to tell what the trunk is but anyway and maybe other things other than elephants have trunks you might get really confused yeah exactly uh i'm not sure which animals have trunks but you know that's how you define a trunk but yeah that's one parameter you can do okay so these things have a hundred billion parameters so they're able to deal with very complex issues all kinds of trunks human beings actually have a little bit more than that but they're getting to the point where they can emulate humans um if we were able to connect this to our neocortex we would basically add more of these abilities to make distinctions and it could ultimately be much smaller and also be attached to information that we feel is reliable um so that's where we're headed so you think that there will be a merger in the 30s an increasing amount of merging between the either human brain and the ai brain exactly and the ai brain is really an emulation of human beings i mean that's why we're creating them because human beings act the same way and this is basically to amplify them i mean this amplifies our brain um it's a little bit clumsy to interact with but it definitely it's a you know way beyond what what we had 15 years ago but the implementation becomes different just like a bird versus the airplane the even though the ai brain is an emulation it starts adding features we might not otherwise have like ability to consume a huge amount of information quickly like look up thousands of wikipedia articles in one take exactly we can get for example issues like simulated biology where it can uh simulate many different things at once we already had one example of simulated biology which is the moderna vaccine and that's going to be now the way in which we create medications but they were able to simulate what each example of an mrna would do to a human being and they were able to simulate that quite reliably and we actually simulated billions of different mrna sequences and they found the ones that they were the best and they created the vaccine and they did and talked about doing that quickly they did that in two days now how long would a human being take to simulate billions of different mrna sequences i i don't know that we could do it at all but it would take many years they did it in two days and one of the reasons that people didn't like vaccines is because it was done too quickly you know it's done too fast and they actually included the time it took to test it out which was 10 months so they figured okay it took 10 months to create this actually it took us two days and we also will be able to ultimately do the tests in a few days as well oh because we can stimulate how the body will respond to it yeah that's a little bit more complicated because the body's has a lot of different elements and we have to simulate all of that but that's coming as well so ultimately we could create it in a few days and then test it in a few days and would be done uh and we can do that with every type of medical ins you know insufficiency that we have so curing all diseases yeah improving certain functions of the body supplements drugs for recreation for health for performance for productivity all that well that's where we're headed because i mean right right now we have a very inefficient way of creating these new medications um but we've already shown it and the moderna vaccine is actually the best uh of the of the vaccines we've had and it literally took two days to create uh and we'll get to the point where we can test it out also quickly are you impressed by alpha fold and uh the the solution to the protein folding which essentially is simulating modeling this primitive building block of life which is a protein and it's 3d shape it's pretty remarkable that they can actually predict what the 3d shape of these things are but they did it with the same type of neural net that won for example the go uh test so it's all the same it's all the same they took that same thing and just changed the rules to chess and within a couple of days it now played a master level of chess greater than any human being and and the same thing then worked for alpha foam uh which no human had done i mean human beings could do the best humans could maybe do 15 20 uh of figuring out what the shape would be and this after a few takes it out it ultimately did just about 100 percent do you still think the singularity will happen in 2045 and what does that look like you know once we can amplify our brain with computers directly which will happen in the 2030s that's going to keep growing it's another whole theme which is the exponential growth of computing power yeah so looking at price performance of computation from 1939 to 2021. right so that starts with the very first computer actually created by german during world war ii and you might have thought that that might be significant but actually the germans didn't think computers were significant and they completely rejected it and the second one was also the zeus ii and by the way we're looking at a plot with the x-axis being the year from 1935 to 2025 and on the y-axis and log scale is competition per second per constant dollar so dollar normalized inflation and it's growing linearly on the log scale which means it's growing exponentially the third one was the british computer which the allies did take very seriously and it cracked the german code and enabled the british to win the battle of britain which otherwise absolutely would not have happened if they hadn't cracked the code using that computer but that's an exponential graph so a straight line on that graph is exponential growth and you see 80 years of exponential growth and i would say about every five years and this happened shortly before the pandemic people saying well they call it moore's law which is not the correct because that's not all intel in fact it started decades before intel was even created it wasn't with transistors formed into a grid so it's not just transistor count or transistor size right that's a bunch of stars relays then went to vacuum tubes then went to individual transistors and and then to integrated circuits um and the integrated circuits actually starts like in the middle of this graph and it has nothing to do with intel intel actually was a key part of this but a few years ago they they stopped making the fastest chips uh but if you take the fastest chip of any technology in that year you get this kind of graph and it's definitely continuing for 80 years so you don't think moore's law broadly defined is dead it's been declared dead multiple times throughout this process i don't like the term moore's law because it has nothing to do with moore or with the intel but yes the exponential growth of computing is continuing yes and has never stopped from various sources i mean it went through world war ii it went through global recessions it's just continuing and if you continue that out along with software gains which is a whole other issue and they really multiply whatever you get from software gains you multiply by the computer gains you get faster and faster speed uh this is actually the fastest computer models that have been created and that actually expands roughly twice a year like every six months it expands by two so we're looking at a plot from 2010 to 2022 on the x-axis is the publication date of the model and the perhaps sometimes the actual paper associated with it and on the y-axis is training compute and flops and so basically this is looking at the increase in the not transistors but the computational power of neural networks yeah it's the computational power that created these models and that's doubled every six months which is even faster than transistor division yeah actually since it goes faster than the the amount of cost this has actually become a greater investment to create these but at any rate by the time we get to 2045 we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold and it's just very hard to imagine what that would be like and that's the singularity what we can't even imagine right that's why we call it the singularity because the singularity in physics something gets sucked into its singularity and you can't tell what's going on in there because no information can get out of it there's various problems with that but that's the idea it's too um it's too much beyond what we can imagine do you think it's possible we don't notice that what the singularity actually feels like is we just live through it with exponentially increasing uh cognitive capabilities and we almost because everything's moving so quickly don't aren't really able to introspect that our life has changed yeah but i mean we will have that much greater capacity to understand things so we should be able to look back looking at history understand history but but we will need people basically like you and me to actually think about this think about it but we might be distracted by all the other sources of entertainment and fun because the exponential power of intellect is growing but also there'll be a lot of fun uh the the amount of ways you can have you know i mean we already have a lot of fun with computer games and so on that are really quite remarkable what do you think about uh the digital world uh the metaverse virtual reality will that have a component in this or will most of our advancement be in physical realm well that's a little bit like second life although the second life actually didn't work very well because it couldn't actually handle too many people and i don't think the metaverse has come to being i think there will be something like that it won't necessarily be from that one company i mean there's going to be competitors but yes we're going to live increasingly online and particularly when if our brains are online i mean how could we not be online do you think it's possible that given this merger with ai most of our meaningful interactions will be in this virtual world most of our life we fall in love we make friends we come up with ideas we do collaborations we have fun i actually know somebody who's marrying somebody that they never met yeah uh i think they just met her briefly before the wedding but she actu she actually fell in love with this other person uh never having met them uh and i think it's i think the love is real so that's a beautiful story but do you think that story is one that might be experienced as opposed to by hundreds of thousands of people but instead by hundreds of millions of people i mean it really gives you appreciation for these virtual ways of communicating uh and if anybody can do it then it's really not such a freak story uh so i think more and more people will do that but that's turning our back on our entire history of evolution or the old days we used to fall in love by holding hands and sitting by the fire that kind of stuff here you're actually i actually have five patents on where you can hold hands even if you're separated great um so the touch the sense it's all just senses it's all just yeah i mean it is it's not just that you're touching someone or not there's a whole way of doing it and it's very subtle and but ultimately we can emulate all of that are you excited by that future do you worry about that future i have certain worries about the future but not not that virtual touch [Laughter] well i agree with you you described six stages in the evolution of information processing in the universe as you started to describe can you maybe talk through some of those stages from the physics and chemistry to dna and brains and then to the to the very end to the very beautiful end of this process well it actually gets more rapid so physics and chemistry that's how we started um the very beginning of the universe we had lots of electrons and various things traveling around and and that took actually many billions of years kind of jumping ahead here to kind of some of the last stages where we have things like love and creativity it's really quite remarkable that that happens but finally physics and chemistry created biology and dna and now you had actually one type of molecule that described the cutting edge of this process and we go from physics and chemistry to biology and finally biology created brains i mean not all not everything that's created by biology has a brain but eventually brains came along and all of this is happening faster and faster yeah it created increasingly complex organisms another key thing is actually not just brains but our thumb because because there's a lot of animals with brains even bigger than humans elephants have a bigger brain whales have a bigger brain but they've not created technology because they don't have a thumb so that's one of the really key elements in the evolution of humans this uh physical manipulator device right that's useful for puzzle solving in the physical reality so i could think i could look at a tree and go oh i can actually strip that branch down and eliminate the leaves and carve it tip on it and great technology uh and you can't do that if you don't have a thumb yeah um so uh thumbs and created technology and technology also had a memory and now those memories are competing with the scale and scope of human beings and ultimately we'll go beyond it and then we're going to merge human technology with uh with human intelligence and understand how human intelligence works which i think we already do and we're putting that into uh our human technology so create the technology inspired by our own intelligence and then that technology supersedes us in terms of its capabilities and we ride along or do do you ultimately see it as we ride along but a lot of people don't see that they say well okay you've got humans and you've got machines and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans and you can already see that lisa dahl who's like the best go player in the world says he's not going to play go anymore yeah because playing go for human that was like the ultimate in intelligence because no one else could do that but now a machine can actually go way beyond him and so he says well there's no point playing it anymore that may be more true for games than it is for life i think there's a lot of benefit to working together with ai in regular life so if you were to put a probability on it is it more likely that we merge with ai or ai replaces us a lot of people just think computers come along they compete with them we can't really compete and that's the end of it as opposed to them increasing our abilities and if you look at most technology it increases our abilities i mean look at the history of work look at what people did 100 years ago does any of that exist anymore people i mean if you were to predict that all of these jobs would go away and would be done by machines people would say well that's going to be no one's going to have jobs and it's going to be massive unemployment um but i show in this book that's coming out the amount of people that are working even as a percentage of the population has gone way up we're looking at the x-axis year from 1774 to 2024 and on the y-axis personal income per capita in constant dollars and it's growing super linearly i mean it's 20 21 constant dollars and it's gone way up that's not what you were to predict given that we would predict that all these jobs would go away yeah but the reason it's gone up is because we've basically enhanced our own capabilities by using these machines as opposed to them just competing with us that's a key way in which we're going to be able to become far smarter than we are now by increasing the number of different parameters we can consider and making a decision i was very fortunate i am very fortunate to be able to get a glimpse preview of your upcoming book uh singularity's nearer and uh one of the themes outside of just discussing the increasing exponential growth of technology one of the themes is that things are getting better in all aspects of life and you talk just about just about this so one of the things you're saying is with jobs so let me just ask about that there is a big concern that automation especially powerful ai will get rid of jobs where people will lose jobs and as you were saying the sense is throughout history of the 20th century automation did not do that ultimately and so the question is will this time be different right that is the question will this time be different and it really has to do with how quickly we can merge with this type of intelligence whether lambda or gpt-3 is out there and maybe it's overcome some of its you know key problems and we really have an enhanced human intelligence that might be a negative scenario um but i mean that's that's why we create technologies to enhance ourselves and i believe we will be enhanced we're not just going to sit here with uh 300 million modules in our neocortex we're going to be able to go beyond that um because that's useful but we can multiply that by 10 a hundred thousand a million um and you might think well what's the point of doing that it's like asking somebody that's never heard music well what's the value of music i mean you can't appreciate it until you've created it there's some worry that there'll be a wealth disparity you know class or wealth disparity only the rich people will be basically the rich people will first have access to this kind of thing and then because of this kind of thing because the ability to merge will get richer exponentially faster and i say that's just like cell phones i mean there's like 4 billion cell phones in the world today in fact when cell phones first came out you had to be fairly wealthy they weren't very inexpensive she had to have some wealth in order to afford them yeah there were these big sexy headphones and they didn't work very well they did almost nothing so you can only afford these things if you're wealthy at a point where they really don't work very well so um so achieving scale is and uh making it inexpensive as part of making the thing work well exactly so these are not totally cheap but they're pretty pretty cheap yeah i mean you can get them for a few hundred dollars especially given the kind of things it provides for you there's a lot of people in the third world that have very little but they have a smartphone yeah absolutely and the same will be true with ai i mean i see homeless people have their own cell phones and yeah so your sense is any kind of advanced technology will take the same trajectory right it ultimately becomes cheap and will be affordable i probably would not be the first person to put something in my brain to connect to computers because i think it will have limitations but once it's really perfected and at that point it'll be pretty inexpensive i think it'll be pretty affordable so in which other ways as you outline your book is life getting better because i think well i have i mean i have 50 charts in there yeah where everything is getting better i think there's a kind of cynicism about um like if even if we look at extreme poverty for example for example this is actually a poll taken on extreme poverty and then people were asked has poverty gotten better or worse and the options are increased by 50 percent increase by 25 percent remain the same decreased by 25 degrees by 50 if you're watching this or listening to this try to to try to vote for yourself 70 thought it had gotten worse and that's the general impression 88 thought it had gotten worse or remained the same only one percent thought it decreased by 50 and that is the answer it actually decreased by 50 percent so only one percent of people got the right optimistic estimate of how poverty is right and and this is the reality and it's true of almost everything you look at you don't want to go back 100 years or 50 years things were quite miserable then but we tend not to remember that so literacy rate increasing over the past few centuries across all the different nations nearly to 100 across many of the nations in the world it's gone way up average years of education have gone way up life expectancy is also increasing life expectancy was 48 in 1900 and is over 80 now and it's going to continue to go up particularly as we get into more advanced stages of simulated biology for life expectancy these trends are the same for at birth age 1 age 5 age 10 so it's not just the infant mortality and i have 50 more graphs in the book about all kinds of things uh even spread of democracy we're trying to bring up some sort of controversial issues it still has gone way up well that one is uh it's gone way up but that one is a bumpy road right exactly and some somebody might represent democracy and and go backwards but we basically had no democracies before the creation of the united states which was a little over two centuries ago which in the scale of human history isn't that long do you think superintelligence systems will help with democracy so what is democracy democracy is giving a voice to the populace and having their ideas having their beliefs having their views represented well i hope so i mean we've seen social networks can spread uh conspiracy theories uh which have been quite negative being for example being against any kind of stuff that would help your health so those kinds of ideas have uh on social media what you notice is they increase engagement so dramatic division increases engagement do you worry about ai systems that will learn to maximize that division i mean i do have some concerns about this and i have a chapter in the book about the perils of advanced a.i um spreading misinformation on social networks is one of them but uh there are many others what's the one that worries you the most that we should think about to try to avoid well it's hard to choose we do have the nuclear power that evolved when i was a child i remember in we would actually do these drills against a nuclear war we'd get under our desks and put our hands behind our heads to protect us from a nuclear war seems to work we're still around so um you're protected but that's still a concern and there are key dangerous situations that can take place in biology someone could create a virus that's very i mean we have viruses that are hard to spread and they can be very dangerous and we have viruses that are easy to spread but they're not so dangerous um somebody could create something that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous and be very hard to stop uh it could be something that would spread without people noticing because people could get it they'd have no symptoms and then everybody would get it and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later so i mean and that and that actually doesn't occur normally because if we were to to uh have a problem with that we wouldn't exist so the fact that humans exist means that we don't have viruses that can spread easily and kill us because otherwise we wouldn't exist yeah viruses don't want to do that they want they want to spread and keep the host alive yeah somewhat so you can describe various dangers with biology uh also nanotechnology uh which we actually haven't experienced yet but there are people that creating nanotechnology and i describe that in the book now you're excited by the possibilities of nanotechnology of nanobots of being able to do things inside our body inside our mind that's going to help what's exciting what's terrifying about nanobots what's exciting is that that's a way to communicate with our neocortex because it's each neocortex is pretty small and you need a small entity that can actually get in there and establish a communication channel and that's going to really be necessary to connect our brains to ai within ourselves because otherwise it would be hard for us to compete with it in a high bandwidth way yeah yeah and that's key actually because a lot of the things like neural ink are really not high band within so nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth how much intelligence would those nanobots have yeah they don't need a lot just enough to basically establish a communication channel to one nanobot so it's primarily about communication yeah between external computing devices and our biological thinking machine what worries you about nanobots is it similar to with the viruses well i mean this is the great goo channel challenge yes um if you had a nanobot that wanted to create any any kind of entity and repeat itself and was able to operate in a natural environment it could turn everything into that entity and basically destroy all uh biological life so you mentioned nuclear weapons yeah i'd love to hear your opinion about the 21st century and whether you think we might destroy ourselves and maybe your opinion if it has changed by looking at what's going on in ukraine that we could have a hot war with nuclear powers involved and the tensions building and the seeming forgetting of how terrifying and destructive nuclear weapons are do you think humans might destroy ourselves in the 21st century and if we do how and how do we avoid it i don't think that's going to happen despite the terrors of that war it is a possibility but i mean i i don't it's unlikely in your mind yeah even with the tensions we've had with this one nuclear power plant that's been taken over um it's very tense but i don't actually see a lot of people worrying that that's going to happen i think we'll avoid that we had two nuclear bombs go off in 45 so now we're 77 years later yeah we're doing pretty good we've never had another one go off through anger but people forget people forget the lessons of history well yeah that's how i mean i am worried about it i mean that that is definitely a challenge but you believe that we'll make it out and ultimately super intelligent ai will help us make it out as opposed to uh destroy us i think so but we we do have to be mindful of these dangers and and there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons so to get back to merging with ai we would be able to upload our mind in a computer in a way where we might even transcend the constraints of our bodies so copy our mind into a computer and leave the body behind let me describe one thing i've already done with my father that's a great story so we we created technology this is public came out i think six years ago where you could ask any question and the release product which i think is still on the market it would read 200 000 books and then and then find the one sentence in 200 000 books that best answered your question uh it's actually quite interesting you can ask all kinds of questions and you get the best answer in 200 000 books but i was also able to to take it and uh not go through 200 000 books but go through a book that i'd put together which is basically everything my father had written so everything he had written i had gathered and we created a book everything that frederick is all had written now i didn't think this actually would work that well because uh stuff he'd written was stuff about how to lay out i mean he did directed coral groups and music groups and he would be laying out how the people should where they should sit and and uh how to fund this and all kinds of things that really weren't didn't seem that interesting um and yet when you asked a question it would go through it and it would actually give you a very good answer so i said well you know who's the most interesting composer and he said well definitely brahms he would go on about how promise was fabulous and talk about the importance of music education and so you could have a essentially uh uh can i have a conversation with him which was actually more interesting than talking to him because if you talk to him he'd be concerned about how they're going to lay out this property to give a coral group he'd be concerned about the day-to-day versus the big questions exactly yeah and you did ask about the meaning of life and he answered love yeah do you miss him yes i do um you know you get used to missing somebody after 52 years and i didn't really have intelligent conversations with them until later in life in the last few years he was sick which meant he was home a lot and i was actually able to talk to him about different things like music and other things and so i missed that pretty much what did you learn about life from your father what what part of him is is with you now he was devoted to music and when he would create something to music it put him in a different world otherwise he was very shy and if people got together he tended not to interact with people just because it was china's but when he created music that he was like a different person do you have that in you that yeah kind of light that shines i mean i i got involved with technology at like age five and you fell in love with it in the same way he did with music yeah yeah i remember this actually happened with my grandmother she had a manual typewriter and she wrote a book one life is not enough it's actually a good title for a book i might write but and it was about a school she had created well actually her mother created it so my mother's mother's mother created the school in 1868 and it was the first school in europe that provided higher education for girls it went through 14th grade if you were a girl and you were lucky enough to get an education at all it would go through like ninth grade and many people didn't have any education as a girl this went through 14th grade um her mother created it she took it over and the and the book was about the history of the school and her involvement with it um when she presented to me i was not so interested in the story of the of the school but i was totally amazed with this manual typewriter i mean here is something you could put a blank piece of paper into and you could turn it into something that looked like it came from a book and you could actually type on it and it looked like it came from a book it was just amazing to me and i could see actually how it worked and i was also interested in magic but in magic if somebody actually knows how it works the magic goes away the magic doesn't stay there if you actually understand how it works but he was technology i didn't have that word when i was five or six and the magic was still there for you the magic was still there even if you knew how it worked yeah so i became totally interested in this and then went around collected little pieces of mechanical objects from bicycles from broken radios i go through the neighborhood uh this was an era where you would allow five or six-year-olds to like roam through the neighborhood and do this we don't do that anymore but i didn't know how to put them together i said if i could just figure out how to put these things together i could solve any problem and i actually remember talking to these very old girls i think they were 10 and telling them if i could just figure this out like we could fly we could do anything and they said well you have quite an imagination um and then like then when i was in third grade so it was like eight created like a virtual reality theater where people could come on stage and they could move their arms and all of it was controlled through one control box it was all done with mechanical technology and it was a big hit in my third grade class and then i went on to do things in junior high school science fairs and and high school science fairs i won the westinghouse science talent search so i mean i became committed to technology when i was five or six years old you've talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think to come up with ideas as a source of creativity because you maybe talk through that maybe the process of how to you've invented a lot of things you've came up and thought through some very interesting ideas what advice would you give or can you speak to the process of thinking of how to think how to think creatively well i mean sometimes i will think through in a dream and try to interpret that but i think the key issue that i would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position what you're trying to create already exists and then you're explaining like how it works exactly that's really interesting you paint a world that you would like to exist you think it exists and reverse engineering then you actually imagine you're giving a speech about how you created this well you'd have to then work backwards as to how you would create it in order to make it work that's brilliant and that requires uh some imagination too some first principles thinking you have to visualize that world that's really interesting and generally when i talk about things we're trying to invent i would use the present tense as if it already exists not just to give myself that confidence but everybody else who's working on um it just have to kind of uh do all the steps in order to make it actual actual how much of a good idea is about timing how much is it about your genius versus that its time has come timing's very important i mean that that's really why i got into futurism i'm not i didn't i wasn't inherently a futurist that there's not really my goal uh it's really to to figure out when things are feasible we see that now with large-scale models they're very large-scale models like gpt-3 it started two years ago four years ago it wasn't feasible in fact they did create gpt-2 which didn't work so it required a certain amount of timing having to do with this exponential growth of computing power so futurism in some sense is a study of timing trying to understand how the world will evolve yeah and when will the capacity for certain ideas and that's become a thing in itself and to try to time things in the future uh but really it's a original purpose was to tie my products i mean i did ocr in the 1970s because ocrs doesn't require a lot of computation optical character recognition so we were able to do that in the 70s and i waited till the 80s to address speech recognition since that requires more computation so you were thinking through timing when you're developing those things yeah has its time come yeah and that's how you've developed that brain power to start to think in a futurist sense when how will the world look like in 2045 and work backwards yeah and how it gets there but that has become a thing in itself because looking at what uh things will be like in the future reflect such dramatic changes in in how humans will live that was worth communicating also so you developed that muscle of of predicting the future and then apply it broadly and start to discuss how it changes the world of technology how it changes the world of human life on earth in danielle one of your books you write about someone who has the courage to question assumptions that limit human imagination to solve problems and you also give advice and how each of us can have this kind of um courage it's good that you picked that quote because i think that does symbolize what danielle is about courage so how can each of us have that courage to quest question assumptions i mean we see that when people can beyond the current round and create something that's new i mean take uber for example before that existed you never thought that that would be feasible and it did require changes in the way people work is there practical advices you give in the book about each what each of us can do to be a danielle well she looks at the situation and tries to imagine uh how she can overcome various obstacles and then she goes for it and she's a very good communicator so she can communicate these ideas to other people and there's practical advice of learning to program and recording your life and things of this nature become a physicist so you list a bunch of different uh suggestions of how to throw yourself into this world yeah i mean it's kind of a idea how young people can actually change the world by uh learning all of these different skills and at the core of that is the belief that you can change the world that your mind your body can change the world yeah that's right and not letting anyone else tell you otherwise it's pretty good exactly when we upload the story you told about your dad and having a conversation with him we're talking about uploading your mind to the computer do you think we'll have a future with something you call uh afterlife we'll have avatars that mimic increasingly better and better our behavior our appearance all that kind of stuff even those are perhaps not no longer with us yes i mean we need some information about about them i mean think about my father i have what he wrote now he didn't have a word processor so he didn't actually write that much and our memories of him aren't perfect so how do you even know if you've created something that's satisfactory now you could do a rake frederick kurzweil turing test it seems like frederick kurzweil to me but the people who remember him like me don't have a perfect memory is there such a thing as a perfect memory maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel a certain way yeah well i think that would be the goal and that's the connection we have with loved ones it's not really based on very strict definition of truth it's more about the experiences we share yeah and they get more through memory but ultimately they make us smile i think we we definitely can do that and that would be very worthwhile so do you think we'll have a world of replicants of copies would there be a bunch of raker as well as like i could hang out with one i can download it for five bucks and have a best friend ray and uh you the original copy wouldn't even know about it um is that do you think that world is um first of all do you think that world is feasible and do you think there's ethical challenges there like how would you feel about me hanging out with raker as well and you not knowing about it doesn't strike uh me as a problem um which would you the original would you would that cause a problem for you no i i would really very much enjoy it no not just hang out with me but if somebody hanging out with you a replicant of you well i think i would start it sounds exciting but then what if they start doing better than me and take take over my friend group and then and then i'll because because they may be an imperfect copy or there may be more social or these kinds of things and then i become like the old version that's not not nearly as exciting maybe they're a copy of the best version of me on a good day yeah but if you hang out with a replicant of me and that turned out to be successful i'd feel proud of that person because it was based on me so so it's but it is a kind of death of this version of you well not necessarily i mean you can still be alive right but and you would be pro okay so it's like having kids and you're proud that they've done even more than you were able to do yeah exactly uh it does bring up new issues but uh it seems like an opportunity well that that replicant should probably have the same rights as you do well that that gets into a whole issue [Music] uh because when a replicant occurs they're not necessarily going to have your rights and if a replicant occurs to somebody who's already dead do they have all the obligations and that the original person had did they have all the agreements that they had so i think you're going to have to have laws that say yes there has to be if you want to create a replicant they have to have all the same rights as human rights well you don't know someone could create a replica and say well it's a replicant but i didn't bother getting their rights and so yeah but that would be illegal i mean like if you do that you have to do that in the black market you have to if you want to get an official replica okay it's not so easy suppose you created multiple replicants uh the original rights uh maybe for one person and not for a whole group of per people sure so uh so there has to be at least one and then all the other ones kind of share the rights yeah i just don't i don't think that that's very difficult to conceive for us humans the the the the idea that we don't create a replicant that has certain i mean i've talked to people about this including my wife who would like to get back her father um and she doesn't worry about who has rights to what she she would have somebody that she could visit with and like give her some satisfaction uh and they wouldn't she wouldn't care about any of these other rights what does your wife think about multiple array cores walls well you had that discussion i wouldn't address that weather i think i think ultimately that's an important question loved ones how they feel about there's a there's something about love that's the key thing right if the loved one's rejected it's not going to work very well so so the loved ones really are the key to terminate whether or not this works or not but there's also ethical rules um we have to contend with the idea and we have to contend with that idea with ai but what's going to motivate it is i mean i talk to people who really miss people who are gone and they would love to get something back even if it isn't perfect and that's what's going to motivate this and that person lives on in some form and the more data we have the more we're able to reconstruct that person and allow them to live on right and eventually as we go forward we're going to have more and more of this data because we're going to have nanobots that are inside our neocortex and we're going to collect a lot of data in fact anything that's data is is always collected there's something a little bit sad which is becoming or maybe it's hopeful which is more and more common these days which when a person passes away you have their twitter account you know and you have the last tweet they tweeted like something and you can recreate them now with large language models and so on i mean you can create somebody that's just like them and can actually continue to communicate i think that's really exciting because i think in some sense like if i were to die today in some sense i would continue on if i continued tweeting i tweet therefore i am yeah well in some sense i mean that's one of the advantages of a replicant that can recreate the communications of that that person do you hope do you think do you hope humans will become a multi-planetary species you've talked about the phases the six epics and one of them is reaching out into the stars in part yes but uh the kind of attempts i'm making now to go to other planetary objects doesn't excite me that much because it's not really advancing anything it's not efficient enough yeah we're also putting out other uh human beings which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects what i'm really talking about in the in the sixth epic universe wakes up it's where we can spread our super intelligence throughout the universe and that doesn't mean sending very soft squishy creatures like humans yeah the universe wakes up i mean we would sense intelligence masses of nanobots which can then go out and um colonize these these other parts of the universe do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that our bots might meet my hunch is no most people say yes absolutely i mean the universe and it's too big and they'll cite the drake equation and and i think in uh singularities near i have two analyses of the drake equation both with very reasonable assumptions and one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations in each galaxy and another one gives you one civilization and we know of one a lot of the analyses are forgetting the exponential growth of of computation because we've gone from where the fastest way i could send a message to somebody was with a pony which was what like uh a century and a half ago yeah uh to the advanced civilization we have today and and if you accept what i've said go forward a few decades you can have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization compared to a pony and that's in a couple hundred years yeah the speed and the scale of information transfer is just exp is growing exponentially in a blink of an eye now think about these other civilizations they're going to be spread out at cosmic times so if something is like ahead of us or behind us it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions of years which isn't that much i mean the the world is billions of years old 14 billion or something so even a thousand years if two or three hundred years just enough to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization we would see that so of other civilizations that have occurred okay some might be hot behind us but some might be ahead of us if they're ahead of us they're ahead of us by thousands millions of years and they would be so far beyond us they would be doing galaxy-wide engineering yeah but we don't see anything doing galaxy web engineering so either they don't exist or this very universe is a construction of an alien species we're living inside a video game well that's another explanation that yes you've got some teenage kids in another civilization do you do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment that we're living in a simulation the universe is computational so we are an example in a computational world therefore uh it is a simulation it doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world but it's nonetheless is taking place in a computational world and everything that's going on is is basically a form of of computation um so you really have to define what you mean by uh this whole world being a simulation well then it's it's the teenager that that makes the video game you know us humans with our current limited cognitive capability have strived to understand ourselves and we have created religions we think of god whatever that is do you think god exists and if so who is god i alluded to this before we we started out with lots of particles going around yeah and there's nothing that represents love and creativity um and somehow we've gotten into a world where love actually exists and that has to do actually with consciousness because you can't have love without consciousness so to me that's god the fact that we have something where love where you can be devoted to someone else and and really feel that love um that's that's god and if you look at the old testament it was actually created by several different rabbinates in there and i think they've identified three of them one one of them dealt with god as a person that you can make deals with and he gets angry and he wrecks vengeance on various people but two of them actually talk about god as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and so forth uh that's how they describe god and so that's my view of god not not as a person in the sky that you can make deals with it's whatever the magic that goes from basic elements to things like consciousness and love do you think one of the things i find extremely beautiful and powerful is cellular automata which you also touch on do you think whatever the heck happens in cellular automata where interesting complicated objects emerge god is in there too the emergence of love in this seemingly privileged earth of creating a replicant is that they would love you and you would love them there wouldn't be much point of doing it if that didn't happen but all of it i guess what i'm saying about cellular automata is it's a primitive building blocks and they somehow create beautiful things is there some deep truth to that about how our universe works is the the emergence from simple rules beautiful complex objects can emerge is that the thing that made us yeah as we went through all the six phases of reality that's a good way to look at it it just makes them point to the whole value of having a universe do you think about your own mortality are you afraid of it yes but i keep going back to my idea of being able to expand human life quickly enough in advance of our getting there longevity escape velocity um which we're not quite at yet but i think we're actually pretty close particularly with for example doing simulated biology uh i think we can probably get there within say by the end of this decade and that's my goal you hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity you hope to achieve immortality well immortality is hard to say i can't really come on your program saying i've done it i've achieved immortality right because it's never forever um a long time a long time of living well but we'd like to actually advance human life expectancy advance my life expectancy more than a year every year and i think we can get there within by the end of this decade how do you think we do it so there's practical things um and transcend the nine steps to living well forever your book you describe just that there's practical things like health exercise all those things yeah i mean we live in a body that doesn't last forever there's no reason why it can't though and we're discovering things i think that will extend it um but you do have to deal with i mean i've got various issues went to mexico 40 years ago developed salmonella that created pancreatitis which gave me a strange form of diabetes it's not type 1 diabetes because that's an autoimmune disorder that destroys your pancreas i don't have that but it's also not type 2 diabetes because type 2 diabetes is your pancreas works fine but your cells don't absorb the insulin well i don't have that either the pancreatitis i had partially damaged my pancreas but it was a one-time thing it didn't continue and i've learned now how to control it but so that's just something i had to do uh in order to continue to exist it's your particular biological system you have to figure out a few hacks and the is that science would be yeah you have to do that much better actually yeah so i mean i i do spend a lot of time just tinkering with my own body to keep it going uh so i do think i'll last till the end of this decade and i think we'll achieve longevity escape velocity i think that we'll start with people who are very diligent about this eventually it'll become sort of routine that people will be able to do it so if you're talking about kids today or even people in their 20s or 30s it's really not a very serious problem i have had some discussions with relatives who were like almost 100 and saying well we're working on it as quickly as possible then i don't know if that's gonna work is there a case this is a difficult question but is there a case to be made against living forever that a finite life that mortality is a feature not a bug that that living a shorter so dying makes ice cream taste delicious makes life intensely beautiful more than uh most people believe that weighing except if you present a death of anybody they care about or love they find that extremely depressing and i know people who feel that way 20 30 40 years later they still want them back so i mean death is not something to celebrate but we've lived in a world where people just accept this life is short you see it all the time on tv life's short you have to take advantage of it and nobody accepts the fact that you could actually go beyond normal lifetimes but any time we talk about death or death of a person even one death is a terrible tragedy if you have somebody that lives 200 years old we still love them in in return and there's no limit limitation to that in fact these kinds of uh trends are going to provide greater and greater opportunity for everybody even if we have more people so let me ask about an alien species or a super intelligent ai 500 years from now that will look back and uh remember ray kurzweil version zero the uh before the replicants spread uh how do you hope they remember you in a um hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy summary of ray kurzweil what do you hope your legacy is well i mean i do hope to be around so that's some version of you yes so um do you think you'll be the same person around i mean am i the same person i was when i was that's true he's 20 years old you would be the same person in that same way but yes we're different we're doing um what we have of that all you have of that person is your memories which are probably um distorted in some way you just remember the good parts depending on your psyche you might focus on the bad parts might focus on the good parts right but i mean i still have a relationship to the way i was when i was earlier when i was younger how will you and the other super intelligent ais remember you of today from 500 years ago what do you hope to be remembered by this version of you before the singularity well i think it's expressed well in my books trying to create some new realities that people will accept i mean that's something that gives me great pleasure and great greater insight into what what makes humans valuable i'm not the only person who's uh tempted to comment on that but and uh optimism that permeates your work optimism about the future it's ultimately that optimism paves the way for building a better future yeah i agree with that so you uh asked your dad about the meaning of life and he said love let me ask you the same question what's the meaning of life why are we here this beautiful journey that we're on in phase fours reaching for phase five of this evolutionary information processing why well i think i'd give the same answers as my father um because if there were no love and we didn't care about anybody there'd be no point existing love is the meaning of life the ai version of your dad had a good point well i think that's a beautiful way to end it right thank you for your work thank you for being who you are thank you for dreaming about a beautiful future and uh creating it along the way and thank you so much for spending your really valuable time with me today this was awesome well it's my pleasure and uh you have some great insights both into me and into humanity as well so i appreciate that thanks for listening to this conversation with raycor as well to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from isaac asimov it is change continuous change inevitable change that is the dominant factor in society today no sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is but the world as it will be this in turn means that our statesmen our businessmen our every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you