Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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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
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
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
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
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
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
thought it had gotten worse or remained
the same
only one percent thought it decreased by
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
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
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'