SPEAKER_1: But would you live forever if you had the choice?
SPEAKER_2: I would like to live to tomorrow.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: This is StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_1: And today, we're gonna tackle a subject that's on everybody's mind at some point in their life.
SPEAKER_1: And for some people, it's on their minds all the time, and it has to do with longevity, your health longevity, and especially immortality.
SPEAKER_1: And what any of that has to do with technology and the pace that technology has been unfolding, not only over the past century, but especially over the past decades.
SPEAKER_1: And there's one person who comes to mind as a world expert on this, who's probably done more thinking on these topics than anyone else ever born.
SPEAKER_1: And there's none other than Ray Kurzweil.
SPEAKER_1: Ray, welcome to StarTalk.
SPEAKER_2: Great to be here.
SPEAKER_2: Great to see you again.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, thank you.
SPEAKER_1: This is not our first rodeo together.
SPEAKER_1: I've interviewed you before.
SPEAKER_1: You've gotten into such fascinating research topics throughout your life.
SPEAKER_1: You're an author, you're an inventor, you're a futurist, and you have an uncannily accurate track record for making predictions, even predictions like we don't want to be true, but they are, and you know this.
SPEAKER_1: So that makes it kind of awkward having conversations with you about this.
SPEAKER_1: You're also the co-founder of the Singularity Group.
SPEAKER_1: That's a topic we'll get into a little later, but some of that derives from, you had a book back in 2005.
SPEAKER_1: The Singularity is near, and you haven't stopped thinking about it since.
SPEAKER_1: And so, tell me, why do you think we'll one day live forever?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I can't go on your show and say, I've done it, I've lived forever.
SPEAKER_1: You're actually a thousand years old, right?
SPEAKER_2: But we're going to achieve something called Longevity Escape Philosophy.
SPEAKER_2: So, I mean, right now when you go forward a year, you lose part of that year.
SPEAKER_2: We pick up technologies that will extend us, but not a full year.
SPEAKER_2: So we're actually losing time.
SPEAKER_2: Progress is exponential, keeps getting faster, and we'll get to a point where we'll make so much progress and when you go forward a year, your longevity will go forward a year or even more.
SPEAKER_2: And if you're actually in touch with the technology, I believe we'll get there by 2029.
SPEAKER_1: On October 12th, 9 a.m.?
SPEAKER_1: That's awfully specific, dude.
SPEAKER_3: December 31st.
SPEAKER_1: But just to clarify, so we're on the same page.
SPEAKER_1: So the year I was born, there's a certain life expectancy that the medical community would have for me the year I was born.
SPEAKER_1: And the year I die, over those decades, medicines and technologies and understandings have improved so that I'm living longer than they previously had predicted for me.
SPEAKER_2: And the progress is exponential.
SPEAKER_2: So we get to a point where the progress is so fast that it will keep up with time going by.
SPEAKER_2: So when a year goes by, your longevity will actually improve by a year or even more than a year, particularly if you're in touch with the technology.
SPEAKER_1: And I love the phrase escape velocity.
SPEAKER_1: So at that point, everyone born at that point onward will basically live forever.
SPEAKER_1: This is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_2: Well, not necessarily.
SPEAKER_2: Let's say you're a ten-year-old and they calculate your longevity is many, many decades.
SPEAKER_2: You could die the next day.
SPEAKER_2: So longevity doesn't guarantee...
SPEAKER_1: Well, natural, dying a natural death, of course.
SPEAKER_1: We're not talking about drowning or falling off a ladder, right?
SPEAKER_2: Well, things are somewhat unpredictable.
SPEAKER_2: So even if you have a longevity that goes out, it's not a guarantee.
SPEAKER_2: As we go further out, we'll actually be able to register what our brains are doing because we're going to actually merge with technology.
SPEAKER_2: That's going to keep track of what we're thinking.
SPEAKER_2: And anything that's digital is backed up.
SPEAKER_2: So ultimately we'll be able to recreate ourselves.
SPEAKER_1: The day we reach escape velocity, would we have done so purely by advances in medicines and human physiology?
SPEAKER_2: Well, there are different stages.
SPEAKER_2: When we get out to the 2040s, everything that we're thinking will be backed up.
SPEAKER_2: And that's not so amazing.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, this is backed up.
SPEAKER_2: If I throw this into the river and it washes away, I can recreate it because it's all backed up.
SPEAKER_2: We haven't backed up our brains, but ultimately we'll do that because we're going to...
SPEAKER_2: That's the whole story, but we'll be able to back up what we're thinking and really recreate ourselves.
SPEAKER_1: But that's not what you mean when you talk about adding a year per year, is it?
SPEAKER_2: That's a different story.
SPEAKER_2: That's actually understanding our organs and so on.
SPEAKER_1: No, I get that.
SPEAKER_3: So I just want to put that to rest.
SPEAKER_2: I'll give you an example.
SPEAKER_2: Let's just tap it.
SPEAKER_2: I've had diabetes for 40 years.
SPEAKER_2: I've kept it controlled.
SPEAKER_2: I have this thing here, which actually measures my glucose.
SPEAKER_2: But now I'm going to get another one.
SPEAKER_1: So it's a patch under your elbow.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, okay.
SPEAKER_2: I'm going to get another one, slightly bigger but actually very small, that actually has insulin and can put it into my bloodstream.
SPEAKER_2: So it's basically an artificial pancreas.
SPEAKER_2: So if I suddenly eat a lot of sugar, it will detect that and release more insulin.
SPEAKER_2: If I haven't eaten anything for a while, it won't release insulin.
SPEAKER_2: It will be just like your pancreas.
SPEAKER_1: So it's a pancreas patch.
SPEAKER_1: That's great.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, but it's actually replacing your organs.
SPEAKER_2: Now we can do that with all of your organs and ultimately we'll be able to do that.
SPEAKER_2: And these things are very reliable and much safer than your real organs.
SPEAKER_2: So when we get to the 2030s, we'll be actually supplementing our organs and redoing them.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but that's a different thing from the biomedical community saying, we have a cure for diabetes.
SPEAKER_1: So you don't need to replace your pancreas with a patch.
SPEAKER_1: Your pancreas works perfectly.
SPEAKER_1: Or any other failure of your organs if we get into the genome and know what the failure mode is, we don't have to...
SPEAKER_2: I mean, there's different ways of overcoming problems with your organs.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, one is to replace it.
SPEAKER_2: Another is to fix it.
SPEAKER_2: Fixing your organs is not perfect either.
SPEAKER_2: But we'll actually have a way of overcoming different issues that we have with our body, because our bodies are definitely not perfect.
SPEAKER_2: And actually, we can do a better job than your real pancreas with this artificial pancreas.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, that's just an example of being able to basically overcome problems with your organs.
SPEAKER_1: So we start swapping it out and we upload your brain.
SPEAKER_1: So now there's like a box on the table.
SPEAKER_1: All right, that's your brain.
SPEAKER_2: Well, uploading your brain is a little bit later.
SPEAKER_2: But yes, we'll be able to...
SPEAKER_2: I mean, what we're going to first do is connect parts of our brain where we do our thinking to the cloud.
SPEAKER_2: Just the way this does it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you can actually use this without being connected to the cloud.
SPEAKER_1: You mean your smartphone?
SPEAKER_2: My smartphone.
SPEAKER_2: But it's pretty useless because it doesn't know very much.
SPEAKER_2: So for this to really be effective, it has to connect to the cloud.
SPEAKER_2: But our brain is not connected to the cloud.
SPEAKER_2: So that's going to happen in the 2030s.
SPEAKER_2: And we will then be able to...
SPEAKER_2: I mean, this really amplifies our brain.
SPEAKER_2: But I have to have it.
SPEAKER_2: If I put it down and I don't have it handy, I can't use it.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but Ray, I'm not giving you a scalpel to go into my brain and put electrodes.
SPEAKER_1: If I have just as good access to the cloud by holding a smartphone and touching it with my thumbs.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, that is a point, but...
SPEAKER_2: But you don't have to actually go in with a scalpel.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we'll send nanobots through the bloodstream.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, I feel much better about that now.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, if I were to describe how everybody has this phone and it actually amplifies our mind, 20 years ago, people, in fact, which I did do, and people thought that was crazy.
SPEAKER_2: And now everybody has this.
SPEAKER_1: Everybody's got it.
SPEAKER_2: And 500 people there and I said, who does not have their smartphone handy?
SPEAKER_2: And nobody raised their hand.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Like everybody has this.
SPEAKER_2: That wasn't true five years ago.
SPEAKER_2: Definitely wasn't true 10 years ago.
SPEAKER_2: So people get used to things.
SPEAKER_2: It's much better to actually have it in your brain.
SPEAKER_2: You have it instantly.
SPEAKER_2: Trying to reach your phone.
SPEAKER_2: Typing on it is awkward.
SPEAKER_2: This will be much better.
SPEAKER_1: So you'd be carrying Wi-Fi antennas inside your head somehow.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we'll make that more reliable than it is now.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: So what happens if you're walking around and then you hit a dead zone?
SPEAKER_1: Does your brain shut off?
SPEAKER_1: How does that play out?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, that's something we're going to have to overcome.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we're talking about the 2030s and 2040s.
SPEAKER_1: So tell me about these nanobots that you're describing.
SPEAKER_1: We broadly think of that as sort of nanotechnology.
SPEAKER_1: What is the anatomy of a nanobot in the service of your visions?
SPEAKER_2: Well, it just goes into your neocortex and it can actually pick up what each neocortex module is doing and connect it to the cloud and get feedback from the cloud.
SPEAKER_2: And it basically, I mean, it's just like your phone.
SPEAKER_2: It basically amplifies what you're doing in your brain.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but it's one thing to say that technology advances and that's a very different thing to say that our understanding of our own brain has advanced.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, that's going to happen much more slowly.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, we can understand our brain, but it's very limited.
SPEAKER_2: And ultimately, we want to expand our brain.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we have a large head so that we can actually think a lot, but it's limited.
SPEAKER_2: And even if you're superior in one field, like Einstein was brilliant in physics, and he actually was interested in playing the violin, but he was no Yasha Haifetz.
SPEAKER_2: Yasha Haifetz was master at the violin.
SPEAKER_2: He was interested in physics, but he was no Einstein.
SPEAKER_2: We have a limited capacity in our brains.
SPEAKER_2: So ultimately, we'd like to amplify that and actually multiply it by two, by ten, by a thousand, ultimately by a million.
SPEAKER_1: But it requires you to know enough about what your brain is doing to know what it is that you need to amplify.
SPEAKER_1: And right now, it's electrochemical synaptic signals, right?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it's hard for us to really make sense of.
SPEAKER_1: I don't see that progressing at the rate that your machines are.
SPEAKER_1: I guess that's my point.
SPEAKER_1: So if the machine is going to help us, we got to know enough about the brain so that your nanobot can insert in the right place to do that.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I can show you this price performance of computation that just started 80 years ago, and every year we have more and more.
SPEAKER_1: By the way, I was honored for you to have shared with me the manuscript of your next book, for a book not coming out until 2023.
SPEAKER_1: And you had an audacious title for it, The Singularity is Nearer.
SPEAKER_1: What did you title it?
SPEAKER_2: That's right, The Singularity is Nearer.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, because it says near was the first one.
SPEAKER_1: Now it's nearer, so you're all in on this.
SPEAKER_1: But I remember you had a fascinating set of charts in there.
SPEAKER_1: Tell me about this first one, which to me was the most mind-blowing of them all.
SPEAKER_2: Well, this shows the amount of computation you can get per dollar, and it increases every single year.
SPEAKER_2: And it looks like one person was in charge of this, but actually this is just the progress that we've made in computation with nobody being in charge of it.
SPEAKER_2: It started with the Zuse 1 in 1941.
SPEAKER_2: He was a German.
SPEAKER_2: He showed it to the Nazi government.
SPEAKER_2: They felt that computation was not important and did not support it.
SPEAKER_2: The second one was the Zuse 2.
SPEAKER_2: The third one was Colossus, which was done by Alan Turing in England.
SPEAKER_2: They got very much behind that, including the United States.
SPEAKER_2: They cracked the German enigma code and enabled Britain to win that war, despite the fact that they were outnumbered.
SPEAKER_2: They gave us a launching pad for our D-Day invasion.
SPEAKER_1: Fascinating film based on that story too.
SPEAKER_2: There are lots of different stories at all of these points.
SPEAKER_2: But we started out at 0.000007 calculations per second per dollar.
SPEAKER_2: The last one, we have 50,000 calculations per second per dollar.
SPEAKER_2: So it has grown exponentially and it keeps going.
SPEAKER_2: People used to call this Moore's law, but I mean there's 80 dots on this, only 10 of them are Intel.
SPEAKER_3: So it's really not Moore's law.
SPEAKER_2: And people constantly come and say Moore's law has ended.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I remember right before the pandemic, people saying, oh, Moore's law has ended.
SPEAKER_2: But that's not the case and I never believe that and it's continuing today.
SPEAKER_2: So this provides more and more computation for the same cost each year.
SPEAKER_1: But that doesn't mean we know our brain better.
SPEAKER_1: Why should it mean that?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, we are a moral enough civilization that we don't line people up and cut open their heads and do experiments on it, right?
SPEAKER_1: So a lot of what you're predicting is predicated on the machine brain interface.
SPEAKER_2: No, I mean, it's really capturing what each neocortex is doing.
SPEAKER_2: We understand enough about that today, passing it onto the cloud, which will basically provide the same kind of things outside the brain.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we're doing, for example, large language models, which is just in a computer, and you can actually talk to it.
SPEAKER_2: And it will actually talk back to you.
SPEAKER_2: And it's not just giving you samples of what humans have written.
SPEAKER_2: It's actually capturing understanding of language.
SPEAKER_2: So, we understand a lot of what, about what humans are doing.
SPEAKER_1: So, maybe it's just additive to your brain, rather than infused within your own synapses, right?
SPEAKER_1: If it's just an add-on, that works, perhaps.
SPEAKER_2: That is the idea.
SPEAKER_2: It's basically to add to it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, our computers already understand a lot about what we're doing.
SPEAKER_2: But we don't have a very good interface.
SPEAKER_1: So, this is one way of interfacing it.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so this involves sort of nanobots.
SPEAKER_1: I want to chat a little bit more about that after the break.
SPEAKER_1: But also, the 900-pound gorilla in the room here is the day that the computing power equals or exceeds anything humans can do, not just how well you play the game of chess or the game of Go, but it can outperform us in everything we had previously held as distinctly human.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, Turing created this test, the Turing test, in 1950, and we haven't managed to pass it yet.
SPEAKER_2: But in 1999, when I wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines, I predicted that we would pass the Turing test by 2029, so in 30 years.
SPEAKER_2: And Stanford was so alarmed at this, they created a worldwide conference, and people came from all over the world, AI experts.
SPEAKER_2: And we did the first poll, and people felt that, yes, we would pass the Turing test, which would mean that a computer could do everything that a human could do, but they said it would take 100 years.
SPEAKER_2: So the AI experts were saying 100 years, I was saying 30 years.
SPEAKER_2: There's been so much progress in AI recently.
SPEAKER_2: A year ago, they were saying 2042, I was still saying 2029.
SPEAKER_2: Three months ago, they were saying 2030.
SPEAKER_2: So basically, they're agreeing them.
SPEAKER_1: And you're quietly watching them one by one, drop like flies, jumping into your boat.
SPEAKER_1: That's what you're watching here.
SPEAKER_1: That's hilarious.
SPEAKER_2: So that's going to happen by the end of this decade.
SPEAKER_2: And AI experts now agree with me on this.
SPEAKER_2: And when we get to the 2030s, we will amplify our own brain by connecting to it.
SPEAKER_2: But the computer already understands everything that a human can do.
SPEAKER_2: And actually, it goes way beyond it.
SPEAKER_2: So I mean, to pass a Turing test, it would actually have to dumb itself down because if it showed its capability, it goes way beyond what a human can do, people wouldn't know it's a machine.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, so it's so good, it comes out the other side of the Turing test.
SPEAKER_1: Wow, it's not like it can't keep up with us.
SPEAKER_1: It's so far ahead of us, no human can do it.
SPEAKER_2: Everything that computers have learned, like take Go for example, it goes way past what a human can do.
SPEAKER_2: So Lisa Dowell, who's the best human at Go in the world, said he's not going to play Go anymore because machines are so much better than him, there's really no point in doing it.
SPEAKER_1: It's hilarious that the Turing test can be turned upside down where you say, don't be too smart, because then they'll know you're a computer.
SPEAKER_2: That's a major issue, passing a Turing test.
SPEAKER_1: Well, let me take a quick break.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back, we'll continue my conversation with futurist Ray Kurzweil on StarTalk.
SPEAKER_4: Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.
SPEAKER_4: Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: We're back, StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: Got a one-on-one special interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil.
SPEAKER_1: This might be our third time in conversation over the past 10 years, and this guy is true to his word.
SPEAKER_1: He makes a prediction about computing, about society, about our culture, and it's scary how on top of this man really is.
SPEAKER_1: And we've got him right here on this show.
SPEAKER_1: So Ray, in your book, The Singularity is Nearer, coming out in 2023, you're doubling down on so much of your earlier predictions.
SPEAKER_1: You're saying, yep, maybe it's happening even sooner than I'd predicted.
SPEAKER_2: No, it's happening on schedule, but it's actually less alarming.
SPEAKER_2: When I wrote this in 2005, things we just assumed today are reality.
SPEAKER_2: People didn't assume that then.
SPEAKER_2: So the whole thing was very surprising in 2005.
SPEAKER_2: Today we assume that and people are greatly amplified by the machines that we carry around.
SPEAKER_1: Right, there was no smartphone in 2005.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Right, and nobody goes outside without it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if I actually leave and I notice I don't have my cell phone, it's like I've lost three quarters of my brain.
SPEAKER_2: I better go back and get it.
SPEAKER_1: For some people, it's 90% of their brain.
SPEAKER_1: If they've lost it, so Ray, what is it with humans that we can't think exponentially about the world?
SPEAKER_1: And even if we, when presented with our own awareness, our own awareness even gets it wrong.
SPEAKER_1: In the manuscript, you were kind enough to share with me of your upcoming book, there are all of these charts that it's almost makes you embarrassed to be human, that people think this way.
SPEAKER_1: One of them was on how much of the world people think live in poverty.
SPEAKER_1: Tell me about that one.
SPEAKER_2: Well, there was actually a poll of 23,000 people in 24 countries and they were asked over the last 20 years, what has happened with poverty?
SPEAKER_2: And have more people become impoverished or less people?
SPEAKER_2: 70% thought it had gotten worse.
SPEAKER_2: 88% thought it had gotten worse or stayed the same.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, it had fallen by 50% and only 1% thought that was true.
SPEAKER_2: And people think that things are getting worse and people are not having children because they think that the world is getting worse.
SPEAKER_2: Well, in fact, it's getting better.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I measure all these different attributes of how we...
SPEAKER_1: You measure that.
SPEAKER_1: You must have had a hundred charts in this book.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it was like, well, every next chart is like, damn, damn, what?
SPEAKER_1: Every chart I went through, it was like...
SPEAKER_1: So, it's almost embarrassing, I have to say.
SPEAKER_2: And things are getting better, but we tend to forget that.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, there's a common human attribute where we tend to remember positive things from the past.
SPEAKER_2: But we wouldn't want to go back even to 1900, human life expectancy was 48, it was 30 in 1800.
SPEAKER_2: And we had very few abilities to deal with disease and so on.
SPEAKER_2: So, things are getting better, but we forget that.
SPEAKER_2: And all we see in the news is the bad news.
SPEAKER_2: The bad news is true, but there's good news that we don't attribute, because the good news happens like every day.
SPEAKER_1: The fact is hidden in plain sight, that life is getting better for people.
SPEAKER_1: That bodes well for living forever, right?
SPEAKER_1: If we were in the middle of poverty and disaster and war, you're not going to want to live forever under those conditions.
SPEAKER_1: So, both of these...
SPEAKER_2: Maybe not, I mean, that's a deeply philosophical issue.
SPEAKER_1: Sure, but they feed into each other, the fact that things are getting better.
SPEAKER_2: If you're not alive, you can't prove anything, you can't enjoy the world.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if you have any joy in your life, you want to continue to live.
SPEAKER_1: I get that, but I'm saying...
SPEAKER_1: But these two forces are resonant.
SPEAKER_1: The fact that everything is getting better statistically for more people than ever before, and we're developing the power to live forever.
SPEAKER_1: But that would have consequences, all right?
SPEAKER_1: Social, cultural, political consequences, all right?
SPEAKER_1: You know, the supply chain of food, the resources of Earth to sustain such a population.
SPEAKER_1: So, to extol the value or virtue of living forever, but not see what challenges that would bring, that would be irresponsible.
SPEAKER_2: If you had a linear mindset...
SPEAKER_1: Okay, dig me out of this one.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, take renewable resources for energy.
SPEAKER_2: That's growing exponentially.
SPEAKER_2: And we'll actually be making more energy from things like solar within 10 years.
SPEAKER_2: And people don't realize that.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you look at the graph, you can see where it's going.
SPEAKER_2: Same thing with food.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we can actually produce food very inexpensively, you know, once we get some technologies that we're working on to work.
SPEAKER_1: But would you live forever if you had the choice?
SPEAKER_2: I would like to live to tomorrow.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, that's a low bar.
SPEAKER_1: That's a low bar, but okay, we'll give it to you.
SPEAKER_1: Let's give it to Ray.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_2: And I think tomorrow I'm going to want to live to the next day.
SPEAKER_2: And people want to continue to live.
SPEAKER_2: People sometimes talk, oh, I want to live another 20 years, 40 years, whatever.
SPEAKER_2: But they definitely want to live to tomorrow.
SPEAKER_2: And in 40 years from now, they want to live to tomorrow.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I had an aunt, she was 98, she died recently, but I talked to her a couple months before she died.
SPEAKER_2: She was a very vibrant woman.
SPEAKER_2: She's a psychologist.
SPEAKER_2: She actually talked to her patients at 98.
SPEAKER_2: And I was actually talking to her about longevity escape philosophy and explaining that.
SPEAKER_2: And she said, well, do we have it now?
SPEAKER_2: And I said, well, I think we'll have it by 2029.
SPEAKER_2: And she said, could you work on that to make it a little faster?
SPEAKER_2: Because people want to continue to live.
SPEAKER_1: She wants to see tomorrow.
SPEAKER_2: And people get some pleasure from life and they want to continue to live and they also want to continue to create, you know, further technologies for tomorrow.
SPEAKER_1: This reminds me of the Frank Sinatra quote.
SPEAKER_1: It's been attributed to him at least.
SPEAKER_1: He said, live every day like it's your last.
SPEAKER_1: Because one day that'll be true.
SPEAKER_3: That is your last day.
SPEAKER_2: Well, people have assumed that.
SPEAKER_2: And certainly that's been true.
SPEAKER_2: So we're actually going to be able to overcome that.
SPEAKER_2: But people want to continue unless they're under unbearable pain, either physically, emotionally or spiritually, and then they don't want to go on.
SPEAKER_1: Right, right.
SPEAKER_2: But otherwise people do want to go on.
SPEAKER_1: And those are exceptions, clearly.
SPEAKER_1: Important exceptions, right, but they're exceptions.
SPEAKER_1: Correct.
SPEAKER_2: Well, we're also working on alleviating these kinds of problems.
SPEAKER_2: Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_1: So before we go to break, let me just ask, there's a next generation that doesn't see a good world that we're leaving for them.
SPEAKER_1: They see the vagaries of climate change.
SPEAKER_1: They see regressive thinking on the social cultural front.
SPEAKER_2: Right, but they're really not aware of what's happening.
SPEAKER_2: And I've had many debates with particularly younger people that have this view.
SPEAKER_2: They're not aware of how close we are, for example, to replacing everything with renewable energy and many other of the graphs that I show.
SPEAKER_2: They're just not aware of it.
SPEAKER_2: And I think things are getting worse when they're actually getting better.
SPEAKER_2: And we could go through all these graphs, but it definitely shows that things are getting better and people are unaware of it.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so they've been diluted by the forces of media by whatever else is not looking at those same graphs because it sells new stories.
SPEAKER_2: And these, I mean, progress in this is not news.
SPEAKER_2: It's like every day we're making progress and it's kind of the same story, but if you go over a certain amount of time, you see that we're making rapid progress.
SPEAKER_1: Right, so one of them, you might have the number on the tip of your tongue, it was the percent by which poverty drops in the world each day.
SPEAKER_1: I thought that was a great number.
SPEAKER_1: Was it like 0.001% or something?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, something like that.
SPEAKER_1: And it's almost an ignorable amount until you take a step back and look at the sum over the years and over the decades.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly, so that's not news.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, news is all negative.
SPEAKER_2: That's what gets attention.
SPEAKER_2: And a lot of the news is true.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I'm not saying there's no bad news in the world, but that's all we're exposed to.
SPEAKER_1: So what of our problems today might not be tractable by this sort of eternal Moore's law that's unfolding in front of us?
SPEAKER_2: I'm not aware of something that we can't, that we're not making public.
SPEAKER_1: How about transportation?
SPEAKER_1: You know, we, planes today are going the same speed they went 50 years ago.
SPEAKER_1: You know, we're not getting to Tokyo faster than we did in the...
SPEAKER_2: I mean, for one thing, we don't really need to travel that much.
SPEAKER_1: Because technology creates a Zoom call.
SPEAKER_2: And Zoom calls won't just be a picture.
SPEAKER_2: We'll be able to actually embrace each other.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I actually have five patents where you can use technology today where you can actually be with somebody and embrace them and feel like you're with them in three-dimensional space.
SPEAKER_1: Ray, I'm not having a computer hug me.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know what you're cooking up your sleeve there.
SPEAKER_1: But no, I'm not getting warm and cozy with arms sticking out of my laptop.
SPEAKER_1: All right, so what are you cooking up here?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, it's something where you can actually be with somebody in a three-dimensional space, even if you're apart.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, but you can't physically touch them.
SPEAKER_2: But there's many different ways of doing it.
SPEAKER_1: That's like a holographic thing, I guess.
SPEAKER_1: Right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, I mean, holograms are three-dimensional.
SPEAKER_1: There was a, I think I saw a sci-fi movie where you saw the person who you needed it to be, but that person was played by another person who had approximately the same body shape and body type.
SPEAKER_1: So that person got paid to play this role, but you interacting with that person saw and felt and communicated with the person who you intended it to be.
SPEAKER_1: I thought that was an interesting sort of...
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I did actually see that movie.
SPEAKER_2: So that's, I mean, one approach, but I mean, there's many different ways in which we'll bring 3D to virtual reality and to Zoom calls.
SPEAKER_1: And you made a very important point in your book, the singularity is nearer, something that I only mildly appreciated, but after reading it, I was all in the Ray camp.
SPEAKER_1: It's that people have the urge to think of progress not only linearly, of course, but also progress in only one sector.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, the chips are getting faster by this amount each time and that's what really matters.
SPEAKER_1: Let's track the chips.
SPEAKER_1: But you make a very convincing case that it's a much broader phenomenon than that.
SPEAKER_2: Right, that's a very good point.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, this graph that we talked about of the price performance of computation, it's not everything comes from that.
SPEAKER_2: That's just one example of how technology advances over time.
SPEAKER_2: Everything progresses that way and you could point to different types of technology and how they progress every year.
SPEAKER_1: And the people inventing the faster chips are not thinking that one day movie makers are going to fully exploit the power of computing to tell stories in movies.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sure that was not on anybody's thought in the 1960s when they were working hard on the IBM 360 or whatever else was coming online at the time.
SPEAKER_1: Would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, before 1900, we didn't have movies at all.
SPEAKER_2: And that's not that long ago in terms of...
SPEAKER_1: No, it's not.
SPEAKER_1: No, no, it's not.
SPEAKER_1: Let's take a quick break.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back, I want to get all in on your feelings about AI because that's a very controversial subject, as you know.
SPEAKER_1: And I just thought you were an optimist in that because most AI experts are quite pessimistic.
SPEAKER_1: And if not them, then it's every movie ever made about AI which scare the living daylights out of you.
SPEAKER_1: And you'd want to stop every act of AI being conducted in every lab in the world.
SPEAKER_1: I want to get your candid views on that when we come back with my conversation with Ray Kurzweil on StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: We're back to StarTalk, a special one-on-one conversation I'm having with the one and only Ray Kurzweil, futurist extraordinaire.
SPEAKER_1: And he's not just somebody who sits home in his armchair and says, gee, I wonder, wouldn't it be cool if we had flying cars?
SPEAKER_1: No, Ray thinks about agencies, he thinks about industries, he thinks about innovation, he tracks what's been happening in the past, looks at those trends lines, trend lines, applies his own ingenuity to it, his own creativity, and he's telling us what is in store.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, I actually got into futurism because of my interest in being an inventor.
SPEAKER_2: So it wasn't just futurism to think about what the future will be like, but to really time my own inventions, because certain inventions don't make sense at particular periods of time.
SPEAKER_2: And so I use futurism to tell when we should actually be doing certain things.
SPEAKER_1: Excellent.
SPEAKER_1: Plus I admire the fact that you slap dates on when you think things will happen.
SPEAKER_1: And that's bold.
SPEAKER_1: That's some, as they say, you got gonads.
SPEAKER_1: If you can understand.
SPEAKER_1: Because there's nothing more embarrassing than a wrong prediction that people make, even if it doesn't land in a time period, right?
SPEAKER_1: There's just certain things that never came true, that people either dreamt up or wished would be true.
SPEAKER_1: But so let's get into this AI thing.
SPEAKER_1: My personal view here is computers and machines, think of them as one force operating on civilization.
SPEAKER_1: It wasn't the end of the world when we had machines replace oxen or otherwise human labor on a farm, right?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it was just, we had tractors, now that does it.
SPEAKER_2: That does it and-
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we had 80% in 1800, 80% of the workforce worked on producing food.
SPEAKER_2: So basically, if you were working, you're producing food, at least 80%.
SPEAKER_2: Today, that's 2%.
SPEAKER_1: We're producing more food on less land with fewer people than ever before.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, 80% to 2%.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, in fact, you can go your whole life, particularly if you grew up in a city, and never even meet a farmer, right?
SPEAKER_1: And I think that of our founding fathers, how many of them were farmers?
SPEAKER_1: There's like half or so.
SPEAKER_1: There's some interesting fraction.
SPEAKER_2: No, they were all farmers.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, this was a farmer revolution.
SPEAKER_2: The American Revolution was a revolution of farmers.
SPEAKER_1: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_1: And so, all right.
SPEAKER_2: And yet people found other jobs.
SPEAKER_1: So we survive an era where our physical labor, and that of our pack animals, is replaced by machines.
SPEAKER_1: And it wasn't the end of civilization.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, people found other jobs.
SPEAKER_1: Other industries rose up, in spite of whatever years they might have had at the time.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if I were Oppression futurist in 1900, I would say that all of your jobs are going away.
SPEAKER_2: And people go, oh my God, how are we gonna make money?
SPEAKER_2: And I'd say, well, you're gonna become an IT engineer and do quantum physics.
SPEAKER_2: And no one would have any idea what I'm even talking about.
SPEAKER_1: But they wouldn't even, no, no, but beyond that, they wouldn't even allow you to say, instead of being a blacksmith for horses, you'll fix engines on cars.
SPEAKER_1: They probably could not imagine an industry that rose up surrounding cars.
SPEAKER_2: They couldn't imagine any of the jobs that came, but we actually have a higher fraction of people working today than we did before.
SPEAKER_2: It's actually been increasing.
SPEAKER_2: And the amount of money you've made in constant dollars has greatly advanced.
SPEAKER_2: That's another graph I have here.
SPEAKER_2: It has gone up substantially.
SPEAKER_1: Here's a graph you'd have them put together.
SPEAKER_1: How many 20-something millionaire YouTubers there are for your entire income is what they do on YouTube, which was a platform that didn't even exist 15 years ago, whenever it came into...
SPEAKER_2: So that's a good example of the kinds of new jobs that we have.
SPEAKER_2: And as intelligence increases, we're going to be doing more and more intelligent things.
SPEAKER_2: We're going to become much smarter in the future.
SPEAKER_2: We would not want to go back to the primitive past of today.
SPEAKER_1: The idiot days of 2022.
SPEAKER_1: But Ray, if AI starts taking all the jobs, not just the old jobs, but any new job that people can come up with, AI is going to do it.
SPEAKER_1: Doesn't that...
SPEAKER_1: We have to now think geopolitically about the impact of this.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: So there's two ways of looking at this.
SPEAKER_2: There's humans and there's AIs.
SPEAKER_2: The AIs are going to go way past what humans can do.
SPEAKER_2: And so what are humans going to be able to do?
SPEAKER_2: But that's really not the way I look at it.
SPEAKER_2: We create technology to advance ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, technology is not some alien invasion from Mars.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we create it to overcome limitations that we have.
SPEAKER_2: Our own problems with our organs, we have problems with everything, and we come up with technology that moves us past it.
SPEAKER_2: And we bring this into ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: So that's why I'm talking about advancing our own brains and capabilities with technology in the future.
SPEAKER_2: So we're going to bring the AI into ourselves, and we're going to become smarter, and we're going to be able to do our jobs because it's going to be us and AI together.
SPEAKER_1: Not AI is a separate disembodied force that as every movie has decided, that the AI will judge that we are a scourge on Earth.
SPEAKER_2: AI is not coming from Mars.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we're creating it to overcome problems that we have.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but this fear of it achieving...
SPEAKER_2: And we're already using it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, AI undermines everything we do.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, every single...
SPEAKER_1: I love AI.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to be wrong here, but I'm saying what happens if...
SPEAKER_1: You know, the fear factor, I guess, is a singularity of its own, perhaps, is if AI, quote, achieves consciousness, it makes decisions all by itself.
SPEAKER_2: Well, let's get back to consciousness in a moment, but I mean, this has been an issue ever since the Luddite occurred in the early, in the 1800s.
SPEAKER_2: They saw machines are being built and more machines are being built and every week they're announcing some new machines and employment's going to be, won't exist.
SPEAKER_2: But in fact, employment went up, not down, and continues today to go up and not down.
SPEAKER_2: That's because we use the technology to make ourselves more capable.
SPEAKER_1: So interesting, I remember reading, I read a lot of history.
SPEAKER_1: I enjoy looking at how people used to think about their own time.
SPEAKER_1: One of them was, at the rate machines are replacing human work, one day we will only need a three day work week.
SPEAKER_1: And what enchanted me by that is it's the assumption that the work people were doing in that day was the only work that would ever be done.
SPEAKER_1: And so, if you have machines doing it now, there's less work, total work to do in the world without anyone thinking that maybe you're freed up to think of other things, invent new projects, new ideas, new challenges.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's exactly the case.
SPEAKER_2: And particularly when we increase our own intelligence, we're going to think of all kinds of things we can't even imagine today.
SPEAKER_1: So, when you say intelligence, could you be more specific about that?
SPEAKER_1: Because, in fact, before we even get there, could you remind us what the parts of the brain are doing for us?
SPEAKER_1: Because we hear joke about the reptilian brain and what part of the brain makes us us rather than some other apes.
SPEAKER_1: Could you just spend a moment telling us about that?
SPEAKER_2: Well, there are parts of the brain that control our breathing and so on that are not that important.
SPEAKER_1: Well, unless you want to breathe.
SPEAKER_1: You mean they're not important for intelligence.
SPEAKER_2: The cerebellum is where we do our ability to put different things together.
SPEAKER_2: So you have lots of different constraints, and our cerebellum can solve some of those problems.
SPEAKER_2: We've greatly amplified that with our machines, which can actually go beyond what a normal human brain can do.
SPEAKER_2: And ultimately, we'll connect our cerebellum to the cloud, which basically will just expand it beyond what our brain can do.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, the reason we have such a large head is to accommodate a certain amount of cerebellum.
SPEAKER_2: Now, there's actually one other thing that we need, because there are other animals that have a brain that are as big as us or even larger, like an elephant or a whale actually have a larger brain.
SPEAKER_2: They don't have a thumb.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, this thing is actually very key.
SPEAKER_1: Well, they have an opposable thumb.
SPEAKER_1: They have thumb bones, right, because they're mammals.
SPEAKER_1: But, right.
SPEAKER_2: They don't have an opposable thumb.
SPEAKER_2: So I can think and look at a tree and go, wow, I can take that branch and strip off the leaves and create a tool.
SPEAKER_2: They can't do that.
SPEAKER_2: They might imagine it, but they can't.
SPEAKER_2: They don't have an opposable thumb to create that.
SPEAKER_2: So our whole technology is enabled by our opposable thumb.
SPEAKER_1: But then...
SPEAKER_1: Oh, so are you suggesting...
SPEAKER_1: That's an important point.
SPEAKER_1: AI, we think of it as a computer-based thing, phenomenon.
SPEAKER_1: But can AI create a sculpture?
SPEAKER_1: You know, I do that with my hands.
SPEAKER_1: Does AI do that?
SPEAKER_1: You have to create a robot that jumps out of the machine to do that, right?
SPEAKER_2: Well, since we have the ability to create technology, we can create robots and the robots have an opposable thumb.
SPEAKER_1: So getting back to that point, isn't there a day where there is nothing left for humans to do?
SPEAKER_1: And then there's a world where AI does everything better than we can.
SPEAKER_1: And so how do we...
SPEAKER_1: Is that the end of the economy?
SPEAKER_2: That would be the end of us if we can't expand who we are.
SPEAKER_2: And if we can actually put AI into ourselves, which we've already done with things like cell phones and so on, but if we can actually amplify our ability to think, then we become the AI and we can compete with ourselves because we are the AI.
SPEAKER_2: And that's why we created AI, is to expand our ability to think.
SPEAKER_1: Could you...
SPEAKER_1: You said this the last time we were in conversation and I've never forgotten it and I've repeated it a hundred times.
SPEAKER_1: So I want people to hear it from you firsthand.
SPEAKER_1: Your rebuttal to the comment, you know, the first AI only rich people are going to have it and then they're going to take over the world and there will be more of the have-nots versus the haves and this is going to create an imbalanced world.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: So if you go back 20 years, you had to be actually pretty wealthy to have one of these new cell phones that came out because they were very expensive and only wealthy people could afford them.
SPEAKER_2: And they didn't do very much.
SPEAKER_2: So now they do fantastic amount and they're very inexpensive.
SPEAKER_2: So you can only afford these technologies at a point where they don't really work very well.
SPEAKER_2: Once they get to be perfected, everybody can afford them.
SPEAKER_2: And literally everybody has these phones.
SPEAKER_1: There's six billion.
SPEAKER_1: Look, there's six billion in the world out of eight billion people.
SPEAKER_1: That's crazy.
SPEAKER_1: It's a crazy number.
SPEAKER_2: I checked on this like nine months ago.
SPEAKER_1: It was four million.
SPEAKER_2: But so now it's six billion out of eight billion people.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I walk down and I see homeless people take out their cell phone and use it.
SPEAKER_1: The smartphone.
SPEAKER_1: The smartphone, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So you can only afford these things at a point where they don't work.
SPEAKER_2: Once they're really perfected, everybody can afford them.
SPEAKER_2: And so that's going to be true of all of these technologies.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have to be wealthy.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, wealthy only allows you access to a point where it doesn't really affect anything.
SPEAKER_1: But that presumes that we continue to advance exponentially over that time.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, but that is the reality.
SPEAKER_1: And do you never see that ending?
SPEAKER_2: No, I mean, it's going to keep going.
SPEAKER_1: And what are you basing that on?
SPEAKER_1: Part of it sounds like wishful thinking.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, I'm with you, but I'm just being devil's advocate here.
SPEAKER_1: Who is to say it should go on forever?
SPEAKER_1: The Roman Empire, they surely thought they were a forever thing.
SPEAKER_1: Hitler was ready to be the third dynasty.
SPEAKER_1: He was ready to last at least as long as the Greeks and the Romans, and his dynasty lasted 10 years.
SPEAKER_1: So, where is your, is it just the, I'm queuing off of the past and projecting into the future, or do you have actually knowledge of what will happen in the future that will empower this?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, if you look at the price performance of computation, it's gone on.
SPEAKER_2: There's actually some periods prior to this, before we had computation, that continues this graph into the past, and it's continued, and people are saying, well, I'm not sure it's going to continue.
SPEAKER_2: Moore's Law has ended.
SPEAKER_2: Every five years, people say Moore's Law has ended.
SPEAKER_2: Moore's Law is not a good name for this graph because only 10 of the 80 points have to do.
SPEAKER_2: It's continued, and we plan things that go beyond our current limitations because we need to go overcome them.
SPEAKER_1: Well, all right.
SPEAKER_1: But I've read papers that said you can't make the circuits any smaller because you run into quantum effects of adjacent...
SPEAKER_2: That's not true.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if you look at nanotechnology, for example, there's an analysis if you created the ultimate computer, and it describes exactly how that would work in a one liter size, it would be billions of times greater than today's computers.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, it would be greater than all the computation of all humans put together.
SPEAKER_2: So we can go way beyond where we are.
SPEAKER_2: It will reach a limit.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you're right, there is a limit.
SPEAKER_2: But the limit is far beyond where we are today.
SPEAKER_2: And we could actually create a small computer that would be greater than all human beings together.
SPEAKER_2: And we can prove that as a reality.
SPEAKER_1: So I hate to insult you by bringing this up, but just to take us out, we have to solicit your comment on whether we're all living in a simulation.
SPEAKER_1: Sorry to take you there, but you're dancing in the pond where people talk about this.
SPEAKER_1: So take us out with what you think is going on with us.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if you look at how physics works, it works by formula.
SPEAKER_2: And the world is kind of a computer.
SPEAKER_2: And so anything that happens in it is kind of a simulation of reality.
SPEAKER_2: The idea of us working in the simulation is some high school students in some other world create something...
SPEAKER_1: Basement aliens.
SPEAKER_1: Basement juvenile aliens programming us, yes.
SPEAKER_2: And they create something that simulates our world and we're living in that world.
SPEAKER_2: But it's still reality, whether that happens or not.
SPEAKER_2: And you'd want to actually encourage those high school students not to shut down the simulation.
SPEAKER_2: So the way to do that is to be interesting.
SPEAKER_2: And I think having a singularity would be very interesting.
SPEAKER_2: So they'd want to watch that.
SPEAKER_1: Good answer.
SPEAKER_1: So we want to keep our simulator overlords entertained.
SPEAKER_1: Ray, I think that's all the time we have.
SPEAKER_1: First, a delight to chat with you again.
SPEAKER_1: Good to see you're still at it.
SPEAKER_1: And you've got this new book coming out in 2023.
SPEAKER_1: I'll look forward to that.
SPEAKER_1: The final print version of it.
SPEAKER_1: I feel privileged to have seen an early manuscript of it.
SPEAKER_1: I will brag to others that I've seen an early manuscript of it.
SPEAKER_1: And it's the Singularity is Nearer, which is clearly the case based on all the evidence you bring to bear on that.
SPEAKER_1: So, thank you, Ray.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: You have been watching and possibly listening to StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_1: Keep looking up.