Instant Genius - Superhumans and the end of ageing: Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil's vision of 2050

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Ray Kurzweil has made many accurate predictions about AI in the past. Having worked in the area of AI research for 61 years, he is one of the longest standing experts in the field. Now, he’s back with a new book titled The Singularity Is Nearer, breaking down his expectations for our future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes, and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. In 2005, inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil published the book The Singularity is Near. In that book, he made some predictions about AI, predictions that have so far been highly accurate, forming a lot of the theories that we know today. Now he's back, publishing a follow-up called The Future is Nearer.

He sat down with us to talk about his new book, highlighting how AI could revolutionise how we age, communicate, and even his belief that in 2045 we will reach the singularity, a moment where AI exceeds human intelligence and allows to become superhumans by utilising this technology. So in 2005, you published The Singularity as Near a somewhat legendary very insight into the way humans and technology would interact in the future. Now, you followed up with your new book, The Singularity is Nearer.

I want to dive into all of this a bit deeper, but I think an obvious place to start here is what is the singularity? We'll reach AGI artificial general intelligence, according to my book by 2029. That's now a conservative view. Elon Musk says it will be two years, other people saying three or four years. When I first said that in around 1999, with the age of spiritual machines, people found that quite alarming. Stanford organized a conference about my prediction to see if other AI experts would agree to it.

About a thousand people actually came together, and their view is, yes, that would happen, but not within 30 years. The estimate was about 100 years. and 30 years was just considered wildly optimistic. I've stayed with 2029, but it's actually now a conservative view. And it basically means that AI would be able to do anything that people can do, but not any one person. One person might be good at playing Go, but not good at playing chess and so on.

This would do everything that anybody can do, and generally better than what people can do. I mean, right now computers can play Go better than any humans, and it'll do everything that people can do at a significantly better rate, including creative things, being able to create art, for example. So computers can create art. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not good. I wouldn't say we've reached AGI levels yet, but we're not at 2029,

but it's getting there. The speed is really quite remarkable. If you look at AI today versus one year ago, it's really extraordinary the amount of gain we've gotten. So one of the key things that I talk about is exponential growth. And I have this one graph that we can talk about that shows the most powerful computer of each year. And it really forms a straight line on an exponential graph.

So we've gone from 0.000,000,0007 calculations per second per dollar now to half a trillion calculations per second per dollar. That's a 75-quantrillion-fold increase over that period of time. But what's really interesting is it's a straight line. And you might think that, well, maybe someone's in charge of it. Say, okay, well, we've done this much so far. This year we have to get to this point. But no one is in charge of it.

In fact, no one even knew this was happening for the first 45 years. And it just, no matter what we're increasing, whether it's relay speeds or discrete transistor speeds or integrated circuit speeds, it always makes the same incremental gain each year. It's really pretty remarkable. And I think it speaks to a fundamental rule of how technology expands. If you look at technology, particularly if it has to do with information, it grows in this exponential manner. You mentioned there about the day of 2029, which is very rapidly approaching. Once we pass that, I'm, you know, head further to the future.

Do you see this growth to just continue to rise exponentially, just at a very rapid rate? One of my key points in the book, this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines. These intelligent machines are not coming from Mars to invaders. They're coming from humans, and they're learning from humans, and we're going to put it inside ourselves and make ourselves more intelligent using AI. So it's not us versus AI. AI is expanding us. We can see it already with our phones. I mean, I will not go out of my house without a phone. In fact, just recently my phone stopped working for a part of a day. And that was extremely stressful to actually go through a day without my phone. It's like not having part of my brain

with me. Now, phones are a little bit difficult to get information in and out. I think we'll be able to put it inside us. So we'll get these ideas just the way we get ideas today, which is almost instantly, and that's going to happen in the 2030s. So when you interact with a human, you'll be interacting with someone that combines their natural intelligence with artificial intelligence,

and they're organized really the same way. There are some differences in the way AI implements intelligence, but it really amounts to the same thing. Right now, AI will do things very, very quickly. It'll do it actually in trillions of a second. Our brain actually operates in hundreds of a second. It's much, much slower. But it all operates at the same time.

So it's not like one thing works and then another thing works. Everything works at the same time. But it basically amounts to the same kind of processing. And we're already more intelligent than we were, say, 10 years ago, because of our combination, combining our intelligence with artificial intelligence. So, by the time we get to 2045, we'll have expanded our intelligence a billion-fold, and that will be of the singularity, because that's so hard to imagine that we borrow this term from physics. Singularity in physics is where you have something that's so powerful that no information can get out of it.

That's the singularity in physics. Singularity here is that we're, We expand our intelligence so much, we can't even imagine what will happen. So we're basically borrowing that term from physics to describe the singularity. And we're talking about the singularity as, I guess, an endpoint. You know, your first book was talking about it being near. You're talking about it being near again. What happens once we pass that point? Do we continue to expand, or is it so hard to comprehend that we can't even think past that level?

I mean, the reason we call it a singularity is very hard to imagine. I did write a novel. I tried to express that. Danielle, where this girl is extremely intelligent, and it talks about her, but that's really just a fanciful look at what the singularity will be. And it will be fanciful, because we're going to be able to do things we can't even imagine today. We're seeing fantastic gains in every field. Google, for example, just did something which can solve mathematical problems at the level of somebody working in college. I mean, every week there's some new advance. So even though we're not at AGI, which is, I'm saying 2029,

we've got lots of things that are kind of similar to that. Just LLMs. I mean, you can ask a question on anything, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, biology, any field at all, and it'll give you a very intelligent answer. And if you don't like that, you can ask you to give you another answer. It'll give you an answer, and you can get like 10,000 answers,

all of which are intelligent about that one field. What human can do that today? So it's already far exceeds humans, at least in interacting with language. And if you compare today's language to that even a year ago, they're extremely more intelligent just in one year. So that's not everything that humans can do, but we're getting very close to what humans can do.

But it's going to amplify our own intelligence. It's not just something we're competing with. And people should use it. A lot of colleges say you can't use LLMs. I mean, you should be able to use intelligent machines to help you. That's why we create these machines. And you've been studying this area for much of your career. Is there anything that has surprised you with whether or not it's the speed of development

or certain things that have come about much faster than you were expecting them to? Well, I've actually been involved in AI for 61 years. I actually met Minsky. I met the creator of the first neural net 61 years ago. I've been saying this now for a long period. Nobody's actually come up and said, well, I've been in it for 62 years, so I think 61 is a record.

The amount of computation basically enables you to do these feats. That also requires software, but we're also making exponential gains in software. But this one chart just shows you exponential gains. It's really quite remarkable how it's very close to a straight line over all these years. And I mean, people saying Moore's Law is over. Moore's Law actually only refers to a very small fraction of this. Of the 80 points on here, only 10 of them have to do with Intel.

So it's a basic rule of information-based technologies. It grows exponentially. and that's why we have large language models today and didn't have it even three years ago and it's going to continue to expand. But this is something we're creating. No other species can create technology. You need a brain.

Other people have brains like us, elephants. They have a brain that's actually larger than us. Their intelligence is probably comparable to us, but they don't have a thumb. So if they imagine something, they can't actually create it. Now, monkeys have something that looks like a thumb, but it's actually not constructed very well. It's on the way to a thumb, but it's not really, it's actually down one inch. You can only grab things very gingerly.

It can't really create technology. It can kind of take a stick and maybe create something that can put holes in the ground or something, but it's not able to create technology that we can use that technology to create the next technology. And our technology grows exponentially because We use technology to create the next stage. We use today's computers to create tomorrow's computers. And that's why it's grown in this exponential manner. But we always use these technologies to enhance ourselves. If you try to imagine just today's technology compared to even 10 years ago,

it's a fantastic gain that we've gained from being able to use this technology. And that's going to continue to go. So it's not just us versus AI. There's something I want to touch on with that, actually, is there is a level of criticism about the idea that the singularity or any kind of version of this could be overly optimistic or, I guess, technologically deterministic. Do you think that's a fair comparison or do you think it is quite a logical look at the future? I mean, all the different types of tools we've created, for example, mathematical tools are now being implemented in AI. so it can use the same things that we've used. It's also showing that it can be creative.

Now, not every artistic attempt by AI is successful, but that's also true of humans. And it does it very quickly. I mean, I just used one of the art-creating programs I put in Ray Kurzweil learns from Alice in Wonderland. And it actually created five things that were actually quite marvelous. that actually showed that in art. And if anybody had come up with it, we would praise them.

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expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology, and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

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would be able to help us extend our lives and should we be able to if we can? I mean, one of the key things that I talk about is that we're going to solve aging in the next five to ten years. Right now as you get older, the probability if you're dying the next year goes up. By the time you get into your 90s or even hundreds, there's a pretty high probability that you'll die the next year. We're going to overcome that. And we're also going to see fantastic gains that are already happening in medicine. The Moderna vaccine, for example, they had several billion different possibilities as to what would contribute to the Moderna vaccine, and they listed them all. And generally, you would actually go through each one, one at a time,

which would take forever. They actually tried all of them in one weekend. and we're able to eliminate using AI, different whole categories, and actually went through all of them, several billion of them in one weekend and came up with the Medina vaccine. There's some new cancer vaccines that are being tested now. There's actually a major one in England with over 1,000 people that are being tested with something that AI came up with. We're going to see fantastic gains against things like cancer and Alzheimer's and other problems.

in medicine very, very quickly over the next few years. And by the time we get to somewhere between 20, 29, and 2035, we'll reach longevity escape velocity. Right now, if you go through a year, you use up a year of your longevity. But right now, scientific research is coming up with new ideas. And so you're actually getting back some of that time. Right now, you're getting back about four months. So you lose a year of your longevity, but you get back. four months from scientific progress, so you're actually only losing eight months. But by the time we get to the mid-2030s, you'll actually get back a full year. So you lose a year just because you're getting older, but you get back a year from scientific progress. You basically stay the same.

When we get past that point, you'll actually get back more than a year and you'll go backwards in terms of time. But basically, your probability of your dying will not increase. each year past that point because of the advance in scientific progress. And that's because of the exponential gains in scientific progress. So that's really a new idea that I presented. It doesn't guarantee that you live forever. You can have a 20-year-old who has no problems, and you could compute his life expectancy would be many decades,

and he could die tomorrow. But the probability of you die will not increase year to year. And we'll actually have things that are being able to, for example, replace our organs. I'm actually on a company that's creating artificial lungs and kidneys, and there are other people creating other organs. Basically, if you go through an organ, you can get a new organ. Right now, if you need like a new kidney, it's very, very difficult. I think 100,000 people on the list, and we only serve a very small fraction of those. but we'll be able actually create an unlimited number of new organs of every type.

And we're basically going to be overcoming medical problems. So that's going to enable people to live much longer. So then people get concerned. Oh, if a lot of people don't die very quickly, we're going to run out of resources like energy. And that's a whole other issue here. We're making exponential gains on renewable energy, for example. the amount of sunlight that falls on the earth is 10,000 times more than we need

to meet all of our energy needs, and we're making exponential gains on turning that sunlight into electricity and also making exponential gains on storing energy. And according to this, within about 10 years, we'll have at least enough energy from renewable sources to meet all of our energy needs, and it'll keep going from there

to actually end up being very cheap. So we'll actually have enough resources to handle more people, not dying and so on. So these are some of the implications, not just of getting to the singularity, but on the way towards the singularity that my book indicates. And at the same time as we're, I guess, advancing aging and finding ways to combat this,

the average number of children per family is decreasing pretty much across the entire world in most major reasons. Do you follow, I guess, some people's concerns about a decreasing population, or is that just not what you see as a concern for the future? Well, that only makes it easier to provide enough resources to meet our needs, because actually population is typically not growing the way you just indicated. It will begin to grow again as people age longer, and we're already seeing more and more

people getting to 100 and past 100. We'll actually figure out why it is. is that we don't go beyond, let's say, 115 or something, there's nothing actually inherent in the design of a human that limits our life, but we have to figure all of that out. But we will have more people living and not dying, so that will continue to increase the population. But I don't see overpopulation as a problem, even though people will be dying less often. And you've been supportive of the future of singularity and have said about the idea of embracing it with quite a level of optimism. What advice would you give to younger generations entering what is such a, I guess, advanced level of development? Yeah, well, I mean, that's an old-fashioned sort of advice, which is to go with what you have a passion for.

I mean, people used to bring in certain economic factors. Well, maybe it's good if I go into coding because coding's needed. and they'll be able to make a living at that. Actually, we're replacing a lot of coding with AI already. But you're going to have all of this intelligence created by AI with you. It's going to become part of you. I mean, right now we have a certain size brain, and the reason that humans have a large brain compared to other animals

is it gave us some intelligence. And we also developed this thumb so that we could actually turn our intelligence into technology, and then we could use the latest technology, create the next technology. We're really the only species that does that. But now you're going to be able to have more intelligence. I mean, AI is basically just more intelligence.

So instead of the intelligence that you're born with, you can augment it with this additional intelligence. So you're going to be able to do lots of different things and try to find something that will benefit humanity and the kinds of things that we value, whether it's art or love or beautiful expressions in poetry or anything else that turns you on, you should explore that now so that you can use that as we get more intelligence with the singularity. So we're now in 2024.

Having seen the rate of technology expansion, what are your predictions for, I guess, the next 20 years or so? what is it that you see unfolding? Well, we already have certain ways of interacting with AI. I think that's going to expand. I think virtual reality will become much more realistic than it is today. And ultimately, you'll be able to go into AI. And an AI, unlike today,

you're not going to have an avatar that looks very different from you. You can have something that's very realistic that looks exactly like you or looks exactly like some other people. so you'll have more than one body, and you can experience different types of things, and you'll be more intelligent, and you'll be able to do this very readily. We can't quite do that today,

and we're going to become more intelligent, so the kinds of problems we have, and the important point is to actually solve problems that haven't been solved yet, and we can use AI to do that. So with AI, with the additional intelligence we'll have, We'll be able to solve problems, whether it's overcoming some disease or expressing something that's quite startling.

We'll be able to do that quite readily. And everybody will be able to do that. So don't worry too much about what your limitations are today. You'll be able to overcome them with the additional AI that will be harnessing in the future. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Instant Genius podcast. That was Ray Kurzweil. talking about AI and the singularity. The Insentgenious Podcast is brought to you

by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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