Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Man Who Predicted AGI Decades Ago w/ Ray Kurzweil | EP #125

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Blog Learn more about Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/  _____________ In this episode, Ray and Peter discuss 2025 predictions, Job loss in the coming years, and Ray’s thoughts on nanotech taking over the world.    Recorded on Oct 18th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 12:44 | AGI Predictions Prove Conservative 27:06 | The Future of Jobs with Robots 57:30 | The Future of Humanity: AI Evolution Ray Kurzweil is a world-class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievement in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates. He has written five best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How To Create A Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His new book, The Singularity Is Nearer was released on June 25th and debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google. Read The Singularity is Nearer: https://a.co/d/gbvshG2  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Reverse the age of your skin with OneSkin; 30% off new subscription orders with code PETER at oneskin.co/PETER Get real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health with https://join.levelshealth.com/peter/  _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

2029 for AGI is conservative. People present problems that AI will present and they assume that all we have is the things that we can do today to do to modify it without realizing that that's also going to expand. Do you see significant job loss in 2025, 26, 27. 80% of people worked in food production 200 years ago. Today, that's 2%. So we've lost all those jobs, and yet we have actually more people working. What are we likely to see the next one to three years?

I mean, what's really exciting to me. one to three years. I mean, what's really exciting to me. Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. This is a special episode for me personally. I have my mentor, my business partner, one of the greatest thinkers in AI joining me, Ray Kurzweil.

He's a computer scientist, an inventor, and a futurist. He's best known for his predictions in artificial intelligence being the author of The Singularity is Near and The Singularity is Nearer. His predictions have had an 86 accuracy rate. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what his predictions are for 2025, 2026. We'll talk about longevity escape velocity. We'll talk about jobs and job loss. We'll talk about digital super intelligence. We'll talk about a lot of the things that if you're interested in AI, you're going to want to hear his thoughts and his answers.

Last year, I had Ray on stage with me in Abundance 360. He's one of the co-founders of Abundance 360. I had him there along with Jeffrey Hinton, who just got the Nobel Prize, and Elon Musk, who said, you know, Ray's one of the greatest thinkers, maybe a little bit conservative was what Elon said about Ray. You know, the Abundance 360 membership and summit is for me the program where I bring the greatest thinkers in the world together to talk about what happened in the last year and where things are going in the next two to three years. So you can sort of predict where the future is going.

You know, it's a program that's not for everybody. The folks, 500 members in the Abundance 360 program are running 10 million to 10 billion dollar companies. I've reserved five seats for listeners of my moonshots podcast this year. If that's you, if you're interested, please click on the link below or go to abundance360.com to apply. It's one of the most extraordinary programs and I'm so excited. I've committed to running abundance360 for 25 years. We're at year 13 and it's getting harder and harder to see where things are going next. All right, enough about that.

Let's jump into this podcast and if you love conversations like this, like we're about to have with Ray, please subscribe. All right, now the most amazing thinker on the field of AI, Ray Kurzweil. By the way, if you're enjoying these episodes, each week I write two blogs to update you on the most important tech trends. I personally write these emails and cover topics like AI, Bitcoin, humanoid robotics, and much more. And then I share my personal thoughts on them.

It's called Data-Driven Optimism, and you can find a link to the blog below. Hey, Ray. Good to see you, my friend. My pleasure. Always good to see you my friend. My pleasure, always good to see you. Yeah, buddy. You know, I count you as my mentor, co-founder, you know, and just partner in helping create a vision for humanity of an exponential and a positive future. Well, how long has it been since we've known each other?

Yeah, I'm trying to remember that. I think Martine Rothblatt introduced us. Is that right? It's gotta be shortly after the Ansari X Prize was won. So I'm thinking it's about 20 years now. Okay. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's amazing. We amazing. Yeah, it's amazing.

We still look the same, so. And we still have the same mindset, which is the most important. Yeah, except it's actually coming true, so. It is. There's a few interesting facts people should know. You and I co-founded Singularity University and Abundance 360. I got you your first job. I co-founded Singularity University and Abundance 360. I got you your first job.

I don't think people know that, which is kind of funny. At Google, you mean? Yeah. I mean, you had written this book, How to Make a Mind. And then you invited me to help you to join your board. And we introduced that to Larry Page. Yeah, so I joined your board in that company and you were saying, let's raise,

I think we were trying to raise 50 million or something like that. And you had not met Larry at that point. And I said, listen, Larry's become a friend on my board at XPRIZE. I'm happily introduce you. And so I reached out to Larry and I said, yeah, I'd love to rate it to meet Ray and

We I remember the meeting I remember the conference room. So you and I walk in there and you you launch into Presenting the company. What was the company called back then? Do you remember patterns? Yeah patterns Inc. That's right. Yeah And you wrote and and why don't you recount what happened when you started presenting Patterns to Larry? Well, I thought it might be useful if he had made a venture investment in it. And he said, I don't want to make a venture investment. That's ridiculous. I said, okay, well, I'll let everybody you approach is going to be interested. He said, I'll just buy the company.

I remember him saying, we have so much compute and so much data here, why would you want to do Patterns Inc. outside of the company? Right, and I said, okay, but we've just started two weeks ago, we haven't really done anything. And he said, well, is it worth anything? I said, well, yeah, I wouldn't ask you to invest if it wasn't worth anything. He said, okay, so I'll buy it. Yeah. And then you said, well, how would you value it? And then I remember him saying, we can value anything.

Right, that's right. Yeah, it was fun. And that's how you got your first job. That's right. So what's your title? Yeah, you are. What's your title at Google these days? Principal Research AI Visionary.

Okay. That's good. I like that. So let's jump in. I'm thrilled to be having this conversation and this podcast could last a good 48 hours straight on all the subjects we have to chat about, but we'll keep it rather succinct and brief. And I want to jump in with a question I've actually had for a bit. You've talked about the singularity being in the year 2045, and you've spoken about

reaching human level AI by 2029 and I'm trying to understand if we've got human level AI by 2029 by 2030 and 31 and 35 doesn't mean though typical of a human it means typical of all humans yes to any human that can do anything it'll be comparable to that and better than that so why aren't we reaching the singularity? Go it can play go better than any human and Etc for every single thing that humans can do I Buy that but my question is why is the singularity? 44 years out if we're doubling and we've got ten doublings

I mean in AI the power of AI is doubling not once every two years But in some instances, it's still like 20 years away 2045 is Almost 21 years from so why is it so far out? It seems like if I don't think it's a you don't think we're able to predict anything by 2035. And the speed is going to be just extraordinary by then. Well, the singularity is a metaphor. And it's something that we can't really say about. Like if information goes into a physics singularity

We can't actually access it. It's stuck in there and things can happen in there, but we can't actually tell what's going on So we're actually borrowing this metaphor from physics to talk about this historical singularity and so 2030s Will have things that go beyond what humans can do and it will seem quite remarkable. But we have humans today, so having more humans, it amplifies us, but it's not the same thing as singularity.

The singularity is when we can ourselves ourselves we're going to merge with the a i so that's already a difference than other people people think a eyes over here we're over here there's a difference we're actually going to be merged the two together uh... and we're going to become uh... we're going to be able to do everything that AI can do ourselves. Right now if you use a language model, it doesn't seem like it's ourselves.

It seems like it's somebody else. And we're going to do that with things like the future version of Neuralink right now which allows you to actually access your own brain and So neural ink for example, it's implanted in two paralyzed patients. They can control a computer with their brain They can do it actually as good as people can access their own computer But next to the thing your own computer isn't like accessing your own mind. Like if you want, if I want to tell you something and you look it up in your computer, it takes you five seconds, ten

seconds, it doesn't just like pop up instantly. Yeah. So we're gonna be able to do that in the 2030s. We're going to have nanorobots that are much more expansive than neural link or synchron today. And by 2045, we're going to expand our own intelligence a million fold. That's so remarkable that we can't really say what it will be like. And that's why we're using this metaphor. Do you believe we're going to have an intelligence explosion? There's been a lot of conversation about recursive AI, self-programming and self-improving that will lead to a hard takeoff with an extraordinary acceleration of computational capacity.

No. But it's going to be exponential. And exponential seems very fast, but their positions, once it gets established, boom, it interacts in a fraction of a second and we get the singularity. Minus we're gonna go exponentially towards that. But exponentially gets to be faster and faster. So it seems similar but it's actually on the slow school of the singularity. We're gonna get there exponentially. One of the single greatest predictors of how long you'll live

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you can get two extra months on your annual levels membership by going to levels.link backslash Peter. I hope you do. It's an extraordinary experience to know what's truly going on inside your body. Let's go back to our episode You know is interesting last year. I had Yourself on stage with me at the abundance summit, which was awesome Jeffrey Hinton was with us Elon Musk was with us and I loved that, you know, Elon said yes Ray is prescient and he's conservative. So I think it's the first time you're being called conservative about your a gi

estimates well Ga i A gi is going to be do you still believe it's 2029? Yes, and he's actually saying next year. Yeah. So I'm conservative compared to him. I think saying by the end of this decade is conservative. It could happen faster. I see no reason to increase my estimate. I said 2029 in 1999.

Yeah, 30 years. And people like Jeffrey Hinton was there Stanford actually organized a conference several hundred people came and their consensus was 80% thought it would be a hundred years including Jeffrey Hinton and he's saying that he was wrong that's actually more like 30 years, like what Kurzweil was saying in 1999. But no one was saying 30 years at that time. Yeah. Now, it's your... And for those who don't know, Ray's predictive accuracy has been outstanding. If you go and you Google, there are many cases in which all of your

books are documented about when you predict something is going to happen and within you know giving a leniency of like 12 to 24 months I think your accuracy rate is at 86%. So not too bad, not too bad at all. You know the other thing that happened at that summit last year at the Abundance Summit, and I hope we'll have Elon and you back next year, is that- I mean, that happened a year ago. That seems like an ancient history. Yeah, it is ancient history. But one of the things that was-

So much has happened in the last year. It's just remarkable. And it's going to keep happening faster and faster each year so it's 2029 for agi is Conservative Um and on on the predictive, you know 12 to 24 months accurate so, uh One of the comments made by both elon and jefferyinton, and congrats to him for the Nobel Prize,

was that 80% chance AI is going to turn out great for humanity, 20% chance we're screwed. I'm curious, you know, whether what your comments are about. Say that again. So Elon and Jeffrey Hinton said that they're looking forward On how AI will impact humanity It's 80% probability that humanity is going to survive and thrive and AI is going to support us and there's a 20% chance that AI is going to be

You know disruptive to humanity and so I'm curious, you know if you feel that's correct and What do we do to minimize the downside? Yeah, well I deal with that a lot in my book and Your and for those need to know Ray's most recent book is the singularity is nearer Ray's most recent book is The Singularity is Nearer. The super imaginative title as a follow-on to The Singularity is Nearer, which really began our relationship. I read that book when I was when I was trekking through, through, where was I, I was in Chile, trekking in the mountains there. I hadn't met you at that point. You hadn't met me, no.

And I had this huge backpack this huge Hardcover book was a significant amount of the weight I was carrying and when I finished reading this book I was like, okay I know a lot of the stuff having spent, you know a decade at MIT with folks like Eric Drexler and reading your previous books But I said there's no place on the planet that anyone can go To get an overview of all of these topics to understand what they mean and I wrote down at the end of the book, you know, International Singularity University,

which became Singularity University, which I then approached you and instantly we're having lunch I think. Yeah And that actually, yeah, go ahead. Well, I make decisions very quickly. Yeah. Instantly you said, yeah, let's do it. Persist in my life for decades. Um, I make instantly. So I said, yes.

Yes, you did. And we launched it at Ted, uh, and at Ames and Larryry page was there he came on stage and said yes this should should exist And so singularity is then really well and then you and I started The abundance 360 membership, which is singularity's highest level membership and the abundance summit Um, but going back to the 80 20 probability. What do you think? Do you give us 20% chance of having problems? Well, we're going to have problems.

I mean, we have benefits and problems already. Fire warms us, cooks our food, also burns us, and does both of those things. We can be mindful that we know that fire can burn us so we have to avoid putting ourselves near fire. We already see things, I mean I can create you and I can have you saying things that you would never say. It looks real real that exists today That's affecting the election

Which is a few weeks away But I don't think we would want to get rid of AI Its benefits are already quite enormous And it's gonna get better Literally, we talked about something a year ago, it seems like ancient history. So we're not going to want to get rid of it. For sure. And we're going to actually want to learn its problems.

People present problems that AI will present and they assume that all we have is the things that we can do today to modify it without realizing that that's also going to expand and we're going to be able to actually deal with problems that we can't deal with today. I mean, would... This is really an increase in our intelligence and Would we want to not be intelligent have human beings be the intelligence of a mouse Maybe that would be good. We wouldn't be able to develop its atomic weapons that way So yes intelligence has brought us problems that we didn't have before But I Mean I've given you a few charts.

Your personal income. Yeah, let's go ahead and put on the charts one second for those on YouTube, which is most of our audience. Let's take a look at these charts. I mean, in constant dollars, the amount of money per person, that a person in the United States makes is ten times what it was a hundred years ago In constant dollars, so we see an ex literally an exponential curve between 1774

Up through 2022 and this is just a meteoric rise and the important thing is that these are in constant year dollars. They're not inflated dollars. And all this is driven by the exponential increase in computation. Actually, that's my most important chart. And this is plotted on a log scale which means a straight line. Each level is ten times the level below it. So this started with a Zuse computer. He was a German in 1939 and was shown to Hitler. He was not actually the supporter of Hitler but it got shown to him. Hitler had no interest in computation. The third computer on this chart is Turing's computer, which was shown to

the leader of the Allied forces. We use it to decode the Nazi messages. Anyway, this is straight line, it means exponential growth. Yeah. It started at 0.00007 calculations per second per constant dollar. In 2024, the Nvidia chip,

the B200 is half a trillion calculations per second per constant dollar. So for the same price, we can now get 75 quadrillion fold increase in the amount of computation. And that's what's driven it. That's why we didn't have large language models in 1931 or even three years ago. We began to have them two years ago. If you compare the things two years ago to today, it's remarkable. So this constant increase in the amount of computation for the same money has driven this AI revolution that started two years ago. You've deemed this the law of accelerating returns.

Moore's law is a segment of it, which involves integrated ships. Right, Moore's law has to do with integrated circuits. But this started with relays, went to tubes, discrete transistors, integrated circuits, and now we've gone beyond integrated circuits. And you don't see any variation in this tube is you don't expect this line you don't expect this to slow down or stop no, in fact I

Found this chart 45 years ago and Meltzer would continue and it has continued exactly As I found it 45 years ago. So I have half of this chart, and it's continued, onto trillions of calculations per second per constant dollar. So it's pretty amazing. And it's going to continue. And we've made the same progress with software as we have with hardware.

So the actual value is the amount of computations we get From software and from order both So it's actually even more Expansive than what you see here. Yeah, Elon was saying on on our stage last year that He's seeing a hundred X per year if you include computation and algorithmic efficiencies? Well, that's about what we've done with the kinds of computations we've done with the large language models. And if we compare what we have today to two years

ago, it's something like that. So it's pretty extraordinary. Amazing. I believe that large language models should be called large event models because large language models, yes they're actually pretty fantastic with language but they're not just applied to language, applied to pharmaceuticals, they're applied to all kinds of things other than language. So it really should be large event models. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's

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that have been on a lot of people's minds. And I wanna put them to bed because it causes fear and excitement. The first is concerns of job loss. And I think you and I have both been consistent on our positions here. But do you see significant job loss in 2025, 26, 27, as a result of humanoid robots, AI-driven humanoid robots coming online and Large-language models entering this field

Well, I mean we have to consider what jobs Well good there are what value we get out of jobs and If it's actually to to explore new areas, find out new things that we didn't know before, that's very exciting. That's what I've tried to do in my life. And I can actually do that more

if I actually have more intelligence. I mean, I have a certain amount of intelligence, but it's limited. I'll have a lot more if I can actually merge with the intelligence that we're creating. But people are very eager to retire because they don't really don't like their jobs. The jobs is we got a bunch of tables that have been used. We have to clean it up. That's not the kind of jobs

that people want to do anymore. Or the bathroom. Yeah, these people get jobs because it's what they need to put food on the table for their kids or get insurance. It's not what they dreamed of doing as a kid. And that kind of jobs we're going to be able to do for ourselves. Now this is going to lead to some kind of dislocation. For example, large language models can code already.

They're not quite at the same level as a professional coder, but they're going to get there pretty soon. professional coder but you're gonna get there pretty soon so we're gonna have to relearn how to apply our new intelligence to create new kinds of capabilities that'll be very good that's what we've done anyway 80% of people worked in food production 200 years ago. Farmers, yes. So if you lost all those jobs and yet we have actually more people working, people say well don't worry about losing your job you'll become a social media influencer and no one will know what you're talking about So we're gonna have new types of jobs things that we can't even imagine today So this going to be Problems with figuring this out and it's gonna go very very quickly, but ultimately we'll be

happier for it I think we will give people money so they can manage while they're reconsidering what kind of work they think you'd be I will come on you be I will come online Universal Basic Income yes I think in the 2030s Would that come you know? I've heard Jeff Bezos talk about we're gonna tax the robots and the AI is that take the jobs and Then we'll use the income from that as the tax base to then provide UBI different ideas. I'm not sure we'll follow

Anybody's ideas, but we'll figure that out. I'm not sure we'll follow anybody's ideas, but we'll figure that out. I mean, we'll have to do that. We won't have people won't have money to buy products. You know, one of the another question along these lines is I think humans inherently need some level of challenge and purpose in life to feel happy. And I'm curious, you know, as we get super-intelligence, you know, as we head towards digital super-intelligence or artificial super-intelligence, whatever name you like. The digital super-intelligence is going to be within us. It's not like we're here and then there are AIs over there. So had that conversation on the abundant stage last year too, and it's interesting right because that Effectively means we are going to speciate. They're going to be those

who choose to merge with ai and become Enabled empowered and those who choose not to Enabled empowered and those who choose not to and then you've got the scenario with her The movie her in which the a eyes get bored with us and just take off and go away So will we link with AI I? Guess is one of the questions Well, we will I mean 15 years ago I presented something like this

And said are you gonna want to carry this around every day? You don't want to have it with you? And people said, no, maybe once a day I'll look at it. Recently I asked everybody who has a cell phone. Literally everybody had their cell phone. Yeah, I'm sure. So it's not like there's certain persons that carry their cell phone and certain people that don't Like carrying a cell phone. It's a problem though if you want to get information from it. It takes a few seconds

Can take like 10 15 20 seconds. It's actually too long You better if it just pops up in your mind And it's like you If you try to remember something, you remember it instantly. That's how we want this new intelligence to be. We don't want to have a separate thing. I mean, I have to carry this around all the time. What a pain in the neck, huh?

Or pain in the butt. Yeah, it is. But we do it. So you think purpose is going to be, we're going to up level our purpose because we're able to now take on new huge aspirational goals because we're more intelligent and capable. Yes, absolutely. As do I.

Would we want to stay the level of a mouse? I mean a lot of the problems we have are because of our intelligence. Like we created atomic weapons. Mice didn't do that, we did that. And that's because of our added intelligence. So we've actually created problems and people think of new problems created by the additional intelligence we'll have. But, and I guess I'm advocating that we'll become more intelligent. I think that's beneficial,

and we'll be able to do things that are aspirational. You know, today when I'm on stages and I speak about a future of connecting with the cloud, of brain computer interface, of connecting our neocortex with the cloud, and I ask people how many of you would like to do this? And you know, there's always a good 20% in the audience, but it's not a hundred percent Because I think they feared the unknown I think it's very similar to when you ask the question 20 years ago How many of you want to carry this around with you everywhere all the time?

You know Neuralink, you know, we humans connect at like 40 bits per second as we're communication communicated. I think is there is the appropriate Rate speed there But well our thoughts actually occurred to us much more quickly than that. They do internally sure yeah And that's where we're going for we actually be able to create internal speeds like we have with our own brain. And that's what we'll have in the 2030s. We don't have that today. What we have today is very good

for people that can't communicate. If you can't communicate and suddenly you can actually access a computer at the speed that people access computers today, that's very beneficial. But if you're talking about everybody, it's got to be even faster. But that will happen by the 2030s. So I think one of the things that you pin both longevity, escape velocity and brain computer interface on is the

nanotechnology world. And of course Feynman, Richard Feynman spoke about nanotechnology in his very famous 1959 lecture, there's plenty room at the bottom, and then a mutual friend of ours, Eric Drexler, in 1986 wrote the Engines of Creation and of course you've written extensively about nanotechnology. Can you describe what nanotechnology is and I am super curious, where are we today in nanotech? Are you know of any companies that are making diligent progress in that area? I do, I mean some of them are confidential. We don't actually need that type of capability to do what I'm saying will happen in the 2030s. It's basically the ability to communicate from our neocortex outside of our body and that

will go to a cloud and that does not require Drexlerian nanotechnology. Eric spoke about assemblers, right, which are nanomachines that can rearrange individual anything, you know and We've had the description of computers that are at that level So literally computer this size would have the intelligence of all human beings You know like 10 all human beings, you know, like 10 billion human beings together. But we don't need that for the 2030s.

But we will be able to do what I'm saying, which is basically just have our neocortex communicate to the cloud. And it doesn't have to be the entire neocortex. Neocortex is organized like a funnel. And the ones, as you go up the funnel, concepts become more complex. And you really only need to interact with the last part of the neocortex.

That we can do in the 2030s. And so if you're thinking about something, thoughts will come to you just like it comes to you from your own brain and you won't actually be able to tell the difference between things coming from your own brain and things coming from the neocortex. It'll be the same. So if I want to understand Schrodinger's equation and how it applies to certain molecules on the surface of a cell, I will just understand it without Knowing how yes and computers can do that today And you'll be able to do that as well So I'm going back I'm going back to MIT and becoming a physics physics major it's gonna be so much easier

Physics and every other field But I mean you can do the large language model today. You can look up anything in physics or humanities or psychology, psychiatry, so on. And you'll be able to get a very decent description of it. But you have to read it. It takes a few minutes as opposed to just instantly knowing it. I mean, that's really the difference, knowing it instantly like it was in your own brain.

Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Yeah, we just saw two Nobel prizes. Obviously, the prize that Jeffrey Hinton received and then the prize that Demis and John Jemper received

both at DeepMind related to AI and directly in AI, you know, an alpha fold. This is very much for AI. Yes, it's a great year. And here's the question. It seems to me like I would imagine in the next two to 10 years and then beyond, almost every Nobel Prize in chemistry, math and physics will be enabled by or directly discovered by AI. Do you agree with that? Yes, I mean right now 95% of the Nobel Prizes in medicine go to people with MDs. I think they should get rid of that requirement.

Because computer scientists, they may have studied anything, but they know computer science and they can develop AlphaFold, for example, which should stymie human beings. 50 years. Until we get AlphaFold. Yeah. I remember when I was in medical school the huge grand challenge was can you predict the folding of a protein? Yeah, it was the unknown supercomputer. Some people could do that but they didn't do it very accurately and we only did a few hundred thousand then one year we did, you know, 200 million Then one year we did 200 million proteins. In one year, and then alpha proteo,

we can actually design new proteins that bind to a given target protein. And we can actually create something, for example, that goes into a cell, determine whether or not it can divide cancerously. And if it divides cancerously, it will set a flag. If the flag is set, it would destroy that cell. So basically there would be a cure for cancer and we can actually do that with alpha-proteo. We have to actually design the protein so there's a few steps left but that's actually done a very large

fraction of curing cancer for example. Let's switch on that note to the subject of longevity, escape velocity, something that we're both passionate about. In fact I've got my longevity uh, my longevity cup here, which says on the backside, what would you do with an extra 30 years of healthy life? Um, which is a low wall number. Um, so, I mean, when you get the 30 years of extra life, it's not like nothing's going to happen during that 30 years.

That's the incredible part, right? It's like, I mean, every year we're going to be able to develop new things. For example, all of our organs, what do they do? They either put things into the bloodstream or they take things out. Except for the heart and brain, which is a different matter, but we can also deal with that. But like the lungs, put in oxygen, take out a carbon dioxide. And we're actually developing those. I'm going to a board meeting of the United Therapeutics next year and we're actually developing lungs, hearts, kidneys, and so on. It's only a few years away. So literally all of our organs will be redeveloped.

So they'll be much more reliable. Right now, people lose their lives because one of their organs doesn't function properly. So right now, you go through a year, and years up a year of your longevity. However, you're getting back approximately four months from scientific research. So you're only losing about eight months a year of your longevity. But by the early 2030s, around 2032, depending on how diligent you are, you live a year, you give

up a year of your longevity, but you'll get back a full year from scientific progress. Beyond that point, you'll actually get back more than a year, so you'll actually go backwards in terms of time. Now, that doesn't guarantee you'll live forever. You could have a healthy 20-year-old, you could compute his longevity as many many decades and he could die tomorrow probably from an accident we're also dealing with that with that yeah self-driving cars for example have almost no accidents we lose forty thousand dollars a year from human drivers generally self-driving cars will actually have no accidents.

But anyway. It's an amazing time. I just tweeted out this morning a quote from a paper by Dario Amodi, the CEO of Anthropic, who considers you one of the great visionaries, you're a hero of his, and he says, it is my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these biological discoveries, giving us the next 50 to 100 years of biological progress in the next five to 10 years.

And it's gonna keep getting faster and faster. It's not like we just go through one step and suddenly we're going from getting back four months a year to 12 months. It's gonna go faster and faster. And we're gonna actually deal with accidents and actually be able to back up our brain, back up our heart, and it's gonna be very hard

to imagine how you could die. And people don't really want to die. You ask people, well, do you want to live to 120? And people are negative about that because they think of people that they've met. Exactly. They haven't actually met anybody 120, but they've met 95, 100 year olds.

They don't want to be like that, but we won't be like that and people actually And people say well, I don't want to live past 95, but when they get to be 95 and if they sound mind and body And they said do you want to die tomorrow? The answer is no unless They're in they're in horrible pain. Yeah, and obviously we want to avoid that as well. Yeah, I agree. Now, you've been very, again, part of your predictions, been very specific in saying that we're

going to reach longevity escape velocity by the end of the year 2030. I've had this conversation with George Church and David Sinclair and they are placing it in the mid 2030s, that's still for anybody listening, you know, that's the next six to ten years. And so I think your advice is, is don't die from something stupid between now and then. Right? Right, right exactly And so what so dependent on our own body which is very Problematic we got all these different organs one of them doesn't function quite correctly and it's not your choice You could die

But if you I Mean, I really believe if you can hold on for five, maybe 10 years, we can replace all of these problems that enable us to die more quickly than we want. that scientists have been able to create the Drosophila's connectome. They were able to, using a scanning electron microscope, actually slice the brain of a Drosophila so thin and then use AI to map all the synaptic connections. It's the first full brain that was actually mapped

and I find that amazing. Yeah, we're not gonna use actual brain matter to expand our brain. We're gonna use the kind of, I mean, already the brains of I mean already The brains of Computers are much more intelligent I'm making good trillions of calculations per second. Our own brain goes about 200 calculations per second

so the We don't want to use our brain matter to expand our brain we don't want to use our brain matter to expand our brain. Yes, true. But understanding how the brain functions to avoid neurological... We'll make all kinds of things. I mean, literally every day, there's fantastic progress. I just think about a year ago. It seems like ancient history Let's go a year forward. I am curious Being the oracle of the singularity ray. That's my nickname for you What do you what do you have for us for the year 2025? What do you think is likely? Or maybe you broaden it from 25 26 27. What do we what are we likely to see the next? broaden it from 25, 26, 27, what are we likely to see the next one to three years? Well, I mean, just based on conversations I've had in the last few days, we can already

take an idea we have and transform it into a movie. Today the movies are not quite there, wouldn't convince you that it's done by a person. Although Google actually has a thing where you can actually take anything. Like I've fed in my entire book. I just fed an entire book and said, have a podcast between two people that talks about the summary of the book Yeah, and actually it's called what it's called

Notebook LM, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it's an amazing product It actually got the right summary because there's a lot of ideas in the book some of which are not that Important if you want to talk about the summary of the book it it actually picked the right things and had two people that sounded human interacting about a summary of the book, which was better actually than most summaries that people have created on their own. That's today. Now, suppose you say, well, okay, we got these two people, but I want to actually see them. I want them to actually be in some kind of situation and can't quite do that today, but that will happen within a year or two.

Yeah, I believe that. I just saw one of the avatar type companies has created your ability to create your avatar and then have it join a zoom meeting and represent you in form and voice. And so you can be attending, you know, a hundred or five hundred. You and I used to joke I'll have you know Ray 2 of 10 meet with Peter 3 of 10 in the meeting tomorrow afternoon And and being able to be in multiple places at once. That's pretty extraordinary Yeah That's gonna happen. I don't know if it's one year two years three years, but it's that's in that time frame Yeah, any other fun predictions or conversations you've had in the back halls of Google?

Well, all the things that we do, I mean, what's really exciting to me, when we created pharmaceuticals, we go to a person who's had some experience and they have some idea of what might be a pharmaceutical interaction. And they work for 10 years testing it on people. And maybe if they're lucky, they'll find some pharmaceuticals. Most of the pharmaceuticals on the market today were done that way. So when we were doing one was to find a COVID vaccine, they made a list of all the different mRNA sequences that might create COVID and there's several billion of them. So you would actually test all several billion on humans.

That's impossible to do. So they actually simulated that. And they simulated in two days, they tried all several billion in different ways. They could eliminate this patch and this patch. And they had found one thing that caused COVID and they came up with a vaccine. They actually created that vaccine in two days.

Now we actually then tested it on humans, it took 10 months. We will be able to eliminate that by testing it also, by using simulated biology and do that in a few days. And we'll be able to actually test every type of medication we want against cancer and so on very quickly. And it'll be millions of times faster than what we've done. Especially with alpha-proteo, right?

That's part of the process to actually come up with proteins that can do that. Human trials are slow, they're risky, they're expensive, they take a long time. We'll be able to do this much more quickly, literally millions of times faster over the next few years. So I think we're going to actually, and already there's things on the market that were done that way for cancer and so on. I've got people who have got to hit cancer and actually trying these new things. It's going to be really fantastic over the next few years. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the

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Yeah, I haven't been convinced that they're human yet. Maybe that's just an old, uh, habit of mine. Uh, I definitely say please and thank you. I talked to them and it's like, I feel like if they become conscious, I want them to know I was respectful from the beginning. Well, that's good. You're, you're more advanced than I am. I'll get there. All right.

Next next question here. Will humanity, this is from Anna Penn, pen art. Will humanity split into two and AI merged set of humans and then the original homo sapien species? What do you think are we going to speciate? No, I mean I asked 15 years ago whether people would carry the surround And I would say maybe 80 said they would not

But that 80 is carrying this around today. I mean, how many people don't carry their cell phone around? It's approximately zero. If you actually go out and you don't have it, you gotta go back and get it. Yes, that's true. So, the answer is, if you ask people today, some people will say no, but when we actually get there,

the advantages are gonna be so great that everybody's gonna have it. And it's gonna be a lot easier because you won't actually have to carry this around. It'll be inside your mind. Next question comes from Dustin Headed. He says, if you could upload your consciousness into a robot, and I think we will be able to, would you choose

to retain your human flaws or opt to be a perfect version of Ray? Well right now we have really just one body we can be. Virtual reality has given us a little bit of flexibility on that, but the type of bodies you can get with virtual reality Railway aren't quite there. They will be there. Ultimately, we will be able to create new types of bodies. We won't be limited to one. That's a great point, right?

You can have different bodies for different occasions. And you can have flaws or not have flaws and so on. And what we'll accept for a body won't necessarily be even a human body you'll be able you'll be able to play games and so on that way you have a different type of body won't have be limited to one body per person I love that Torsten HQ, what are your recommendations for a teenager today for being ready for the future, right? University, trade, travel, hard skills, soft skills. That's a question I'm often asked as well and I'm super curious. I have two

13 year old boys. I don't think school's preparing them for the future. What's your recommendation? Right, well it's not just for teenagers, I mean it's it's also for young kids and also for old kids like you and me. And you want to learn the passions that come from different types of activities and what it can then benefit and then you can actually create new types of institutions with new types of intelligence that we don't have everything that we put effort into. You want to be courageous. You want to follow your dreams despite the skeptics.

You want to see an exponential future. Yeah, I answer that. I want my kids to find their passion and become passion-driven or purpose-driven in that regard. Ash Stewart asks, will AI or ASI lead to more centralization or decentralization? And that's a fascinating question On a government side on an organizational side. How do you think about that? Well, what do you mean by centralization I think what they mean is would a government Be Enabling enabled with AI number reading into their question here their question here, because this is not my question. Like China benefit more from AI or a decentralized government be more beneficial from AI. You know, we had, you know, the idea of communism never could possibly have worked in a, in

with humans trying to run the supply-demand curve and capitalism was the ideal marketplace for that. But the question is, is an all-knowing AI able to do a better job moving society in a direction? Well, I mean, I think individual people will be able to do more than they can do today because we'll have many more skills and you brought up certain mathematical things. A lot of people in the audience may not have actually heard that before but we'll be able to understand that.

Won't necessarily have to go to a lot of different people. We're basically taking all of the creations of every living person who've ever demonstrated and will actually have access to all of it inside our own mind. So it works both ways. It is democratizing and molecular assemblers when we get to that I think that's going to be more like the 2040s Will be able to build anything we want anywhere So the ability of one person is going to Become more democratic as we move forward Here's a two-part question the touring test. I feel like we passed the touring test a while ago And the original the originally Turing test, right?

And we just didn't notice. Do you agree with that? Yes, I said the Turing test is going to be, we're going to hear early versions that computers are passed the Turing test and we won't actually pay attention to that. By the time it becomes clear that computers can pass the Turing test, it'll have been said so many times that we'll dismiss it, oh, that's an old hat at this point.

And we've already gone past that first point. We've already heard that GP4 or so and can handle the Turing test. By the time it becomes obvious, it won't be a question anymore. And it's probably like four or five years. We're in the midst of that now. You know, we saw GPT-01 score an IQ of 120. About a year ago, we saw Anthropic Claw 3 score an IQ of 101. The average human IQ, by definition, is 100. I know that Google has... Right, but there's some people that have a higher IQ.

Sure. So it's not it's not equal to all people, but that's kind of the average of so-called large language models is going to increase. So it's 120 today, it'll be 130... So that's my question. Where do you think where do you think will be next year? Uh or a year from now how fast is that escalation likely to be? I mean, I i'd say over the next by 2029 is going to be far beyond what humans can do. I think that is definitely true. But I you know, I've heard projections that will hit 150. And the question becomes, you know, do you think that could happen by early next year

or next year? Which would put it in the top, you know, 0.0001% of humanity. And also it has some things that no human being can do at all. I mean, you can ask it any question and it can actually give you a very good response. And if you don't like that response, you can ask it again. It'll say the same thing in different words, but also Intelligently no human being today can do that So it has that advantage it knows everything that anybody has Ever dealt with Ray

I want to thank you for your mentorship for your leadership for, for your vision, for all that you've done. It's been a two way pleasure. Yeah. I'm looking forward to the next 30 years together, maybe a hundred. We'll see. Um, you know, well the next five years is going to be pretty spectacular. So it's going to be unbelievably spectacular and into such a pleasure to be alive. You know, the one reason I think we're living in a simulation is this is such the most extraordinary time ever to be alive

and the coincidence of being here now, well hey. Yeah, but you talk to people who think it's a terrible time to be alive so. Yeah, that's a problem. They don't want to have children so. Yeah, well you know, I remember it was sitting down with you and Neil Jacobstein in the early days of Singularity where the idea of my first book the abundance the future is better than you think came came into play because as we're sitting there talking about it and and and i'm saying wow there is technology is the force that turns everything from scarcity into abundance over and over and over again and people's default mindset of of fear and scarcity is blinding them to what's going on

in the world. Well it's true. Yeah. but that will continue. Um, hopefully we can help people see it a little bit different. Right? Uh, have a beautiful day, my friend. Um, wherever you are in the cosmos and, uh, and thank you for spending the time with me. I hope we can do this again. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.