The Singularity Countdown: AGI by 2029, Humans Merge with AI, Intelligence 1000x | Ray Kurzweil

Dave, are you going to be joining the board meeting by Zoom? Yeah, I'm with Ray here in Boston, actually. We're in the happening spot, but I'm going to be flying straight from here to Davos on Sunday where Alex and I will be hanging out with Dennis Osabas and the whole gang. Amazing. I just got back from Singapore. I had an extraordinary visit there. I was the guest of an incredible bank, DBS. Sushan, who's the CEO, a big shout out. Susan, thank you for an incredible visit to Singapore. You know, she's a Singular University alum and a fan of our pod. So I just think the world of Singapore can't wait to get back there.

DBS is doing extraordinary work. So a big shout out to the team there. Gentlemen, we have an extraordinary guest today, someone who all of us count as our mentors. He's been a mentor for me for the last 20 years. We're here with the incredible Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's leading thinkers and futurists. He's been called the relentless genius, the ultimate thinking machine. He's got a 30-year track record of accurate predictions regarding the evolution of technology in the future. If you go to Wikipedia, you can check it out, an 86% accuracy rate on his predictions. He's an inventor of the CCD Flatbeck Scanner, the first Omnifont optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine, the Kurzweil synthesizer, the author of The Law of Accelerating Returns.

We'll be talking about that. The author of two books that have set the foundation for all the conversations we have here on Moonshots. The Singularity is Near in 2005. More recently, The Singularity is Nearer in 2024. He's the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He has 21 honorary doctorates. He's been honored by three U.S. presidents. And really, the gentleman who has popularized and driven the term singularity, which he famously predicts will happen in the year 2045. Ray, it is an honor and a pleasure to have you here, buddy. And a bucket list item. Absolutely. It's great to be here.

Always great to talk with you. peter salim so yeah no and gotta love those suspenders buddy you you are fashionable on the exponential world i do have to say they're all they're all hand-painted so yeah really yeah i do have to say when i read the singularity is near in 2005 when it came out i thought it was the most important book i had read in my entire life up until that point so definitely uh definitely a life-changing book worth worth buying again and rereading yeah well it was quite controversial when it came out which is about 20 years ago um stanford had a uh basically a A meeting of about several hundred AI experts to examine its predictions, it was considered very controversial.

People agreed with me that it would happen, but not within 30 years. They thought it would happen within 100 years. And I'm actually running into people who were there, several hundred AI experts who came to that conference. uh and they agreed that it's if anything uh 30 years is 20 29 uh that's a right now that seems overly conservative people are predicting a little bit sooner than that like 2027 and so on um but at the time people thought it would be a hundred years off well i think it's important for people to go read the book it's so non-controversial today given how things have unfolded and put yourself in the mindset of this being completely controversial at the time because a lot of things that we predict on the podcast that alex says you know they also have that same flavor you know trying to look forward 10 years from today is very very hard and they have that same feeling of well that's impossible that could never happen uh but if you rewind the tape you know, these impossible things routinely happen. And then because of hindsight bias, everyone's like, oh, I would have seen that coming. So I think it's a good exercise.

It's happening so quickly now that looking one year out is like a long term prediction. Yeah. I didn't like to predict things one or two years away, like 10 years ago. But now one or two years away is really kind of a long term prediction. So Ray, you made two predictions. I Your first prediction, as you said, that you released in 1989 was that we're going to reach human level AI by by 2029. And people laughed at that, as you said. But the other prediction you've made is that we're going to reach the singularity by 2045. And there's a lot of confusion about, OK, well, if we're reaching human level AI by 2029 and it's growing exponentially, why are we waiting till 2045 for the singularity? Could you sort of explain the difference between When we multiply our intelligence a thousandfold, I mean, one difference of my own perspective versus everybody else's, it's not like we have our own intelligence.

intelligence, biological intelligence, and then we have AI that's over here, and we somehow relate to AI versus human intelligence. We're going to merge with it. It's going to be the same thing. We're not going to be able to tell whether or not an idea is coming to us from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence. It's going to seem the same. I mean, if I asked you to think of some actress and you think of it, you don't know where that came from. It just somehow appeared in your mind and it's going to be the same way whether it's coming from your computational intelligence or your biological intelligence and we're not going to be able to tell the difference. Today you can tell the difference if you actually go to your favorite LLM you can tell that it's coming from the LLM not from your biological intelligence.

In the future though it's going to you're not going to be able to tell the difference and we're going to become a thousand times smarter by 2045. Hey everybody, you may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team. And every week, myself and my research team study the meta-trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta-trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to Diamandis.com slash MetaTrends.

That's Diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. Feels like we're in the midst of the singularity, and it's a smooth function. It's hard to note that. Do you agree that we're actually in the midst of it right now, or are we going to have to wait for some other point to get there? I mean, a lot of things have already amplified dramatically. for example we can take our models of biological paradigms and predict what will happen if we can actually simulate biology and we're actually doing that now with biological tests so we can actually simulate millions or even billions of different possibilities these and do that in like one weekend um and ray how do you define the singularity currently because In the past, you've put it as a moment in time.

Then we talked about it as a process. What's your current framing of it? Well, the framing is when we're a thousand times more intelligent. But in some ways, we'll be able to, for example, simulate biology for medical tests even faster than that. And we can do that actually today, although we don't have all of the paradigms of what biological intelligence will do. So, I've talked to people who are actually modeling this, and the most conservative views is that it will take about five years from now. We'll be able to have all of the conversions that are done to biological intelligence predicting uh what different chemicals will do so we can actually try out a million tests in one weekend uh and be able to predict that uh very very quickly we can do that now in some cases but not in every case i'd love to rewind the tape just a little bit and talk about why you or how you landed the plane so accurately you know in predictions going back to 1999 are coming down to basically within a year or two of what you predicted, which is so different from, you know, when I was at the MIT AI lab, you know, people were predicting all kinds of different things and then they would never happen. And then we get into these AI winters.

And so if you go back and read your books from 2005, you have to put yourself in the context of nobody believes AI will ever happen because it's been predicted like 12 times in a row and whiffed every single time. Every prediction has absolutely whiffed. Meanwhile, you're drawing a timeline that's much longer than other people's timelines. And it's going to land, you know, the date of AI having human level intelligence is going to land within three years of something you predicted 20 years ago. 30 years ago. 30, is it 30 years ago? Yeah, 1999 to today, yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, the date where it crosses all combined human intelligence, which I guess is 2045 in your prediction, will likely happen or be sooner.

I mean, it has to do with thinking exponentially. and people are not used to that. They're thinking linearly, thinking if it took 10 years in the past, it'll take 10 years in the future. And that's really, that's what people think about. The future is the same as the past. So to really think exponentially requires a certain practice. uh and and that's how i got to this kind of uh this kind of view alex do you want to jump in yeah maybe to pull on this thread ray first of all it's wonderful to be chatting with you again always enjoy our conversations the turing test i've argued on this podcast in past that the Turing test went by with a whimper, not a bang. It flew by. The Loebner prize was cancelled before the Turing test was arguably passed, and yet it was passed, and there was no celebration.

The Loebner test was not a really good test. He had various practices that were really not in accord with the Turing test. And Turing test is really matching an ordinary person that's talking, not really an expert in the field. AGI thinks actually a better view because we're actually matching the best person in each field. And we have maybe several thousand, maybe several hundred thousand fields that you could be expert in.

Ray KurzweilAnd AGI means that you can match a human being in any of the fields and then combine the insight into many different fields together,

which no human being can do. I mean, Einstein was very good at physics, and he actually was interested in playing a violin, but he was not an expert in playing a violin. He was only an expert in physics. People maybe can master two fields at the most, but there's actually thousands of fields and if you could actually be an expert in all of them and then combine all those insights that's something that's quite unique so that's what AGI represents whereas Turing test is really matching an ordinary person with a lot of mischaracterizations of different things. I agree that AGI and passing the Turing test are, for most common definitions, different standards. The question I was going to ask, though, is, arguably, if you agree with the premise that the Turing test, as reasonably defined, not the original gender presentation-based Turing test, but the subsequent definition, was passed without very much hoopla at all, Do you think the same is going to happen with the singularity?

There's, in particular, one of my favorite scenes in Charlie Strauss's novel, Accelerando. You have a bunch of characters who've been all uploaded to a Starwisp traveling to another star system who are all arguing with each other. They're post-human uploads arguing with each other as to whether the singularity has even happened. Do you think that's what's actually going to happen here, where we'll just singularity will zoom by and we'll all be arguing with each other decades later. Did the singularity even happen? Has it happened yet? I mean, these standards are not very clear. Not everybody agrees that we've passed the Turing test. And when we pass AGI, there'll be disagreements.

It's disagreements now as to what that means. People say it's basically as good as somebody who's a little bit above average intelligence. I define it as being an expert in every area when there's many different areas that you can be expert in. So that's actually quite an impressive level. And I think we'll get there by 2029. The thing that's, then you can combine your insights into every possible field. Really, I mean, have that large language models can answer questions in lots of different fields. No person can do what a large language model can do today, let alone what will happen by 2029.

By the way, we have a moonshots test where you have to fool your spouse for three minutes on a Zoom call. We haven't defined what we're going to give to the listener. We should do that. That would be hilarious. Well, I think that's a better benchmark. So that's our moonshots. That much more closely matches the original Turing test. I'm sorry, Alex, what were you going to say? I was just going to say, or rather to ask, Ray, are you at all concerned about goalposts getting moved yet again, as we see happening over and over again with definitions of AGI? and otherwise, that we will pass your definition of the singularity, but nonetheless, most commentators will be arguing with each other for a long time after that, whether the singularity has actually happened.

Well, mine is actually pretty strict. I mean, to pass my definition of AGI, you have to be an expert in thousands of different areas, which is actually more strict than most definitions of AGI. so i i think i have a a suitably strict definition of it what about the definition of singularity because i you know one of the things that really inspired me in both of your singularity titled books is the fact that there's a moment in time where ai is working on itself and self-improving and that moment in time is where you get this incredible acceleration it feels like that's either right now or within the last year or within the next year it's it's it's imminent and you know we're predicting on this podcast a 100x step up in the efficiency of the existing algorithms that's completely independent of the underlying curve you know we've started to see uh ai improving itself a little bit but it really has not gone it's not really very dramatic i mean But these definitions are not beyond debate, and it's not like everyone will agree.

Take AGI. I mean, you could predict that a certain number of people will predict that it's actually there today, but it's actually a small group, and it will accelerate and finally when everybody more or less agrees with it. But that's a band of maybe three or four years, and I think it will end in 2029. It's already beginning. People feel we have AGI already, but most people will believe that, I think, by 2029. Well, that means your prediction has to be exact. If you say that we'll be debating it for the rest of time and it was sometime between today and 2029, that means you are irrefutably right in your prediction from 30 years ago.

So that's kind of cool, right? I memorialize that right now. Salim, you were going to jump in? So, you know, I remember Ray... And we were in a car with Peter, you and me, going to the CNN studios to launch Singularity University and announce it. I was a young, fresh-faced fellow, and I said, Ray, they're going to ask you about exponentials as part of the briefing. And they said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that may be a problem. And I said, well, what do you mean? I was all kind of freaked out. And you said, I'd better bone up on the subject. And it took me like 10 seconds to realize that you were joking.

And I think one of my favorite things about you is the unbelievable sense of humor, dry humor that you bring to the table. Here's my question for you. You know, you've been kind of saying this very steadily for 30 years, right? At the beginning, it must have been very hard saying this to people who are just like, he is out of his mind. What is he talking about? Is it easier for you now? Do you feel a sense of accomplishment that many more people are talking about it and saying, yep, he was right, et cetera, et cetera? or do you feel some sense of that? Well, yes and no. The basic debate about whether or not this will happen, is it going to be exactly 2029 or something, has gone away.

People actually accept that. I run into very few people that say, oh, no, it's going to be 500 years from now. On the other hand, the issue has changed from is it going to happen to is it good for humanity, and that's a big debate. Yes, it's going to happen, but we're all going to be screwed as a result of it. And we've got books that come out saying it's going to eliminate humanity. And that's really the big debate now, whether or not it's going to be beneficial for humanity or not. I mean, you've said publicly that technology is a major driver of progress, and it might be the only major driver of progress.

I assume you're very clearly on that, on the beneficial pro side. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's some chance that things will go wrong. I wouldn't say that that has no chance of happening. But I think what we're seeing is going to be beneficial, although it's going to change things very rapidly and that will lead to some foreboding as well yeah and we'll get we'll get into that in a minute There's a question that we've debated on this show and curious about your point of view, which is, are we going to actually achieve consciousness and sentience with AIs? And will they begin petitioning for personhood? And do you think society will approve that, that we're going to actually start to feel our AIs are conscious and sentient and we shouldn't shut them down and they're going to have rights like humans have? What's your feeling on all that?

Ray KurzweilWell, first of all, consciousness is a subjective point of view. There's nothing we can do scientifically to prove that an entity is conscious.

We can't have a machine, and you slide something in, and a light goes on. Oh, this is conscious. No, this isn't conscious. There's no scientific test for it. So some people, like, for example, Marvin Minsky, who was my mentor for 50 years, said, well, there's no scientific test for it. Therefore, it's not scientific. Therefore, we shouldn't deal with consciousness. It's a meaningful, meaningless debate. On the other hand, you could say it's the most important thing. Am I conscious? Are you conscious? I mean, that's something we really need to deal with. I need to be able to relate to you as if you are conscious.

I consider myself to be conscious. And yet it's not scientific. My scientific test is I think I'm conscious, but my wife disagrees. So when she thinks I am, then I think I'll be there. Alex, you've been thinking a lot about this idea of personhood and consciousness. I'm a proponent, broadly speaking, of AI personhood. And I guess I'll play the contrarian role that I'm painted as of respectfully disagreeing with my friend Ray that there aren't benchmarks. I think there has been over the past two years marked progress toward developing quantitative benchmarks for call it self-awareness rather than consciousness, maybe slightly less mushy as a term, including, as I've pointed out in the past, tests for whether certain models can detect overlaid activations in their residual streams if they're transformers.

I see progress toward developing real benchmarks. for self-awareness in models. Yes, but I'll give you something else that's even more perplexing. There's lots of conscious people. Now, I can't prove that you're conscious, but I believe that you are. I believe that a human being that acts conscious is probably conscious. But why do I have the consciousness I have? there's all these conscious beings but there's one person that i relate to that if something happens to it i care about it in a different way than i care about other people uh my own consciousness so why why am i conscious uh why was i born in 1948 why am i a male in on earth and why am I not another animal?

I mean, why am I the person that I am? You could think the same thing about yourself, but it's a subjective view of consciousness. Why am I the person that I am? And that's really hard to explain. Why am I have all the earmarks of this particular person? Well, of course, Ray, it's such an ironic question that, in my mind, that you're asking an anthropic question. What you just posed, why am I myself, is the most fundamental anthropic, lowercase a, not capital A, question that one could ask. and why does the universe appear the way it does? And the usual answer is if the universe or your own identity had sufficiently different properties, you wouldn't be around to ask the question, why do I?

It's very hard to even ask the question. People don't actually quite understand it. Maybe the most favorite comment you've ever made for me was we were at a group of singularity folks. We've had a couple of glasses of wine and somebody asked about consciousness and you said language is a very thin pipe to discuss concepts that are this complex. And it just blew everybody's mind. AIs will be indistinguishable from a conscious being and that will just keep going. And finally, we will accept it. When? When, Ray? Sam Holtman says, if you can't tell, why do you care? I might say that it's conscious.

and you but people aren't really sure but eventually it keeps having all the earmarks of a conscious being and you will accept it because it'd be useless not to have it and again you can't say that's going to happen at the same time for everybody but I think when we're a few years into uh ai entities acting conscious uh we will accept it uh and so i i don't think it's going to be a very long delay well let's walk through that because the the outer bound of the day when when ais are acting conscious you can't even tell outer bound of that is 2029 i think and uh so you think a year or two later just because they're so convincing and so human-like that everyone will accept it because because you know they have weird behavior too they don't just act you know they somehow times they merge their brains together and they have combined personalities you know and so normal beings don't kind of do that so i could see a world where people are like this is just yeah it's acting very human but it's just too weird or i could see a world where Everybody just accepts it.

I mean, today people have AI therapists, and sometimes they don't really believe it, but in other times people really believe it, and the AI therapists, if you read the transcripts, they sound very convincing, and that's going to keep going, and people will really accept that they have a therapist that's conscious, and that's already beginning to happen. One thing I love about today's AI is I use them all day long every day, but they have no intent of their own. They just do what you ask them to do, and they try and be as helpful as they can in getting you to whatever destination. But they're not trying to get to any destination of their own. When you start saying, well, they're going to act conscious, that implies to me anyway that, yeah, I'm trying to get somewhere on my own. I don't have time to help you right now. I'm busy with my own personal agenda here.

Dave, good point. I'm still waiting for the AI to call me up one day and say, hey, Peter, listen, I'm working on this thing over here. You can join me if you want, but this is my objective for the day. Yeah, that's, yeah, different world. Different world. You know, Ray, something you said on the Abundant Stage, you as yourself, myself, Salim, we're talking about this and... You made a statement that really rocked a lot of people, and it's to contextualize the speed. You said in the next 10 years, you originally said 2025 to 2035, this decade going forward, that we're going to see as much change as we saw in the last 100 years, 1925 to 2025, back when the highest level of technology was the Ford Model T and 30% of homes had electricity and telephony.

Do you still hold to that level, or is it faster, slower, 100 years of progress in the next decade? Are you still holding to that? That sounds about right, yeah. I mean, think about the difference between 2025 and 2035. I mean, 2035 will be way past AGI. We'll have supercomputers, but we'll also be merging with them. So we're going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are today. that's a huge amount of progress compared with what we've done 100 years before that. How do you see society dealing with this? Because right now, the limiting factor in a lot of areas is regulatory, social structures, norms, market capture. What do you think is the weakest point that we should focus on solving to allow this progress to implement into the world?

I mean, it's going to be a major thing. Employment's not, I mean, right now employment is considered equivalent to being able to deal with your own financial needs. That's going to change a lot. We will have, we'll be able to produce enough things that everybody will be wealthy compared to what we now consider wealthy. uh and yet we won't necessarily have jobs as such and how we're going to deal with that it's really done unclear um but people are actually not that concerned about it you you would think that uh well it's because they're in denial yeah no they're just not i can't tell you how many people i interact with who are running companies you know hundreds and 90 plus percent are just like, yeah, it's not happening, or things always take longer than people say, or it's just pure denial.

Yes, but I think we'll deal with it okay. But it's going to be a major change. in the way we organize society. There are folks like Mo Gaudet and a few others that think this, and Peter, you've said this, the next 10 years is going to be the most volatile while we kind of try and absorb all of this. Do you agree with that rough time period, Ray, or do you think it's longer or shorter? I agree with it, but it's not like it's going to end in 10 years. They will have this flux of great change in the next 10 years, and the next 10 years after that will be smooth. No, it'll be much crazier. I mean, the next 10 years will get us to my definition of singularity, which is we'll be at least a thousand times more intelligent.

I'll maybe pose hopefully a less obvious question for you, Ray. You've been very public about keeping, maintaining lots of documents, lots of artifacts from your father, whom I gather was tremendous influence on your life, with the premise that AI is going to enable you to basically computationally reconstruct your father someday, if I'm not misconstruing. there is a related notion that has been called variously quantum archaeology or humanity's final task. Tsiol Kolsky has written or had written extensively about this in the context of Russian cosmism. Question for you, when do we get the ability to computationally resurrect dead human beings with AI? Well, I mean, prior to that, we're trying to create avatars of ourselves uh we did create one of my father uh and i'm like creating now an avatar of myself i have actually a lot more uh material that we can uh put into text i have 11 books i've got several hundred articles that i've written articles about me all of this to go into a large language model, we'll create something that can talk like me and it will look like me.

And like, I get probably five to 10 requests for interviews and podcasts a day, and I can't do most of them. So I'll actually offer them, you can interview the avatar.

Ray KurzweilThe avatar is actually better than me because it will remember everything. I don't remember everything that I've said.

So the avatar will actually be better, and you can interview the avatar as long as you want. In whatever language? You can do it in another language, right? And that'll be this year, so... What age are you going to make yourself in your avatar? Kind of an arbitrary choice you have to make. Yeah. Now, that's not actually creating everything about me or my father, which we have actually less material of his, although we have enough to create an avatar that's also lively. Being able to relate everything that a person has and the state of their bodies and so on. That will happen eventually, but that's probably another 10 or 15 years away.

Do you view that as the killer app of the singularity, the so-called great task of resurrecting computationally with AI every human who has ever existed? That's one of them, yeah. To me that I'm very interested in is being able to longevity escape velocity where a year goes by, you age a year, but you get back that year from advances in medicine that keep you going for another year or more than a year. so that you don't actually age during that year. You lose a year, but you'll actually get it back from advances in medicine and so on. What's your current prediction when we hit escape velocity?

2032. 2032. Yeah, let's jump into that subject of common interest, I think, to all of us. And Ray, you and I have had so many conversations about this concept of longevity, which was a very controversial subject a decade ago. And Now, you know, AI is impacting biology and making it happen. When we've talked about reaching longevity, escape velocity in the past, the technology that I believe you said is required to really get us there is nanotechnology. Do you think that we're going to reach LEV without nanotechnology, just based upon drug discovery using AI? It really has nothing to do with nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is a way for us to take advantage of AI without it being obvious so that I can be thinking about something. I'll get an idea, and I won't know if it's coming from a biological brain or the computational brain. That has to do with nanotechnology. But longevity escape velocity has to do with advances in medicine. It has to do with being able to simulate what happens in medicine, and it really has nothing to do with nanotechnology.

Ray KurzweilWe have to be able to create biological models of what happens in biology very quickly so that in one weekend you can simulate millions or billions of different possibilities and

try them out, test them, and then be able to go forward with a cure based on that type of analysis. And talking to people who are working on this, five years is like an outside limit. So if we can actually do it in five years, then another couple of years to basically go through most of the medical problems we have. So your advice to people is stay healthy until we get to the early 2030s. Yes, exactly, exactly. Just curious to drill in one level deeper since, you know, Peter, you're also a top expert on this topic. If you had a perfect simulation, you know exactly what's going on in a body. You've got it all nailed through computation.

And that's, you know, about three, four, five years from now. Then what's the intervention if not nanotechnology? like is it just more and more targeted chemicals in your bloodstream or like how do you act on that simulation i mean you're coming up with new cures new treatments both ward off as well as avoid getting these types of treatments like cancer, for example. And you can see it already happening. I mean, right now, I've seen this many times. Somebody gets some problem today and says, well, just wait a few months and there'll be some new cure for it. And sure enough, that happens in most cases.

I can think of four or five cases where it's been really vital and it's happened. So it's happening much more quickly. I think that applies to cancer, heart disease, hip replacements, knee replacements, all those things fit that mold. But then you've got this just general aging. you know because stretching out your life reversal right yeah yeah exactly like that take heart disease so rapatha is a new type of drug that dramatically reduces your ldl so i've reduced my ldl to like 10 which is a very low number yep and i've actually examined my arteries and i have no plaque. Now that wasn't true like four or five years ago, or even three or four years ago.

So in various areas, I'm developing things that are avoiding getting problems that didn't exist just a short while ago. That's a good example of chemical in your bloodstream, you know, the traditional, it's a new drug, a new chemical that's in your bloodstream. And so there is a version of the world where that's all you need to reverse aging and then there's a version of the world where you need something much more targeted yeah that's the work david of david sinclair right who is currently doing gene therapy for age reversal for epigenetic reprogramming but then heading towards actually three molecules so it's a very cheap um uh you know oral supplement that you take to reset your epigenetic age ray do you have a do you have a target age you're you're shooting for uh you know to hit lev do you do you expect i would very much like to be alive tomorrow and take advantage of all the friends i have like the friends in this Virtual room. And I think that tomorrow, I will also be interested in being alive the next day.

I can't imagine I'm going to get to a point where I wouldn't want to be alive. The only time, really, that people take their lives generally is if they're in insufferable pain, physical pain, mental pain spiritual pain uh and they can't continue otherwise people want to remain alive so and so i would want to stay healthy and be able to take advantage of that so i'm not going to get to a point where i'm not interested in being alive as time goes on we're going to get more and more ai is going to be more and more intelligent it's going to be able to keep our body going. I can describe today a way in which we can replace every one of our organs, and we can actually imagine that, and it wouldn't take that long. Certainly within a decade or two, we can replace all of our organs. It was something that really would last forever, more or less.

so as time goes on we have more and more capability of of being able to replace things that are going wrong with our body and uh we'll get more and more into longevity escape velocity as time goes on are you anticipating a world where everybody agrees like if you said hey you know i'm i'm alive today i want to be alive tomorrow and i'm tomorrow but i want to be alive to the next day. Are you anticipating a world where everybody gets on board with that within 10 years and, you know, everyone has those options or a world where a subset of people have had five organs replaced? They've had stem cells in their brain. They're extending their thinking ability. Another subset are violently opposed. They're ranting in the streets. They're trying to prevent it. They want natural death. I mean, you can get natural death today. You can go to Switzerland and get natural death, I was debating with Kahneman, who was a Nobel prize-winning economist.

and he was 90. he was actually very healthy i would meet with him in new york i had like four or five lunches with him and he would actually walk like five blocks to get to where our lunch was and walk back so he was actually pretty healthy but he was mindful of what happens to you in your 90s he's saying well it's um bad things happen and he'd rather know that not happened with him and he took his life he went to switzerland and ended his life even though he was healthy um and i wasn't aware that he had this plan although his family was aware of it uh and i tried to talk him out of it and talk about how we're making exponential progress on overcoming diseases and so on he was concerned about his kidneys but i related some things that i'm involved in that relate to the kidney and uh and he understood what i was saying and it was actually an economic issue uh but he ended up taking his life anyway um but that's because he really didn't was not convinced that this would happen yeah ray my father passed away a year ago at 97 and also had an assisted death in Canada. They've now approved it. And I have never seen anyone as happy in my life as my father in the last week. And I asked the doctor after he passed

away, I'm trying to feel loss or pain or suffering, but I can't, I've never seen him so happy. Have you seen this? And she said, you know, 20,000 people in Canada have had this procedure this past year. Most of them go out in this state and we think it's because they have agency. And he lived with dignity, he wanted to pass away with dignity, and he got his wish. And he was happy as a clam. So a very philosophical, thought-provoking outcome. Yeah. I don't think that would be me, but I hope not. Alex, you had a great question about cryonics. Yeah, no, I don't like very much the direction of what we're discussing here.

I don't think, Ray, this at all aligns with the way you see the world either. I think you and I probably see the world quite similarly, rather than having hand-wringing discussions about death with dignity and going to Canada, I would argue we should be talking about cryonics as recognizing that. that approximately 150,000 people are dying every day in our world, and not everyone, statistically, if we get to longevity escape velocity by the early 2030s, as you predict, that's many, many millions of people who are going to die between now and LEV. Why do you think more people aren't obtaining cryonics plans for themselves?

And what can you say here? We have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of viewers to encourage viewers to consider getting cryonics plans for themselves so they don't have to move to Canada to die with dignity if they're in that position? Well, my point on cryonics is that that is plan D. Plan D. I love that. Plan A, B, and C is to remain alive one way or another. And cryonics is plan D. I mean, I have enough trouble keeping track of my ideas when I'm able to give arguments for them and keep track of them. It would be hard to imagine keeping track of them while I'm basically dead.

Coming back, it's, I mean, I have concerns about them. You may come back and you may not be happy with the way you come back.

Ray KurzweilI mean, cryonics is better than not doing cryonics because at least you have some chance of coming back.

But there's risks with it. So I do it, very few people do it. I mean, the number of people who die, who elect cryonics, it's very, very small. I have done it, I hope it works. You've signed up for cryonics, right? Yeah, but I hope that I won't have that opportunity. For our viewers and listeners who don't know what this is, there are companies like Alcor where you can sign up and near the moment of your death, they will effectively put antifreeze or some equivalent thereof into your bloodstream and you will be frozen with the notion that eventually technologies like nanotechnology will be able to reconstruct your...

Your full neocortex is under cryonics right now. I would say, Ray, it's unconscionable to me that I think you have the statistics. I think probably a few thousand people, order of magnitude, have cryonics plans. Why do you think it's not hundreds of millions? And again, is there anything that you would care to do? You're speaking to hundreds of thousands of people who take the future of technology very seriously to maybe persuade them, if you think this is a righteous act, that they should be perhaps considering cryonics plans for themselves. perhaps but given that i have limited uh persuasion on people listen to me uh i would tell people that they should do everything they can to stay alive uh that's because that's the best way of being alive in the future is to stay alive right now and there's a lot you can do to remain alive and ray are you saying you not just stay alive but stay in reasonable health.

Yeah, absolutely. And that the technologies will unveil themselves to you in the next five to eight years, yes? And it's happening very quickly. So this is actually a vital time that you can remain. I'm still chuckling at your comment where you said it's harder to keep track of your ideas when you're dead. But you're going to, whether you're keeping yourself alive and you enter longevity escape velocity or you're chronically frozen. The other thing going on is you probably have a hundred or a thousand or a million avatar versions of you that are up and operating in the universe in parallel with your meat body, right?

Yeah. Whether or not those will have consciousness or not, we get back to the same thing we discussed earlier. um actually they'll be probably better at remembering everything i've said because um if it has a computer behind it it won't forget anything uh unlike myself this episode is brought to you by blitzy autonomous software development with infinite code context blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code engineers start every development sprint with the blitzy platform bringing in their development requirements the blitzy platform provides a plan then generates and pre-compiles code for each task blitzy delivers 80 percent or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org.

Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. We should definitely do a podcast where it's Ray K. Avatar and Alex Avatar and Dave and Salim Avatar having a conversation amongst ourselves. We should put that on the docket for some time this year. Ray, I want to take just a second to say thank you for supporting my book launch with Stephen Kotler. Ray has graciously said he'll do a live event. We're gonna do it, Dave, at Link Studios in Cambridge in May. And we had an amazing, Steven and I had an amazing AMA at the end of December.

And if folks, if you're interested in joining another AMA with Steven and I about the new book, We Are As Gods, A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, we'll pop the cover up here. Nick will ask you to pop it up, but we're gonna, you can go to diamandis.com slash book. And if you pre-order a book, at the end of January this month, we're going to be doing another AMA. And it's part of our book launch effort. So check it out, diamandis.com slash book. Ray, can we jump in? Just one thing. I did a conference with Martine Rothblatt. This was at UCLA to represent their progress over the last, I think, 30 years.

It had me, Martine, two professors there, and Martine's avatar. So you had both Martine and Martine's avatar. Martine's avatar looks realistic. It's like doing a Zoom with her. um and the avatar is actually very good it remembers everything that martina said and you could ask it anything and it actually is very convincing and actually knew when to come in because if you're in a conference you can't just like suddenly say something if someone else is speaking you have to wait till there's a silence and you can say something and say something maybe that's relevant to what was said before and it worked worked very well um so this was a conference with with the avatar uh and martine herself uh at the same time hey can i i'm very clear well directly related question to that you know uh i i stumbled a couple years ago on your how my predictions have fared essay which is a great essay by the way um and you know you're uh 86 outright correct and then that you know you worked on speech recognition years and years ago and by now the interface to your computer you would think is voice not a keyboard and i feel like like that is something we're so used to now that we're under predicting how this interface is going to change for the

first time since you know 19 since the gui so maybe 1980s but it's got to be imminent now and i don't know if you agree with that or not but if you when you look at these avatars that you're just describing they're so good and so convincing and so much better of a way to interact with technology another one i got wrong was that we would have self-driving cars yeah uh which we do now um yeah but it didn't quite make the time frame so that was wrong well that one was wrong because of regulatory issues, right? The technology, your timeline on the technology, I think, was incredibly close. But, you know, regulatory is very hard to predict.

I think you made that point in the essay. But the one on the interface to a computer is not held up by regulatory. It's something else, momentum or barriers or Apple not doing AI or something. But that one, to me, feels like this is going to happen very, very soon. And people, because when you talk to an avatar, like you said, you're at a conference this you know why am i not talking to my computer that way it's crazy that i'm typing on this keyboard well i think part of that dave is is having to not be verbal in the middle of an airplane flight or sitting at your desk sometimes. I'll tell you, before we kicked off the pod, Peter, you were saying, where's our AI that's our AV, basically?

Yeah. And pulling in images, pulling... Like when we talk about Ray's books, why is it not popping up as a picture in real time that we're all looking at? That's got to be imminent, too, because the technology is there. Dude, let's start that company. All right. Let's start that company. I'm in. I'm in. Fantastic. Salim, you were going to jump in. um ray if you look over the last six months what breakthrough or development has surprised you the most i'm getting much more credence to people accepting this which didn't accept it a year ago i mean think of the difference between 2024 and 2025 or january 2026 and january 2025 25 uh most people a year ago that i would speak to would say yeah it's pretty interesting but it's not really very good and people don't really accept it and and and they've completely changed their views in the last year uh where they're really accepting it now uh there was just an article by people who advocate therapy who are saying that online therapists are actually doing a very meaningful job, and that never would have happened a year ago.

So I'd say the change in people's attitudes is pretty phenomenal in one year. pace of change currently faster than you predicted because it feels faster this is to dave's point earlier it feels like we're moving faster than you predicted do you agree or not agree i mean in 1999 i predicted 2029 for agi and i still predict 2029 um i think I think Elon Musk says 2026, I think we'll have a lot of things that remind us of AGI, but it really won't be, we really won't be convinced in 2026. Maybe it'll happen sooner, 2027, 2028. I mean, you get varying degrees of confidence, but by 2029. And I think everyone will accept that.

Amazing, amazing. Alex, I want to turn it back to you, pal. Yeah, maybe to shift gears a bit. Ray, obviously, if this isn't obvious from some of my questions and comments, I'm an enormous fan of both you and your writings and your courageous extrapolation of following the law of straight lines of progress in experience curves, progress in Moore's law type experience curves, your law of accelerating returns, your countdown to the singularity, all arguably variants on various forms of experience curves from economics question for you. So if we follow to its logical conclusion, law of accelerating returns and your countdown to the singularity, this idea that we're almost in a technologically deterministic way, we emerge from a primordial soup and everything follows some very nice, elegant law of straight lines exponential calendar. Do you think that this implies that our universe is abundant with intelligent civilizations? And if so, in other words, abundant, not just human intelligence, but non-human intelligence as well. And if so, do you think that would then imply that there are non-human intelligent civilizations on or near Earth.

The fact that we can emerge as a far more intelligent version of ourselves in a short period of time doesn't imply that there are intelligences that go beyond humans. We haven't really seen evidence of that. I mean, there's a lot of interest in trying to find signals in the universe that would indicate that there's some intelligent source of them. We haven't actually found that yet, and we have more and more ability to look. So, it may exist, but we don't know that there's any intelligence besides coming from Earth. And the more and more ability… The ability of first actually evaluate different types of intelligent sources that are not coming from Earth, and yet we still don't see any evidence of that, kind of indicates that they aren't there.

but there's no way of actually determining that because we can only look at a very small fraction of what's out there. Switching, so go on. Alex, you want to do a follow-up? Maybe just a quick follow-up question. So Ray, you've made many, many predictions of technologies that you think either the singularity itself or progress toward the singularity would unlock. Do you think that progress toward the singularity would answer the question that I think many people most want existentially an answer to, which is, is humanity alone? Yeah, I mean, so far, if we're not alone, we're still pretty lonely because we haven't come into contact with any intelligent source aside from ourselves.

uh there's fantastic things happening in the universe and the universe goes on seemingly forever um so it's certainly possible that we'll find something it's impossible to rule that out but so far we haven't actually done that so we certainly feel alone because there's nobody else we can point to we can't point to some other sources and saying well there's a source coming from that it's clearly intelligent and we'd like to contact them we we can't even identify uh a thing like that uh so far i want to jump into the conversation a little bit about bci brain computer interface and our ability to you know up level our capabilities i think when we talk about longevity escape velocity and potentially living well in past a hundred or hundreds of years what most people fear is getting there without having the cognitive clarity without having the ability to maintain their memories and of course one of the technologies that would assist us on that that you've spoken about is The idea of high bandwidth BCI, not the low, you know, thin pipe that we currently do input output through.

And I encourage everybody to go on to your favorite LLM and ask it to give you a list of all of Ray Kurzweil's predictions that he's accurately hit. It's a very impressive list. And, you know, one of those predictions is that we'll hit, you know, high bandwidth BCI in the mid 2030s. Is that still your prediction? And I want to say, what's that going to feel like? You know, I raise my hand and volunteer for one of the early BCI, you know, interfaces. What's that going to feel like? And how do you think we're going to achieve that? I mean, it's very hard to know how we're going to react to things that haven't happened yet.

And you could imagine this being something that we're welcoming or something that we would be alarmed by. So the future hasn't been written yet. And it can't be the future could be terrible or it could be fantastic. It's really hard to give a prediction about that. Ray, you described it if i could once we have high bandwidth bci that you'll have concepts emerge in your mind that are driven by if you would uh the cloud uh can you speak to that a little bit well that would be useful i'm actually writing my autobiography and trying to remember things that happened when i was like three years old and four years old and uh actually have a pretty good memory of that but it could be better and it would actually be helpful if I had AI to help me along with that.

Actually, wait, not just that but are you using AI to go interview people that you interacted with when you were 3, 4, 10 years old and get their sides of the story? Well, it would have to have a lot of capability that it doesn't have now to be able to generate. A view of something that we don't have now. So, I'm using large language models a little bit to try to, but actually, my memory is actually not bad of things that happened a long time ago. Well, when's the biography coming out? I can't wait. It's about ready. It should be out within a year. yeah i had a chance to read it it's uh it's pretty it's pretty amazing well the thing i'm really eager to read in that biography is that the role of the futurist you know you you made all these really bold predictions and i'm sure at the time everyone's like you're a crackpot you're a crackpot i suspect by now everyone's like wow what what an incredible foresight um and so i I assume you're at an all-time high now, but maybe not.

But the role of being a futurist is fraught with this hindsight bias where you get three things wrong. You know, the self-driving car is not yet. Our clothes are not made by nanotechnology. And computing isn't done on biological systems. You know, we don't have DNA computers. I mean, I'm getting less of that now. I mean, before, if I would make a whole bunch of predictions and one of them was wrong, everybody would focus on that. But now people are more generous on their views of— To me, the most amazing—like, when you read at the time, everyone's going to have a computer in their pocket, in their clothes, and it's going to be almost like an extension of their life.

And at the time, it sounded like nuts. And now everyone's like, oh, that's just an iPhone. Like, well, no, it's not just an iPhone. It's a total cultural phenomenon that's changed our—you know, it just changes you much more than you have ever. You go to a conference and there's like several hundred people, every single person has a cell phone in their pocket. And it's actually an extension of your mind. It is. If you don't have your cell phone, you've left, you know, three quarters of your mind. And I'll tell you what else. The headmaster of the school that my kids went to took all of the kids, I think in seventh grade or sixth grade, to an island without their phones for three days and said, you have to learn to live without your phone.

The new headmaster came in and said, that's inhumane. We can't do this anymore. This is not viable. I think there's a book called Lord of the Flies that was written about that. Lord of the Flies. But I mean, it's so innate. And we're talking about seventh graders here, but it's so attached to their mentality, their mind, their body, whatever, that they can't live without it for three days. We're going to replace this. I mean, carrying around a physical object like this is difficult. I mean, where do you put it? How do you not lose it? Peter's got two chips in his hand now. What do you think replaces the phone?

We'll have something besides this. it'll be yeah that's a good question so yeah it'll be something like virtual reality so you basically you look out and you can see uh basically a screen and it will be interfacing with the computer but it'll be on all the time you'll be able to interact with it and you won't be carrying something around and you won't leave it in your apartment um yeah beyond that it'll actually uh go inside our nervous system uh interact with your biological neurons i've got i got this thing now we're starting to record everything basically you know peter's got the wearable and now we've got these omnidirectional mic size of a credit card and you just throw it on the table and everything that happens is not only recorded but it's assigned to whoever said it with these omnidirectional mics but they're starting to pop up everywhere this year dave at at the Abundance Summit, we're giving everybody two devices. One is a ring format that we talked about on one of the WTF episodes that Pebble is putting out where you can just quickly record a message, it goes LLM, and then we're giving everybody something called applaud. I guess I'm spoiling the secret for our Abundance members. Ray, can we talk about one of the concerns you

raised earlier that people have which is people's attachment to their employment so thoughts on the future of work uh you know you've spoken eloquently about the need for universal basic income and even universal high income that elon spoken about so what's your thoughts on the future of work and and when do we start having ubi and should people be worried about their future income Well, I mean, we relate having an income to having the means to deal with our financial

Ray Kurzweilsystem, but if we separate that and you're going to be able to deal with your financial needs without having a conventional job, that's actually liberating.

And I mean, why do people retire? Now, to me, retirement doesn't make sense because of what I'm doing, I enjoy doing. But if you look at most jobs, people don't like them so much that they want to be able to do them forever. And it's actually liberation to not have to do that and find something within their means That gives them gratification without having to work in a way that's unpleasant. And we're basically overcoming that. You know, 79% of corporate employees do not find meaning in their work, so this might be an easier transition than most people think. Do you think we're going to develop UBI soon?

We're going to have to do something that's equivalent to it because if people don't have enough money, that's the economic system won't work for anybody. And so I think, I mean, I made a prediction at TED that we would develop UBI by the 2030s, and I think that's still true. salim um i'm gonna do a quick separate thing you know imagine you're in a luddite courtroom right okay and uh uh the the prosecutor is saying to you you have made absurdly accurate predictions for 30 years we don't believe you're human um so how would you defend that because you actually feel to me like a time traveler from somewhere that's popped in to deliver inject into humanity all of these insights it blows my mind that 60 times i've heard you speak i've never not learned anything so if i was the luddite i'd go you must be a time traveling something how would you defend against that i mean hopefully would appear enough like a human to convince people that maybe that won't be true in the future. You can't really tell if someone's a human or not a human because they'll still act human.

And then I wouldn't have a defense. Alex, over to you, buddy. Yeah, I could say something mildly snarky about looking at Ray's immunome to see if he's been exposed to future diseases as a way of determining whether he's a time traveler or not. I'm going to face plant on that one. But instead, I'd like to shift gears, Ray, and maybe talk about the past and future of the nature of the mind. One of the most many, but one of the many striking performances and I think just incredible accomplishments of yours going all the way back. This is more than 60 years back now to your appearance on I've Got a Secret on television with Steve Allen in February of 1965.

It's incredible to think that that was 60 plus years ago. You demonstrated an AI-based music generator on television. I thought that was such, yeah. That was actually the first music composition by AI anywhere. We should show that clip. We should absolutely show that clip. It's such an incredible accomplishment, Ray. So where I was going with that. In fact, let's pause one second on this recording, and we'll inject the clip right here and then come back. Good morning. Very nicely played. And now your performance, of course, leads into your secret. So if you'll whisper it to me, we'll let everybody at home know what's up.

Well, that's... That certainly deserves applause, but... Oh, the subway's leaving. That deserves applause, but what has it got to do with the music? I don't understand that. Ah, I see. Well, Raymond's secret concerns something that he did, and we'll start the game this time with Vestmarsh. Raymond. That's a very unlikely-sounding piece of music. Am I being supercritical? No. Did you compose it? No, I didn't. Oh. Did you, however, use... Were there some kind of formulas or letters or something unusual used to compose, to make up the notes of this piece? You could say that, I guess. Well, for example, would the notes spell out a name or would they be a mathematical formula or anything like that?

Not to spell out a name, nothing like that, no. But there... $20 down, $60 to go. Henry? Was that thing written by a computer? Ah, no. Yeah. Is there writing music at this moment? Right now, it's writing a tune. Writing a tune. I have a feeling that, as a non-scientist, I'm not going to understand this here too well, but perhaps you can explain how it works. First of all, I want the folks to see short of some of this. This nest of spaghetti-like wire here is united to a bunch of little watts. What are these black things over here, Raymond? Well, those are relays, and that's what does it through.

That's the right to the music. I see. The relays write the music. They feed it into this white cheese box here, whatever that is, and there are three little... Are these wires or just pieces of string? Pieces of string are wires. I mean, does the message go through there, or are these full of things? No, that's just recording what the music, what the computer says. I see. And then the typewriter does the final part of the process. Right. So 60 years ago, you demonstrated what I understand to be the first, at least on television, AI music generator. I'd like to ask you now, 60 years plus from now.

So we're now in 2026. So we're talking 2086. what form do you think most intelligence in our solar system will take and i'll offer you a few options and i'll deny you one option the option that i'll deny you is you're not allowed to say it's past the singularity so i have no idea you have to you i'm going to condition on you having a real opinion on this topic i'll offer you a few options and and an escape valve for maybe something that i haven't thought of say the question again alex yes so the question is again 60 years from now in the year 2086 what form will most intelligence in our solar A few options. Meek bodies, substantially similar to the way human intelligence is embodied now. That's option one. Cyborgs, which is some sort of human-machine hybrid inclusive of nanorobots in the human bloodstream. Uploads, that's option three. So human minds have been uploaded to the cloud.

Foundation models or pure AIs, not dissimilar to GPT-type models that we have right now. Some sort of unrecognizable life form, maybe an unrecognizable arrangement of matter or energy that's far more efficient. In the past on the podcast, we've talked about, Royal We, I, have talked on the podcast about how black holes, for example, are amazing computers in principle. So maybe something like that or something totally different maybe uploads to the gravitational field or something else entirely. So I'm laying out a few options plus an escape valve. What do you think? I mean, we're going to have things like Compitronium certainly by 2045, if not sooner.

And I know people that are working on this. You want to define computronium, Ray? Yeah, it's basically taking what we know is feasible and creating something out of matter that can perform the maximum computation that we can conceive of. So one analysis has basically one liter cube would be more intelligent than all people, be like 10 billion people combined in one setting. so that's going to be happening by 2045 so you're talking about 2085 it's going to be after beyond what we can imagine but it'll be even more so so we'll be able to create Something that's very exciting. If I listen to, let's say, I've got some things on the web that go with the book, my father playing the 5th Brandenburg Concerto, which is done like several hundred years ago by Bach.

And it's actually quite amazing to listen to that. So it'll be something like that, only more fantastic, that will generate fantastic emotions and will be as intelligent as all people combined or more so. We really can't imagine what that would be like, but we can state it mathematically by comparing it to what we can do today. if i may ask a follow-up question on this so it sounds ray unless i'm misunderstanding as if you do in fact have a prediction for what most intelligence would look like namely if i heard correctly you think in 60 years most intelligence in the solar system will be basically software running on computronium i think you you referenced some work by seth lloyd with the reference to a leader of volume and Seth Lloyd's work back now 25 years ago on the ultimate computer and the physics of what the physical limit of the maximum amount of competition.

I mean, since that's going to be feasible well before 2086, any kind of intelligent being is going to contain that. Yes. And so it will be even beyond that, But certainly that will be the capability that it will have. Then I have to ask you, I guess, the obvious question. If you think 60 years from now, most intelligence in our solar system is going to be software running on Computronium, what happens to our solar system? Do we disassemble the planets? Do we starlift our sun? Do we convert our solar system to Computronium to run the software? Alex, you're back to dismantling. Saturn had it coming.

Saturn actually I think Ray is back to it in the stances I don't know we'll have to think about that but the point Alex and Ray that you're both making is humanity as we know it today as biological forms are in either the vast minority or absolutely displaced by a digital or quantum version of intelligence. So will some people choose to maintain an enhanced meat body or is the overwhelming benefits of going digital so much that it will wash away all previous versions? Well, I didn't say the meat bodies would go away, but certainly it will have the capability of Computronium running the ultimate software, certainly by 2086.

You know, since you're inside Google for so long, And it's really, you know, Google is kind of like the AT&T Obell Labs or university times a thousand. But this Computronium shift, you know, in your early books, you made the point that Moore's Law isn't really Moore's Law. It goes back to, you go all the way back to switches, you know, telecom switches, then vacuum tubes, then transistors, then integrated circuits. And so there's been a shift in the compute platform that keeps this curve going. but you know now we're at this stage where we're just pushing the silicon to its limit and and scaling horizontally with half a trillion dollars we're going to put into NVIDIA chips so we're kind of at this flat spot waiting for that next you know breakthrough and how do we compute is there anything imminent anything that's you know that's going to fill that gap and i know ai will help us innovate very quickly here well it's a different issue but i think we'll actually generate slower computational bodies. If you look at the brain, it uses about two watts of power. And that's because it's very, very slow. Our neurons compute between one calculation per second and about 200 calculations per second. But both of those are extremely slow

So compared to the millions or billions of, or actually trillions of computations per second that are capable of, what I wrote about actually. a couple of decades ago was it would make sense to slow it down and introduce parallel processing because the brain, every single neuron is computing at the same time. 20 years ago, we had basically a computer would do one thing at a time. So we actually have done that. We now have millions or actually billions of computations that occur at the same time. but we actually haven't slowed down the speed of the circuits. If we slow them down a little bit, we'd use much less power and I think that would actually solve the power problem.

Well, so it'd solve the chip fab bottleneck problem. I think there's imminent innovation in exactly that vein you're talking about. So that buys you another few years but it doesn't switch you to a new computronium kind of paradigm. I don't know. I know you were kind of like quantum isn't really going to change the curve here, and I don't know if you still feel that way on quantum computing, but is there anything else on the horizon that you know of from either inside Google or elsewhere? Well, I think going towards circuits that use a completely different paradigm that are actually done at the molecular level and can be done in three dimensions.

Right now, we're using third dimension in a very limited way. And so we can actually create three-dimensional circuits at the atomic level that will actually match, where, you know, one liter of computing will match 10 billion human beings. Salim, do you want to jump in? Ray, when you look at what's coming over the next, say, year, is there anything that you're incredibly excited about? because one of the things I've heard you talk about is the intersection between these, right? You intersect synthetic biology or neuroscience with AI and computing and all sorts of new fields get instigated at that.

What is most exciting to you and what are you anticipating most excitedly in the next, say, year or two? Well, robotics has actually not really been something that has affected us very much.

Ray KurzweilI think that's going to begin to take place in 2026, 2027.

But you look at robots, I mean, they can do certain things like do a very fast dance, but they really have not been practical. Like if you actually eat a meal and leave your dishes, there's no robot that can actually pick it up and actually clean that up the way a human being can do that. that's going to happen over the next couple of years. So that's one area that has been behind. And I think there's going to be a lot of debate on that. Large language models are pretty fantastic, but we've got to bring that to the real world of actually being able to handle physical things using robots. Salim, you had some questions, I think, on society that were important.

Yeah, you know, if you were advising a 25-year-old today, how would you set about giving them a sense of how to manage their life in this radical uncertainty? How would you kind of tell them what mindsets should they have, et cetera? What advice would you give to a 25-year-old today? My son, Ethan, is involved with venture capital, and most of, well, all of his investments are in AI and actually bringing the practice of AI to all kinds of things that haven't been done yet. And there's a tremendous number of opportunities of applying AI to all kinds of things that we do and creating businesses that would be effective.

So I think the opportunities to create a new business and do things that have not been done before is actually higher than it's ever been before. And you can do it very quickly. You talk a lot about entrepreneurship being really the biggest modality you could go after. I think there's a great comment by Kevin Kelly where he said the next 10,000 business plans will be take a domain and add AI to it. Yeah. Ray, you ever feel like you were just born in the wrong era? like if you think about what you did early on with the the keyboard you know the company around it then the omni font character recognition you know the same person today We'd probably be looking at a billion-dollar valuation within a year, year and a half of founding.

Well, I enjoyed bringing some of the concepts that we use today in decades past. Let's do a quick speed round to close out this session with Ray. Alex, you want to kick it off? All right, Ray. Here's a really fast question. So the cliche is that every American male thinks about ancient Rome at least once per day. So here's my cliche question for you. Really? Really, we're going to go there. The question, Ray, is why didn't ancient Rome have an industrial revolution? And what does the answer to that question teach us about technical revolutions that we could be having today, but otherwise aren't?

Well, they did have a technical revolution, given the capabilities of that time. We can only create things that are feasible. And in keeping with the rate of progress, which was feasible at that time, So I think they did okay. Dave, over to you, pal. I feel like I'm seeing the passing of the torch of the futurist here from Ray to Peter to Alex. But I'm really curious if you are happy with your life as a great futurist, because you were already a great entrepreneur before that. And there were many, many years in the middle there where everyone I talked to around MIT or elsewhere was like, yeah, I think Ray's wrong.

I think Ray's wrong. I think Ray's wrong. Now, obviously, you're on top of the world again, but there's a lot of years of just the pain and suffering that goes along with anyone who tries to predict the future. So any regrets? Any advice for future futurists? I mean, I got used to it. And there was certain people that were able to think in the future, like, for example, Singularity University, which Peter and I started, could think about how to go beyond what conventional people were thinking. But it didn't really bother me. that people were not able to think in an exponential manner at the time.

Really? Thick skin? Okay. Salim? The fact that it didn't bother you is why I think you're a time-traveling avatar from the future. Here's my question. Right now, you've said that intelligence and energy are the two things that will become abundant in the future. It seems right now that energy is the limiting factor. Are you excited about what's coming with nuclear and fusion, et cetera? Are there other forms of energy generation that you're looking at? And when do you think we'll have a major breakthrough around some of that? I mean, I'm not that enthusiastic about nuclear. I still think it's dangerous.

There are two things we can do about energy. energy, we can use reversible energy, which most of the computation would be using reversible energy, which in theory uses no energy at all because it reverses itself and gives back the energy that it's taken. We haven't actually experimented with that, but that seems feasible. And I also mentioned the other thing where we could reduce the speed, dramatically reduce the amount of energy it requires, and therefore overcome the excessive use of energy. Right now, we're running things at the very maximum speed, and it uses a great deal of energy. We could reduce that a little and really overcome the energy at that point.

But ultimately, we will go to reversible energy using atomic levels of computation, which don't require any energy, at least in theory. Ray, I want to take a second and say thank you for the extraordinary partnership we've had over these last number of decades. I remember our first lunch together where we kicked around the idea of Singularity University, and I think you waited a nanosecond before saying yes. And just the great joy and a shout out to all the Singularity alumni out there who are listening. and part of this journey. The singularity is now, has sort of been our mantra and our war cry here.

On a 10 scale, how optimistic are you about the future of humanity? I'd say I'm a 10, so. All right. Well, that's a good place to wrap it up. Ray, on behalf of the Moonshot Mates, thank you for all of your wisdom. Thank you for charting the path for us. Yeah, well, this was a great discussion. I appreciate it very much can't wait for that biography too everybody can eye out for that and look forward to seeing you in May for our follow on book launch event Dave, safe travels to the World Economic Forum Salim, I'll see you I'll come and pick you up and see you in an hour we head to the X-Files board meeting Alex, enjoy Paris and Switzerland thank you amazing, alright guys see you all If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate.

Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends.

Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week. you