Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321

Ray Kurzweil 0:00 By the time we get to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold, and it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like.

Lex Fridman 0:13 The following is a conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, and futurist, who has an optimistic view of our future as a human civilization, predicting that exponentially improving technologies will take us to a point of a singularity beyond which super-intelligent, artificial intelligence will transform our world in nearly unimaginable ways. 18 years ago, in the book Singularity is Near, he predicted that the onset of the singularity will happen in the year 2045. He still holds to this prediction and estimate. In fact, he's working on a new book on this topic that will hopefully be out next year. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Ray Kurzweil.

Lex Fridman 1:06 In your 2005 book titled The Singularity Is Near, you predicted that the singularity will happen in 2045.

Ray Kurzweil 1:14 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:15 So now, 18 years later, do you still estimate that the singularity will happen on, uh, 2045? And maybe first, what is the singularity, the technological singularity, and when will it happen?

Ray Kurzweil 1:27 Singularity is where computers really change our view of what's important and change who we are. But we're getting close to some salient things that will change who we are. A key thing is 2029 when computers will pass the Turing test. And there's also some controversy whether the Turing test is valid. I believe it is. Uh, most people do believe that, but there's some controversy about that. But Stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029. I made this in 1999 in my book-

Lex Fridman 2:10 The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Ray Kurzweil 2:12 Right.

Lex Fridman 2:12 And then you repeated the prediction in 2005.

Ray Kurzweil 2:15 In 2005.

Lex Fridman 2:16 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 2:17 So they held a international conference, you might have been aware of it, uh, of AI experts in 1999 to assess this view. So people gave different predictions and they took a poll, and it was really the first time that AI experts worldwide were polled on this prediction. Uh, and the average poll was 100 years. Uh, 20% believed it would never happen, and that was the view in 1999. 80% believed it would happen, but not within their lifetimes. There's been so many advances in AI, uh, that the poll of AI experts has come down over the- the years. So a year ago, uh, something called Meticulus, which you may be aware of, assessed its different types of experts on the future. They again assessed what AI experts then felt and they were saying 2042.

Lex Fridman 3:18 For the Turing test?

Ray Kurzweil 3:20 For the Turing test.

Lex Fridman 3:22 (laughs) So it's coming down.

Ray Kurzweil 3:23 And I was still saying 2029.

Lex Fridman 3:25 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 3:26 A few weeks ago, they again did another poll and it was 2030. So, uh, AI experts now basically agree with me. I haven't changed at all. I've stayed with 2029. Um, and AI experts now agree with me, but they didn't agree at first.

Lex Fridman 3:47 So Alan Turing formulated the Turing test and-

Ray Kurzweil 3:51 Right. Now, what he said was v- very little about it. I mean, the 1950 paper where he had articulated the Turing test, he- there's, like, a few lines that, uh, talk about the Turing test. Um, and it really wasn't, uh, very clear how to administer it. And he- and he said if it- if they did it in, like, 15 minutes that would be sufficient, which I don't really think is- is the case. These large language models now, some people are convinced by it already. I mean, you can talk to it and it'll have a conversation with you, and you can actually talk to it for hours. Um, so it requires a little more depth. There's some problems with large language models, which we can talk about. Um, but some people are convinced by the Turing test. Now, if somebody passes the Turing test, what- what are the implications of that? Does that mean that they're sentient, that they're conscious or- or not? It's- it's not necessarily clear what the implications are. Anyway, I- I believe 2029, that's six, seven years from now, uh, we will have something that passes the Turing test, and a valid Turing test, meaning it goes for hours, not just a few minutes.

Lex Fridman 5:15 Can you speak to that a little bit? What is your formulation of the Turing test? You've- you've proposed a very difficult version of the Turing test. So what- what does that look like?

Ray Kurzweil 5:25 Basically it's just to assess it over several hours, um, and also have, uh, a human judge that's fairly sophisticated on what computers can do and can't do. Um, if you take somebody who's not that sophisticated, or even a- a average engineer, uh, they may not really assess various aspects of it.

Lex Fridman 5:52 So you really want the human to challenge the system-

Ray Kurzweil 5:55 Exactly. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 5:57 ... on its ability to do things like commonsense reasoning, perhaps?

Ray Kurzweil 6:00 That's actually a key problem with large language models. They don't do, uh, these kinds of...... uh, tests that would involve assessing, uh, chains of reasoning. Um, but you can lose track of that. If you, if you talk to them, they actually can talk to you pretty well.

Lex Fridman 6:22 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 6:22 And you can be convinced by it. But it's somebody that w- would really convince you that it's a human. Uh, whatever that takes. May- maybe it would take days or weeks, um, but it would really convince you that it's human. Um, large language models, uh, can appear that way. You can read conversations and th- they appear pretty good. There are some problems with it. It doesn't do math very well. You can ask, "Well, how many legs did 10 elephants have?" And they'll tell you, "Well, okay, th- each elephant has four legs and it's 10 elephants, so it's 40 legs." And you go, "Okay, that's pretty good. How, how many legs do 11 elephants have?" And it d-

Lex Fridman 7:08 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 7:08 They don't seem to understand the question.

Lex Fridman 7:11 Do all humans understand that question?

Ray Kurzweil 7:14 No. That's the key thing. I mean, how advanced a human do you want it to be? But we do, we do expect a human to be able to do multi-chain reasoning, uh, to be able to take a few facts and put them together. Not perfectly. Uh, and we se- we see that, you know, in a lot of polls that people don't do that perfectly at all. But, um ... so it's not, it's not very well-defined, but it, it's something where it really would convince you that it's a human.

Lex Fridman 7:45 Is your intuition that large language models will not be solely the kind of system that passes the Turing test in 2029? Do we need something else?

Ray Kurzweil 7:56 No, I think... No, I think it will be a large language model, but they have to go beyond what, what they're doing now. Uh, I think we're getting there. And, and another key issue i- is if somebody actually passes the Turing test validly, I would believe they're conscious. And then not everybody would say that. Say, "Okay, well, it can pass the Turing test, but we don't really believe that it's conscious." That's a whole nother issue. Um, but if it really passes the Turing test, I would believe that it's conscious. Uh, but I don't believe that of, uh, large language models today.

Lex Fridman 8:32 If it appears to be conscious, that's as good as being conscious, at least for you, in some-

Ray Kurzweil 8:39 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 8:39 ... in some sense?

Ray Kurzweil 8:40 I mean, consciousness is not something that's scientific. Uh, I mean, I believe you're conscious, but it's really just a belief. And we believe that about other humans that, that at least appear to be conscious. Um, when you go outside of shared human assumption, uh, like a- are animals conscious? Some people believe they're not conscious, some people believe they are conscious. And would a machine that acts just like a human be conscious? I mean, I believe it would be. But th- but that's really a philosophical belief. It's not... you can't prove it. I can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious. There's nothing that you can do that would be... that would indicate that.

Lex Fridman 9:30 It's like saying a piece of art is beautiful. You can say it, multiple people can experience a piece of art as beautiful, um, but you can't prove it.

Ray Kurzweil 9:41 But it's also an extremely important issue.

Lex Fridman 9:44 Yes.

Ray Kurzweil 9:44 I mean, imagine if you had something where n- nobody's conscious. Th- the world may as well not exist. Um... and so some people, like, say, Marvin Minsky, um, said, "Well, consciousness is not logical, it's not scientific, and therefore we should dismiss it." And any answer... any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed. But when he actually engaged with somebody wh- who was conscious, he actually acted as if they were conscious.

Lex Fridman 10:22 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 10:22 He didn't ignore that.

Lex Fridman 10:24 He acted as if consciousness does matter.

Ray Kurzweil 10:26 Exactly. Whereas he said it didn't matter. Uh-

Lex Fridman 10:30 (laughs) Well, that's Marvin Minsky.

Ray Kurzweil 10:31 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:32 (laughs) He's full of contradictions.

Ray Kurzweil 10:34 But that's true of, of a lot of people as well. Um...

Lex Fridman 10:37 But to you, consciousness matters.

Ray Kurzweil 10:39 But to me it's, it's very important. But, uh, but I would say it's not a scientific issue. Uh, it's a philosophical issue, and people have different views. Uh, some people believe that anything that makes a decision is conscious. So your light switch is conscious. Its level of consciousness is low, it's not very interesting, but, but that's a consciousness. Uh, and anything... so a computer that makes a, a more interesting decision, still not at human levels, but it's also conscious and at a higher level than your light switch. Uh, so that's one view. Uh, there's many different views of what consciousness is.

Lex Fridman 11:20 So if, uh, a system passes the Turing test, it's not scientific, but, uh, in issues of philosophy, things like ethics start to enter the picture. Do you think there would be... we would start contending as a human species about the ethics of turning off such a machine?

Ray Kurzweil 11:43 Yeah. I mean, that's definitely come up. Hasn't come up in reality yet, but-

Lex Fridman 11:49 Yet.

Ray Kurzweil 11:50 But I'm talking about 2029, it's not that many years from now. Um, and so what are our obligations to it? Uh, it has a different... I mean, a computer that's conscious has, has a little bit different, uh, connotations than a human. Um, we have a continuous consciousness.... we're in an entity that, uh, does not last forever. Um, now, actually, a significant portion of humans still exist, and are therefore still conscious. Um, but anybody who is over a certain age doesn't exist anymore. That wouldn't be true of a computer program, but you could completely turn it off and, and a copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it. And so it has a different type of, uh, validity. Uh, you could actually take it back in time. You could eliminate its memory and have it go over again. I mean, it has a different kind of connotation than humans do.

Lex Fridman 13:01 Well, perhaps you can do the same thing with humans, it's just that we don't know how to do that yet.

Ray Kurzweil 13:06 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 13:06 It's possible that we figure out all of these things on the machine first. But that doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious.

Ray Kurzweil 13:15 Right. I mean, if you look at the way people react to, say, 3PO or other, uh, machines that are conscious in movies, uh, they don't actually present how it's conscious, but we see that they are a machine. And people will believe that they are conscious. And they'll actually worry about it if they get into trouble and so on.

Lex Fridman 13:37 So 2029 is going to be the first year when a, a major thing happens.

Ray Kurzweil 13:43 Right.

Lex Fridman 13:43 And that, that will shake our civilization to start to consider the role of AI in this world.

Ray Kurzweil 13:49 Well, yes and no. I mean, there's this one guy at Google who claimed that the machine was conscious.

Lex Fridman 13:58 But that's just one person.

Ray Kurzweil 14:00 Right. So it-

Lex Fridman 14:00 When it starts to happen to scale...

Ray Kurzweil 14:03 Well, that's exactly right. Because most people have not taken that position. I don't take that position. I mean, I've used, uh, different things, um, uh, like this and they don't appear to, to me to be conscious. As we eliminate various problems of, of these large language models, uh, more and more people will accept that they're conscious. So when we get to 2029, more, uh, I think a, a large fraction of, of people will believe that they're conscious. Uh, so it's not gonna happen all at once. Uh, I believe that it will actually happen gradually, and it's already started to happen.

Lex Fridman 14:47 And so that, uh, takes us one step closer to

Lex Fridman 14:51 the singularity.

Ray Kurzweil 14:52 Another step then is in the 2030s when we can actually connect our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, to computers. And, I mean, ju- just as this actually gains a lot to being connected to computers that will amplify its abilities, I mean, if this did not have any connection, it, it would be pretty stupid. I- it could not answer any of your questions.

Lex Fridman 15:21 If you're just listening to this, by the way, Ray is holding up the, uh, the all-powerful, uh, smartphone.

Ray Kurzweil 15:29 So, we- we're gonna do that directly from our brains. I mean, these are pretty good. These already have amplified our intelligence. I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be if I didn't have this. 'Cause I remember when I first wrote The Age of Intelligent Machines, um, there, there was no way to get, uh, information from computers. I actually would go to a library, find a book, find the page that had an information I wanted, and I'd go to the copier and my most significant, uh, information tool was a roll of quarters where I could feed the, the copier.

Lex Fridman 16:08 (laughs) Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 16:08 So we're already greatly advanced that we have these things. There's a few problems with it. First of all, I, I constantly put it down and I don't remember where I put it. I've actually never lost it. But, um, you have to find it, and then you have to turn it on, so there's a certain amount of steps. It would actually be quite useful if someone would just listen to your conversation and say, "Uh, oh, that's, you know, so-and-so actress," and, and tell you what you're talking about.

Lex Fridman 16:41 So going from active to passive where it just permeates your whole life...

Ray Kurzweil 16:46 Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman 16:47 ... the way your brain does when you're awake. Your brain is always there.

Ray Kurzweil 16:51 Right. Now, that's something that could actually just, just about be done today, where it would listen to your conversation, understand what you're saying, understand what you're, uh, not missing and give you that information. But another step is to actually go inside your brain.

Lex Fridman 17:07 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 17:08 Uh, and there are some prototypes where you can connect to your brain. They actually don't have the, the amount of bandwidth that we need. They can work, but they work fairly slowly. So if it, if it actually would connect to your neocortex, and the neocortex which I describe in How to Create a Mind, uh, the neocortex is actually, uh, it has different levels. And as you go up the levels, it's kind of like a pyramid. The top level is fairly small, and that's the level where you want to connect, uh, these brain extenders. Um, so I believe that will happen in the 2030s. We will actually g- So, so just the way this is, uh, greatly amplified by being connected to the cloud, uh, we can connect our own brain to the cloud and, uh, just do what we can do by using this machine.

Lex Fridman 18:14 Do you think it would look like a, the brain-computer interface, uh, of like Neuralink? So would it be-

Ray Kurzweil 18:19 Well, Neuralink's an attempt to do that. It doesn't have the bandwidth that we need.... um...

Lex Fridman 18:26 Yet, right?

Ray Kurzweil 18:27 Right. But I, I think... I mean, they're gonna get permission for this because there are a lot of people who absolutely need it because they can't communicate. And I know a couple of people like that, who have ideas and they cannot... they don't th- they cannot move their muscles and so on, they can't communicate. Uh, so f- for them, this would be very valuable. But we could all use it. Basically, it'd be, uh, turn this into something that would be like we have a phone, but it would be in our minds, w- it would be kind of instantaneous.

Lex Fridman 19:07 And maybe communication between two people would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language.

Ray Kurzweil 19:14 Yes.

Lex Fridman 19:14 Of spoken word.

Ray Kurzweil 19:15 Exactly. We, we don't know what that would be, although we do know the c- uh, computers can ch- share information, like language instantly. They can share many, many books in a, in a second, so we could do that as well. If you look at what our brain does, it actually can manipulate different parameters. So we, we talk about these large language models, um ... I mean, I, I had written that, uh, it requires a certain amount of information in order to, uh, be effective, and that we would not see AI really being effective until it got to that level.

Lex Fridman 20:03 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 20:04 And we had large language models that were, like, 10 billion bytes, didn't work very well. Th- they finally got to 100 billion bytes and now they work fairly well, and, and now we're going to a trillion bytes. If you say, uh, LaMDA has 100 billion bytes, what does that mean? Well, what, w- what if you had something that had one byte, one, one parameter? Maybe you want to tell whether or not something's, uh, an elephant or not, and so you put in something w- that would detect its trunk. If it has a trunk, it's an elephant. If it doesn't have a trunk, it's not an elephant. And that would work, work fairly well. There's a few problems with it. Um, and it really wouldn't be able to tell what a trunk is, but anyway...

Lex Fridman 20:50 And maybe other things other than elephants have trunks.

Ray Kurzweil 20:54 Yes.

Lex Fridman 20:54 You might get really confused.

Ray Kurzweil 20:55 Yes. Yeah, exactly. Um...

Lex Fridman 20:57 I'm not sure which animals have trunks, but you know.

Ray Kurzweil 21:00 Um...

Lex Fridman 21:00 Plus, how do you define a trunk? But yeah, that's one parameter.

Ray Kurzweil 21:05 So these th-

Lex Fridman 21:05 You, you could do okay. (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 21:06 So these things have 100 billion parameters.

Lex Fridman 21:08 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 21:08 So they're able to deal with very complex issues.

Lex Fridman 21:12 All kinds of trunks.

Ray Kurzweil 21:14 Human beings actually have a little bit more than that, but they're g- they're getting to the point where they can emulate humans. Um, if we were able to connect this to our, uh, neocortex, we would basically add more of these, uh, abilities to make distinctions, and it could ultimately b- be much smarter, and also be attached to information that w- we feel is reliable. Um, so that's where we're headed.

Lex Fridman 21:45 So you think that there will be a, a merger in the '30s?

Ray Kurzweil 21:49 Right.

Lex Fridman 21:49 An increasing amount of merging between the, either human brain and the AI brain.

Ray Kurzweil 21:56 Exactly. And, and the AI brain is really an, uh, an emulation of human beings. I mean, that's why we're creating them, because human beings act the same way, and this is basically to amplify them. I mean, this amplifies our brain. Um, it's a little bit clumsy to interact with, but it definitely, uh, it's a, you know, way beyond what w- what we had 15 years ago.

Lex Fridman 22:21 But the implementation becomes different. Just like a bird versus the airplane, the ... even though the AI brain is an emulation, it starts adding features we might not otherwise have, like ability to consume a huge amount of information quickly. Like look up thousands of Wikipedia articles in one take.

Ray Kurzweil 22:43 Exactly. And we can get, for example, to issues like simulated biology where it can, uh, simulate many different things at once. Um, I mean, we, we already had one example of simulated biology, which is the Moderna vaccine, um ... And, and that's gonna be now the way in which we create, uh, medications. But they were able to simulate what each example of an mRNA would do to a human being, and they were able to simulate that quite reliably. And we actually simulated billions of different mRNA sequences, and they found the ones that, that were the best and they created the vaccine. And they did, uh, and talked about doing it quickly. They did that in two days. Now, how long would a human being take to, to simulate billions of different mRNA sequences? Uh, I don't know that we could do it all, but it would take many years. They did it in two days. And one of the reasons that people didn't like vaccines is because it was done too quickly. "Oh, it was done too fast." Uh, and they actually included the time it, it took to test it out, which was 10 months, so this is ... So they figured, "Okay, it took 10 months to create this." Actually, it took us two days.

Lex Fridman 24:08 (laughs) Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 24:09 And we also will be able to ultimately do the tests in a, in a few days as well.

Lex Fridman 24:14 Oh, 'cause we can simulate how the body will respond to it-

Ray Kurzweil 24:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:17 ... more and more

Narrator 24:17 ... because of that.

Ray Kurzweil 24:17 Now, that's a little bit more complicated, 'cause the body's... has a lot of different e- elements, and we have to simulate all of that. Uh, but that's coming as well.... so, ultimately we could create it in a few days and then test it in a few days, and it would be done. Uh, and we can do that with every type of medical ins- you know, insufficiency that we have.

Lex Fridman 24:40 So, curing all diseases.

Ray Kurzweil 24:42 Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:43 Um, improving certain functions of the body. Supplements, drugs for recreation, for health, for performance, for productivity, all that kind of stuff.

Ray Kurzweil 24:56 Well, that's where we're headed. 'Cause I mean, right- right now, we have a very inefficient way of creating these new medications. Um, but we've already shown it. And the Moderna vaccine is actually the best, uh, of the- of the vaccines we've had. Uh, and it literally took two days to create. Uh, and we'll get to the point where we can test it out, also, quickly.

Lex Fridman 25:20 Are you impressed by AlphaFold and, uh, the pro- the s- solution to the protein folding? Which e- essentially is simulating modeling this primitive building block of life, which is a protein, in its 3D shape?

Ray Kurzweil 25:36 It's pretty remarkable that they can actually predict what the 3D shape of these things are, but they did it with the same type of neural net that won, for example, the Go, uh, test. And then-

Lex Fridman 25:51 So, it's all the same.

Ray Kurzweil 25:52 It's all the same.

Lex Fridman 25:53 All the same approaches.

Ray Kurzweil 25:54 I mean, they- they took that same thing and just changed the rules to chess, and within a couple of days, it- it now played a master level of chess greater than any human being. Um... and it- and the same thing then worked for AlphaFold, uh, which no human had done. I mean, human beings could do... the best humans could maybe do 15, 20%, uh, of figuring out what the shape would be. And th- this... after a few takes, it ul- it ultimately did just about 100%.

Lex Fridman 26:32 Do you still think that singularity will happen in 2045? And what does that look like?

Ray Kurzweil 26:40 You know, o- once we can amplify our brain with computers directly, which will happen in the 2030s, that's gonna keep growing. That's another whole theme, which is the exponential growth of computing power. Yeah, this-

Lex Fridman 26:55 Yeah, so looking at price/performance of computation from 1939 to 2021?

Ray Kurzweil 26:59 Right, so that starts with the very first computer, actually created by a German during World War II.

Lex Fridman 27:05 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 27:06 And you might have thought that that might be significant, but actually, the Germans didn't think computers were significant, and they completely rejected it. Uh, the second one is also the Zuse-2.

Lex Fridman 27:20 And by the way, we're looking at a plot with the X axis being the year from 1935 to 2025. And on the Y axis, in log scale, is computation per second per constant dollar. So, dollar normalized-

Ray Kurzweil 27:35 Ouch.

Lex Fridman 27:36 ... to inflation. And it's growing linearly on the log scale, which means it's growing exponentially.

Ray Kurzweil 27:41 The third one was the British computer, uh, which the allies did take very seriously. And it cracked the Ger- the German code and enabled the British to win the Battle of Britain, which otherwise absolutely would not have happened if they hadn't cracked the code using that computer. But that's an exponential graph, so a straight line on that graph is exponential growth. And you see 80 years of exponential growth. And I would say about every five years, and this happened shortly before the pandemic, people saying... well, they call it Moore's Law, which is n- not the correct... because that's not all Intel. In fact, this started decades before Intel was even created, and it wasn't with transistors formed into a grid. Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 28:34 So, it's not just transistor count or transistor size.

Ray Kurzweil 28:37 Right. I mean, this started with re-

Lex Fridman 28:38 It's a bunch of different components.

Ray Kurzweil 28:39 ... with relays, then went to vacuum tubes, then went to individual transistors an- and then to integrated circuits.

Lex Fridman 28:48 Yes.

Ray Kurzweil 28:49 Um... and Integrated Circuits actually starts, like, in the middle of this graph. And it has nothing to do with Intel. Intel actually was, you know, a key part of this, but a few years ago, they s- they stopped making the fastest chips. Uh... but if you take the fastest chip of any technology in that year, you get this kind of graph. And it's g- it's definitely continuing for 80 years.

Lex Fridman 29:19 So, you don't think Moore's Law, broadly defined, is dead? It's been declared dead multiple times (laughs) throughout this process.

Ray Kurzweil 29:29 Right. I don't like the term Moore's Law, because it has nothing to do with Moore or with Intel.

Lex Fridman 29:34 Sure. (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 29:34 But yes, uh, the- the exponential growth of computing is continuing.

Lex Fridman 29:40 Yes.

Ray Kurzweil 29:41 Uh... and has never stopped.

Lex Fridman 29:43 From various sources.

Ray Kurzweil 29:44 I mean, it went through World War II, it went through p- global recessions. It's just continuing. Um... and if you continue that out, along with software gains, which is a whole nother issue, um... and they really multiply, whatever you get from software gains, you multiply by the computer gains, you get faster and faster speed. Uh, this is actually the fastest computer models that have been created. And- and that actually expands roughly twice a year. Like, every six months, it expands by two.

Lex Fridman 30:22 So, we're looking at a plot from 2010 to 2022. On the X axis is the publication date of the model, and the- perhaps sometimes an actual paper associated with it. And on the Y-... y-axis is training compute and flops. And so basically this is looking at the increase in the, not transistors, but the computational power of neural networks.

Ray Kurzweil 30:51 Yeah, it's the computational power that created these models. And that's doubled every six months.

Lex Fridman 30:57 Which is even faster than

Ray Kurzweil 30:59 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 30:59 ... transistor division.

Ray Kurzweil 31:00 Yeah. Now actually, since that goes faster than the, the amount of cost, this has actually become a, a greater investment to create these. But at any rate, by the time you get to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold, and it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like.

Lex Fridman 31:25 And that's the singularity, where we can't even imagine.

Ray Kurzweil 31:28 Right. That's why we call it the singularity, because the singularity in physics, something gets sucked into its singularity and you can't tell what's going on in there because no information can get out of it. There's various problems with that.

Lex Fridman 31:42 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 31:42 But that's the idea. It, it's too, uh, it's too much beyond what we can imagine.

Lex Fridman 31:49 Do you think it's possible we don't notice? That what the singularity actually feels like, is we just live through it with exponentially increasing, uh, cognitive capabilities and we almost, because everything is moving so quickly, don't- aren't really able to introspect that our life has changed?

Ray Kurzweil 32:13 Yeah, but I mean, we will have that much greater capacity to understand things, so we should be able to look back.

Lex Fridman 32:20 Looking at history, understand history.

Ray Kurzweil 32:22 But, but we will need people basically like you and me to actually think about these things.

Lex Fridman 32:28 Think about it. But we might be distracted by all the other sources of entertainment and fun, because the exponential power of intellect is growing, but also the- (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 32:40 That'll be a lot of fun. Uh...

Lex Fridman 32:42 (laughs) The, the amount of ways you can have, you know-

Ray Kurzweil 32:46 I mean, we already have a lot of fun with computer games and so on that are really quite remarkable.

Lex Fridman 32:50 What

Lex Fridman 32:51 do you think about, uh, the digital world, uh, the metaverse, virtual reality? Will that have a component in this or will most of our advancement be in physical reality?

Ray Kurzweil 33:02 Well, that's a little bit like Second Life, although the Second Life actually didn't work very well because it couldn't actually handle too many people and... I don't think the metaverse has come to being. I think there will be something like that, that it won't necessarily be from that one company. I mean, there's gonna be c- competitors. But yes, we're gonna live increasingly online. And, and particularly when, if our brains are online, I mean, how could we not be online?

Lex Fridman 33:31 Do you think it's possible that, given this merger with AI, most of our meaningful interactions will be in this virtual world? Most of our life, we fall in love, we make friends, we come up with ideas, we do collaborations, we have fun.

Ray Kurzweil 33:49 I actually know somebody who's marrying somebody that they never met.

Lex Fridman 33:53 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 33:54 Uh, I think they just met her briefly before the wedding, but she act- she actually fell in love with this other person, uh, never having met them. Uh, and I think it's a, uh, I think the love is real. So...

Lex Fridman 34:10 That's a beautiful story, but do you think that story-

Ray Kurzweil 34:12 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 34:13 ... is one that might be experienced as opposed to by hundreds of thousands of people, but instead by hundreds of millions of people?

Ray Kurzweil 34:22 I mean, it really gives you appreciation for these virtual ways of communicating. Uh, and if anybody can do it, then it's really not such a, a freak story. Uh, so I think more and more people will do that.

Lex Fridman 34:37 But that's turning our back on our entire history of evolution where the old days we used to fall in love by holding hands and, and sitting by the fire, that kind of stuff. Here, you're, you're-

Ray Kurzweil 34:50 Well, I actually, I actually have five patents on where you can hold hands even if you're s- separated.

Lex Fridman 34:57 (laughs) Great.

Ray Kurzweil 34:57 Um...

Lex Fridman 34:58 So the touch, the sense, it's all just senses. It's all just-

Ray Kurzweil 35:02 Yeah. I mean, touch is-

Lex Fridman 35:03 ... could be replicated.

Ray Kurzweil 35:03 It's not just that you're touching someone or not, there's a whole way of doing it and it's very subtle and... But ultimately, we can emulate all of that.

Lex Fridman 35:17 Are you excited by that future? Do you worry about that future?

Ray Kurzweil 35:23 I have certain worries about the future, but not-

Lex Fridman 35:26 Not that.

Ray Kurzweil 35:26 ... virtual touch. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:29 (laughs) Well, I agree with you.

Lex Fridman 35:31 You described six stages in the evolution of information processing in the universe as you started to describe. Can you maybe talk through some of those stages from the physics and chemistry, to DNA and brains, to, and then to the, to the very end, to the very beautiful end of this process?

Ray Kurzweil 35:51 Well, it actually gets more rapid. So physics and chemistry, that's how we started. Um... And we had-

Lex Fridman 36:00 So, so the very beginning of the universe.

Ray Kurzweil 36:02 We have lots of electrons and various things traveling around and th- and that took actually many billions of years. Kind of jumping ahead here to kind of some of the last stages where we have things like love and creativity, it's really quite remarkable that that happens. But finally, physics and chemistry created biology and DNA, and now you had actually one type of molecule that described the cutting edge of, of this process. Um, and we go from physics and chemistry to biology.And finally, biology created brains. I mean, not all, not everything that's created by biology has a brain, but eventually brains came along.

Lex Fridman 36:56 And all of this is happening faster and faster.

Ray Kurzweil 36:58 Yeah. It created in- increasingly complex organisms. Another key thing is actually not just brains, but our thumb, uh...

Lex Fridman 37:12 Uh-

Ray Kurzweil 37:12 'Cause there's a lot of animals with brains even bigger than humans. I mean, elephants have a bigger brain, whales have a bigger brain, uh, but they've not created technology because they don't have a thumb. So, that's o- one of the really key elements in the evolution of humans.

Lex Fridman 37:34 This, uh, physical manipulator device-

Ray Kurzweil 37:37 Right.

Lex Fridman 37:37 ...that's useful for puzzle solving in the physicals reality.

Ray Kurzweil 37:41 So, I could think, I could look at a tree and go, "Oh, well, I could actually strip that branch down and eliminate the leaves and carve a t- tip on it and I would create technology." Uh, and you can't do that if you don't have a thumb.

Lex Fridman 37:56 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 37:57 Um, so, uh, thumbs then created technology, and technology also g- uh, had a memory, and now those memories are competing with th- the scale and scope of human beings. And ultimately, we'll go beyond it, and then we're gonna merge human technology with, uh, with human intelligence and understand how human, uh, intelligence works, which I think we already do. And we're putting that into, uh, our human technology.

Lex Fridman 38:39 So, create the technology inspired by our own intelligence, and then that technology supersedes us in terms of its capabilities, and we ride along. Or, do you, do you ultimately see it as

Ray Kurzweil 38:50 (intriguing music) We ride along, but a lot of people don't see that.

Lex Fridman 38:52 Yes.

Ray Kurzweil 38:52 They say, "Well, okay, you got humans and you got machines, and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans." And you can already see that. Uh, Lee Sedol, who's like the best Go player in the world, says he's not gonna play Go anymore.

Lex Fridman 39:09 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 39:10 Because playing Go for human, that was like the ultimate in intelligence 'cause no one else could do that. Uh, but now a, a machine can actually go way beyond him. And so he says, "Well, there's no point in playing it anymore."

Lex Fridman 39:25 That may be more true for games than it is for life. I think there's a lot of benefit to working together with AI in regular life. So, if you were to put a probability on it, is it more likely that we merge with AI, or AI replaces us?

Ray Kurzweil 39:43 A lot of people just think computers come along and they compete with them, we can't really compete, and that's the end of it. Uh, as opposed to them increasing our abilities. And if you look at most technology, it, it increases our abilities. Um, I mean, look at the history of work. Uh, look at what people did 100 years ago. Does any of that exist anymore? People... I mean, if you were to predict that all of these jobs would go away and would be done by machines, people would say, "Well, there's gonna be... no one's gonna have jobs, and it's, it's gonna be massive unemployment." Um, but I show in this book that's coming out, uh, th- the amount of people that are working, even as a percentage of the population, has gone way up.

Lex Fridman 40:41 We're looking at the X-axis here from 1774 to 2024, and on the Y-axis, personal income per capita in constant dollars. And it's growing super linearly. I mean, it's-

Ray Kurzweil 40:53 Yeah, 2021 constant dollars, and it's gone way up. That's not what you were to predict, given that we would predict that all these jobs would go away.

Lex Fridman 41:04 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 41:05 But the reason it's gone up is because we've basically enhanced our own capabilities by using these machines, as opposed to them just competing with us. That's a key way in which we're gonna be able to become far smarter than we are now, by increasing the number of different parameters we can consider in making a decision.

Lex Fridman 41:26 I was very fortunate, I am very fortunate to be able to get a glimpse, preview of your, uh, um, upcoming book, uh, Singularity Is Nearer. And, uh, one of the themes outside of just discussing the increasing exponential growth of technology, one of the themes is that things are getting better in all aspects of life. And you talk just about, uh, uh, just about this. So, one of the things you're saying is with jobs, so let me just ask about

Lex Fridman 41:57 that. There is a big concern that automation, especially powerful AI, will get rid of jobs, w- there are people who will lose jobs. And as you were saying, the senses throughout history of the 20th century automation did not do that ultimately. And so the question is, will this time be different?

Ray Kurzweil 42:20 Right. That is the question, will, will this time be different? And it really has to do with how quickly we can merge with this type of intelligence. Uh, whether LaMDA or GPT-3 is out there and maybe it's overcome some of its, you know, key problems, uh, and we really have an enhanced human intelligence, that might be a negative scenario. Um-But, I mean, that's... That's why we create technology, is to enhance ourselves. Uh, and I believe we will be enhanced. We're not just gonna sit here with, uh, 300 million n- uh, modules in our neocortex. We're gonna be able to go beyond that. Um, because that's useful, but we can multiply that by 10, uh, 100, 1,000, a million. Um, and you might think, "Well, what's the point of doing that?" It's like asking somebody that's never heard music, "Well, what- what's the value of music?" I mean, you can't appreciate it until you've created it.

Lex Fridman 43:41 There's some worry that there'll be a wealth disparity, you know, a class or wealth disparity. Only the rich people will be... Basically, the rich people will first have access to this kind of thing, and then because of this kind of thing, because the ability to merge will get richer exponentially faster.

Ray Kurzweil 44:02 Yeah. And I'd say that's just like cellphones. I mean, there's like four billion cellphones in the world today. In fact, when cellphones first came out, you had to be fairly wealthy. They weren't very inexpensive. So, you had to have some wealth in order to afford them.

Lex Fridman 44:20 Yeah, they were these big, sexy, uh, phones.

Ray Kurzweil 44:22 And, and, and they didn't work very well.

Lex Fridman 44:24 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 44:24 They did almost nothing.

Lex Fridman 44:25 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 44:26 So, you can only afford these things if you're wealthy at a point where they really don't work very well.

Lex Fridman 44:34 (laughs) So-

Ray Kurzweil 44:35 Um-

Lex Fridman 44:35 So, achieving scale is... And, uh, making it inexpensive is part of making the thing work well.

Ray Kurzweil 44:42 Exactly. So, these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty, pretty cheap.

Lex Fridman 44:47 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 44:47 Uh, I mean, you can get them for few hundred dollars.

Lex Fridman 44:52 Especially given the kind of things it provides for you, there's a lot of people in the Third World that have very little, but they have a smartphone.

Ray Kurzweil 45:00 Yeah, absolutely.

Lex Fridman 45:02 And the same will be true with AI.

Ray Kurzweil 45:03 I mean, I see homeless people have their own cellphones and...

Lex Fridman 45:07 Yeah. So, your sense is any kind of advanced technology will take the same trajectory?

Ray Kurzweil 45:14 Right. It ultimately becomes cheap and will be affordable. Uh, I probably would not be the first person to put, uh, something in my brain to connect to computers, um, 'cause I think it'll have limitations. But once it's really perfected, uh, at that point it'll be pretty inexpensive. I think it'll be pretty affordable.

Lex Fridman 45:39 So, in, in, in which other ways, as you outline in your book, is life getting better? 'Cause I, I think-

Ray Kurzweil 45:45 Well, I have... I mean, I have 50 charts in there-

Lex Fridman 45:48 (laughs) Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 45:49 ... where everything is getting better.

Lex Fridman 45:51 I think there's a kind of cynicism about, um... Like if we, even if we look at extreme poverty, for example.

Ray Kurzweil 45:58 For example, this is actually a poll taken on extreme poverty, and the people were asked, "Has poverty gotten better or worse?"

Lex Fridman 46:08 And the options are increased by 50%, increased by 25%, remained the same, decreased by 25%, decreased by 50%. If you're watching this or listening to this, try to m- try to vote for yourself.

Ray Kurzweil 46:21 70% thought it had gotten worse.

Lex Fridman 46:23 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 46:24 And th- and that's the general impression. 88% thought it had gotten worse or remained the same. Only 1% thought it decreased by 50%, and that is the answer. It actually decreased by 50%.

Lex Fridman 46:39 So, only 1% of people got the right optimistic estimate of how poverty is...

Ray Kurzweil 46:45 Right. And, and, and this is the reality, and it's true of almost everything you look at. You don't wanna go back 100 years or 50 years. Things were quite miserable then, but we tend not to remember that.

Lex Fridman 47:01 So, literacy rate increasing over the past few centuries across all the different nations, nearly to 100% across many of the nations in the world.

Ray Kurzweil 47:11 It's gone way up. Average years of education have gone way up. Life expectancy is also increasing. Life expectancy was 48 in 1900.

Lex Fridman 47:24 And is over 80 now.

Ray Kurzweil 47:26 And it's gonna continue to go up, particularly as we get into more advanced stages of simulated biology.

Lex Fridman 47:33 For life expectancy, these trends are the same for at birth, age one, age five, age 10. So, it's not just the infant mortality.

Ray Kurzweil 47:40 And I have 50 more graphs in the book-

Narrator 47:42 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 47:43 ... about all kinds of things. Uh, even spread of democracy, which might bring up some sort of controversial issues, it, it still has gone way up.

Lex Fridman 47:55 Well, that one is, uh, has gone way up, but that one is a bumpy road, right?

Ray Kurzweil 47:59 Exactly. And some- somebody might represent democracy and, and go backwards. But we basically had no democracies before the creation of the United States, which was a little over two centuries ago. Which, in the scale of human history, isn't that long.

Lex Fridman 48:17 Do you think superintelligent systems will help with democracy? So, what is democracy? Democracy is giving a voice to the populous and, um, having their ideas, having their beliefs, having, um, their views represented.

Ray Kurzweil 48:38 Well, I hope so. Uh, I mean, we've seen social networks can spread, uh, conspiracy theories, uh, which have been quite negative, being, for example, be- being against any kind of stuff that would help your health.

Lex Fridman 48:58 So those kinds of ideas have, uh... On social media, what you notice is they increase engagement. So dramatic division increases engagement. Do you worry about AI systems that will learn to maximize that division?

Ray Kurzweil 49:17 I mean, I do have some concerns about this. Uh, and I f- have a chapter in the book about the perils of advanced AI. Um, spreading misinformation on social networks is one of them, but, uh, there, there are many others.

Lex Fridman 49:36 What's the one that worries you the most, that we should think about to try to avoid?

Ray Kurzweil 49:47 Well, it's, it's hard to choose.

Lex Fridman 49:48 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 49:49 Um, we do have the nuclear power that evolved when I was a child. I remember in... We would actually do these drills against, uh, a nuclear war. We'd get under our desks and put our hands behind our heads to protect us from a nuclear war. Seemed to work. We're still around, so, um...

Lex Fridman 50:15 (laughs) You're protected.

Ray Kurzweil 50:17 But that's still a concern. And there are key dangerous situations that can, uh, take place in biology. Someone could create, uh, a virus that's very... I mean, we have viruses that are, uh, hard to spread, and they can be very dangerous, and we have viruses that are easy to spread, but they're not so dangerous. Um, somebody could create something that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous and be very hard to stop. Uh, it could be something that would spread without people noticing 'cause people could get it, they'd have no symptoms, and then everybody would get it, and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later. So I mean, uh, and th- a- and that actually doesn't occur n- normally because if we were t- to, uh, h- have a problem with that, we wouldn't exist.

Lex Fridman 51:26 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 51:26 So the fact that humans exist means that we don't have viruses that can spread easily and, and kill us because otherwise we wouldn't exist.

Lex Fridman 51:37 Yeah. Viruses don't want to do that. They want, they want to spread and keep the host alive-

Ray Kurzweil 51:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:43 ... somewhat.

Ray Kurzweil 51:44 So you c- you can describe various dangers with biology. Uh, also nanotechnology, uh, which we actually haven't e- experienced yet, but there are people that creating nanotechnology, and I described that in

Ray Kurzweil 51:57 the book.

Lex Fridman 51:57 Now, you're excited by the possibilities of nanotechnology, of nanobots, of being able to do things inside our body, inside our mind that's going to help. What's exciting, what's terrifying about nanobots?

Ray Kurzweil 52:10 What's exciting is that that's a way to communicate with our neocortex because it's... Each neocortex is pretty small, and you need a small entity that can actually get in there and establish a communication channel. And that can really be necessary to connect our brains to AI within ourselves because otherwise it would be hard for us to compete with it.

Lex Fridman 52:38 In a high bandwidth way.

Ray Kurzweil 52:40 Yeah. Yeah. And that's key actually 'cause a, a lot of the things like Neuralink are, are really not high bandwidth yet.

Lex Fridman 52:49 So nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth. How much intelligence would those nanobots have?

Ray Kurzweil 52:56 Yeah. They don't need a lot. Uh, just enough to basically establish c- communication channel to one nanobot, so...

Lex Fridman 53:04 Just primarily about communication-

Ray Kurzweil 53:06 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:07 ... between external computing devices and our biological thinking machine. What worries you about nanobots? Is it similar to with the viruses?

Ray Kurzweil 53:19 Well, I mean, this is the great goo chal- challenge.

Lex Fridman 53:22 Yes.

Ray Kurzweil 53:23 Um, if you had, uh, a nanobot that wanted to create any, any kind of entity and repeat itself, and was able to operate in a natural environment, it could turn everything into that entity and basically destroy all, uh, uh, biological life.

Lex Fridman 53:52 So you mentioned nuclear weapons.

Ray Kurzweil 53:54 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:57 I'd love to hear your opinion about the 21st century and whether you think we might destroy ourselves. And maybe your opinion, if it has changed by looking at what's going on in Ukraine, that we could have a hot war with nuclear powers involved, and the tensions building, and the seeming forgetting of how terrifying and destructive nuclear weapons are. Do you think humans might destroy ourselves in the 21st century? And if we do, how? And how do we avoid it?

Ray Kurzweil 54:38 I don't think that's gonna happen, d- despite the terrors of that war. It is a possibility, but I mean, I, I, I don't...

Lex Fridman 54:50 It's unlikely in your mind?

Ray Kurzweil 54:52 Yeah. Even with the tensions we've had with this one, uh, nuclear power plant that's been taken over, um, it's very tense.... but I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that that's gonna happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in '45, so now we're 77 years later.

Lex Fridman 55:20 Yeah, we're doing pretty good.

Ray Kurzweil 55:22 We've never had a- another one go off through anger.

Lex Fridman 55:27 But people forget. People forget the lessons of history.

Ray Kurzweil 55:31 Well, yeah. That's... I mean, I am worried about it. I mean, the... so that is definitely a challenge.

Lex Fridman 55:37 But you believe that we'll make it out, and ultimately, super intelligent AI will help us make it out, as opposed to, uh, destroy us?

Ray Kurzweil 55:47 I think so. But we, we do have to be mindful of these dangers. And, and there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons, so...

Lex Fridman 55:57 So, to get back to merging with AI, will we be able to upload our mind in a computer in a way where we might even transcend the constraints of our bodies? So, copy our mind into a computer and leave the body behind?

Ray Kurzweil 56:17 Let me describe one thing I've already done with my father.

Lex Fridman 56:21 That's a great story (laughs) .

Ray Kurzweil 56:23 (laughs) So we, we created technology, this is public, came out, I think six years ago, where you could ask any question, and the, the release product, which I think is still on the market, uh, it would read 200,000 books, and then a- and then find the one sentence in 200,000 books that best answered your question. Uh, and it's actually quite interesting, you can ask all kinds of questions and you get the best answer in 200,000 books. Uh, but I was also able to, to take it and, uh, not go through 200,000 books, but go through a book that I put together, which is basically everything my father had written. So everything he had written, I had gathered, and we created a book, everything that Frederick Risarll had written. Now, I didn't think this actually would work that well, because, uh, stuff he'd written was stuff about how to lay out s- I mean, he, uh, did, uh, directed choral groups and music groups, and he would be laying out how the people should... where they should s- sit, and, and, uh, how to fund this, and all, all, all kinds of things that really weren't... didn't seem that interesting. Um, and yet when you ask a question, it would go through it and it would actually give you a very good answer. So I said, "Well, you know, who's the most interesting composer?" And he said, "Well, definitely Brahms." And he would go on about how Brahms was fabulous, and talk about the importance of music education, and...

Lex Fridman 58:18 So you could have a... essentially a, uh, a question and answer conversation with him?

Ray Kurzweil 58:21 So I could have a con- could have a conversation with him, which was actually more interesting than talking to him, because if you talk to him, he'd be concerned about how they're gonna lay out this property to give a choral group.

Lex Fridman 58:34 He'd be concerned about the day-to-day, versus the big questions.

Ray Kurzweil 58:37 Exactly, yeah.

Lex Fridman 58:39 And you did ask about the meaning of life, and he answered, "Love."

Ray Kurzweil 58:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 58:44 (laughs) Do you miss him?

Ray Kurzweil 58:48 Y- yes, I do. Um, you know, you get used to missing somebody after 52 years. And I didn't really have intelligent conversations with him until later in life. Um, in the last few years, he was sick, which meant he was home a lot, and I was actually able to talk to him about different things like music and other things, and, uh, so I miss that very much.

Lex Fridman 59:19 What did you learn about life from your father? What, what part of him is, is with you now?

Ray Kurzweil 59:29 He was devoted to music, and when he would create something to music, it put him in a different world. Uh, otherwise, he was very shy. Um, and if people got together, he tended not to interact with people, just because of his shyness. But when he created music, that... he- he was like a different person.

Lex Fridman 59:55 Do you have that in you, that...

Ray Kurzweil 59:57 Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 59:57 ... kind of light that shines?

Ray Kurzweil 59:59 I mean, I, uh, I got involved with technology at, like, age five.

Lex Fridman 1:00:06 And you fell in love with it in the same way he did with music?

Ray Kurzweil 1:00:09 Yeah, yeah. I remember, this actually happened with my grandmother. She had a, a manual typewriter, and she wrote a book, One Life Is Not Enough, which actually a good title for a book I might write, but...

Lex Fridman 1:00:26 (laughs) .

Ray Kurzweil 1:00:27 And it was about a school she had created. Well, actually, her mother created it. So my mother's mother's mother created this school in 1868, and it was the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls, it went through 14th grade. If you were a girl and you were lucky enough to get an education at all, it would go through, like, ninth grade, and many people didn't have any education as a girl. Uh, this went through 14th grade. Um, her mother created it, she took it over, and the, and the book was about-... uh, the history of the school and her involvement with it. Um, when she presented to me, I was not too interested in the story of the bo- of the school. But I was totally amazed with this manual typewriter. I mean, here was something you could put a blank piece of paper into and you could turn it into something that looked like it came from a book. And you could actually type on it and it looked like it came from a book. It was just amazing to me, and I could see actually how it worked.

Lex Fridman 1:01:42 Hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 1:01:42 And I was also interested in magic. Um, but in magic, if somebody actually knows how it works, the magic goes away. The magic doesn't stay there if you actually understand how it works. But here was technology, I didn't have that word when I was five or six.

Lex Fridman 1:02:01 And the magic was still there for you? (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:02:02 The magic was still there even if you knew how it worked.

Lex Fridman 1:02:05 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:02:07 So I became totally interested in this and then went around, collected little pieces of mechanical objects, from bicycles, from broken radios. I would go through the neighborhood. Uh, this was an era where you would allow a five or six-year-old to, like, roam through the neighborhood and do this. We don't do that anymore.

Lex Fridman 1:02:27 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:02:27 But I didn't know how to put them together, and I said, "If I could just figure out how to put these things together, I could solve any problem." And I actually remember talking to these very old girls, I think they were 10, um, (laughs) and telling them, "I- if I could just figure this out, we could fly, we could do anything." And they said, "Well, you have quite an imagination." (laughs) Um, and then I get... Then when I was in third grade, so I was, like, eight, created, like, a virtual reality theater where people could come on stage and they could move their arms, and all of it was controlled through one control box. It was all done with mechanical technology. And it was a big hit in my third grade class.

Lex Fridman 1:03:20 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:03:21 And then I went on to do things in junior high school science fairs and, and, and high school science fairs. I won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. So, I mean, I became committed to technology when I was five or six years old.

Lex Fridman 1:03:38 You've talked about how you use, uh, lucid dreaming to think, to come up with ideas as a source of creativity. Could you maybe talk through that? Maybe the process of how to... You've invented a lot of things. You've came up and thought through some very interesting ideas. What advice would you give, or h- can you speak to the process of thinking, of how to think, how to think creatively?

Ray Kurzweil 1:04:07 Well, I mean, sometimes I, I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that. But I think the key issue that I would tell younger people, um, is to put yourself in the position that what you're trying to create already exists, and then you explaining, like, uh...

Lex Fridman 1:04:34 (laughs) How it works? (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:04:37 Exactly. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:04:38 That's really interesting. You paint the world that you would like to exist, you think can exist, and reverse engineer that.

Ray Kurzweil 1:04:45 And, and then you actually imagine you're giving a speech about how you created this.

Lex Fridman 1:04:50 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:04:50 Well, you'd have to then work backwards as to h- h- how you would create it in order to make it work.

Lex Fridman 1:04:57 That's brilliant, and that requires, uh, s- some imagination too, some first principles thinking. You have to visualize that world. That's really interesting.

Ray Kurzweil 1:05:07 And generally when I talk about things we're trying to invent, I would use th- the present tense as if it already exists. Not just to give myself that, that confidence, but everybody else who's working on it. Um, we just have to kind of, uh, do all the steps in order to make it, uh, act- actual.

Lex Fridman 1:05:31 How much of a good idea is about timing? How much is it about your genius versus th- that it's time has come?

Ray Kurzweil 1:05:41 Timing's very important. I mean, th- that's really why I got into futurism. I'm not, I didn't... I wasn't inherently a futurist. That, that was not really my goal. Uh, it's really to, to figure out when things are feasible. We, we see that now with large-scale models. The very f- large-scale models like GPT-3, it started two years ago. Four years ago, it wasn't feasible. In fact, they did create GPT-2, uh, which didn't work. Uh, so it required a certain amount of timing having to do with this exponential growth of, of computing power.

Lex Fridman 1:06:27 So futurism, in some sense, is a study of timing, trying to understand how the world will evolve.

Ray Kurzweil 1:06:33 Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:06:34 And when will the capacity for certain ideas e- emerge.

Ray Kurzweil 1:06:38 And, and that's become a thing in itself than to try to time things in the future. Uh, but really its original purpose was to time my products. I mean, I did OCR in the 1970s, uh, because OCR s- ... uh, doesn't require a lot of computation.

Lex Fridman 1:07:01 Optical character recognition.

Ray Kurzweil 1:07:02 Yeah. So we were able to do that in the '70s, and I waited til the '80s t- to address speech recognition, since that requires, uh, more computation.

Lex Fridman 1:07:14 So you were thinking through timing when you were developing those things.

Ray Kurzweil 1:07:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:07:17 Has its time come?

Ray Kurzweil 1:07:19 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:07:21 And that's how you've developed that brain power to start to think in a futurist sense when... How will the world look like in 2045 and work backwards-

Ray Kurzweil 1:07:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:07:32 ... and how it gets there.

Ray Kurzweil 1:07:33 But that has become a thing in itself, because looking at what, uh, things will be like in the future reflects such dramatic changes in, in how humans will live, uh, that was worth communicating also.

Lex Fridman 1:07:51 So you developed that muscle of, of predicting the future and then apply it broadly and started to discuss how it changes the world of technology, how it changes the world of human life on Earth. In Danielle, one of your books, you write about someone who has the courage to question assumptions that limit human imagination to solve problems. S- and you a- also give advice on how each of us can have this kind of, um, courage.

Ray Kurzweil 1:08:22 Well, it's good that you picked that quote, because I think that does symbolize what Danielle is about.

Lex Fridman 1:08:27 Courage. So how can each of us have that courage to ques- question assumptions?

Ray Kurzweil 1:08:33 I mean, we see that when people can go beyond the current realm and, and create something that's new. I mean, take Uber for example. Before that existed, y- y- you never thought that that would be feasible. And it did require changes in the way people work.

Lex Fridman 1:08:54 Is there practical, uh, advices you give in the book about each... what each of us can do to be a Danielle?

Ray Kurzweil 1:09:04 Well, she looks at, at the situation and tries to imagine, uh, how she can overcome various obstacles, and then she goes for it. And she's a very good communicator, so she can communicate these ideas to other people.

Lex Fridman 1:09:25 And there's practical advice of learning to program and recording your life and things of this nature. Become a physicist. (laughs) So you list a bunch of different, uh, suggestions of how to throw yourself-

Ray Kurzweil 1:09:38 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:38 ... into this world.

Ray Kurzweil 1:09:39 Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a idea how young people can actually change the world by, uh, learning all of these different skills.

Lex Fridman 1:09:52 And a- at the core of that is the belief that you can change the world. That your mind-

Ray Kurzweil 1:09:58 Yes. Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:09:59 ... your body can change the world.

Ray Kurzweil 1:10:00 Yeah. That's right.

Lex Fridman 1:10:02 And not letting anyone else tell you otherwise.

Ray Kurzweil 1:10:06 That's very good. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:10:08 When we upload (laughs) ... The, the story you told about your dad and having a conversation with him, we're talking about uploading your mind t- to the computer. Do you think we'll have a future with something you call, uh, afterlife where we'll have avatars that mimic increasingly better and better our behavior, our appearance, all that kinda stuff, even those that are perhaps not... no longer with us?

Ray Kurzweil 1:10:36 Yes. I mean, w- we need some information about, about them. I mean, I think about my father. I have what he wrote. Now, he didn't have a word processor, so he didn't actually write that much, and our memories of him aren't perfect. So how do you even know if you've created something that's satisfactory? Now, you could do a Ray... a Frederick Kurzweil Turing test. He seems like Frederick Kurzweil to me. But the people who remember him, like me, don't have a perfect memory.

Lex Fridman 1:11:14 Is there such a thing as a perfect memory? Maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel a certain way.

Ray Kurzweil 1:11:25 Yeah. Well, I think that would be the goal.

Lex Fridman 1:11:28 And that's the connection we have with loved ones. It's not really based on very strict definition of truth. It's more about the experiences we share.

Ray Kurzweil 1:11:37 Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:11:37 And they get morphed through memory, but ultimately they make us smile.

Ray Kurzweil 1:11:41 I think we, we definitely can do that, and that would be very worthwhile.

Lex Fridman 1:11:46 So do you think we'll have a world of replicants, of copies? Will there be a bunch of Ray Kurzweils? Like I could hang out with one, I can download it for five bucks and have a best friend Ray, and, uh, you, the original copy, wouldn't even know about it?

Ray Kurzweil 1:12:06 Um...

Lex Fridman 1:12:07 Is that... (laughs) Is that... Do you think that world is, um... First of all, do you think that world is feasible, and do you think there's ethical challenges there? Like, how would feel about me hanging out with Ray Kurzweil and you not knowing about it? (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:12:23 Uh, doesn't strike, uh, me as a problem. Um...

Lex Fridman 1:12:28 Which, which you? (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:12:29 Wh- wh- what-

Lex Fridman 1:12:29 The original?

Ray Kurzweil 1:12:30 Would, would you str- would that, uh, cause a problem for you as a...

Lex Fridman 1:12:34 No. I, I enjoy... I would really very much enjoy it.

Ray Kurzweil 1:12:37 No, not just hanging out with me, but if somebody hung out with you, a, a replicant of you.

Lex Fridman 1:12:43 Well, I think I would start... It sounds exciting, but then what if they, uh, start doing better than me and s- and take, take over my friend group? And then, and then I... Because, (laughs) because they may be, um, an imperfect copy or they may be more social, all these kinds of things, and then I become, like, the old version that's not, not nearly as exciting. Maybe they're a copy of the best version of me on a good day.

Ray Kurzweil 1:13:13 Yeah. But if you hang out with a replicant of me and that turned out to be successful, I'd, I'd feel proud of that person 'cause it's based on me, so...

Lex Fridman 1:13:24 (laughs) So it's... Uh, but it is a kind of...... death of this version of you.

Ray Kurzweil 1:13:32 Well, not necessarily. I mean, you, you can still be alive, right?

Lex Fridman 1:13:36 But... And you would be pr- okay, so it's like having kids and you're proud that they've done even more than you were able to do.

Ray Kurzweil 1:13:42 Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:13:45 Hmm. (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:13:48 Uh, it does bring up new issues, but, uh, it seems like an opportunity.

Lex Fridman 1:13:55 Well, that, that replicant should probably have the same rights as you do.

Ray Kurzweil 1:13:59 Well, that, uh, that gets into a whole issue, uh, because when a replicant occurs, they're not necessarily gonna have your rights. And if a replicant occurs to somebody who's already dead, do they have all the obligations and, that the original person had? Do they have all the agreements that they had? And, uh, so...

Lex Fridman 1:14:25 I think you're gonna have to have laws that say, yes, there has to be... If you want to create a replicant, they have to have all the same rights as human rights.

Ray Kurzweil 1:14:35 Well, you, you don't know. Someone could create a replicant, say, "Well, it's a replicant, but I didn't bother getting their rights." And so...

Lex Fridman 1:14:41 But that would be illegal, I mean. Like, if you do that, you have to do that in the black market. You have to... If you want to get an official replicant-

Ray Kurzweil 1:14:49 Okay. It's no- it's not so easy. Suppose you created multiple replicants, uh, the original rights, uh, maybe for one person and not for a whole group of per- people.

Lex Fridman 1:15:04 Sure. (laughs) So like, uh, so there has to be at least one, and then all the other ones kind of share the rights. Yeah, I, I just don't, I don't think that... That's very difficult to conceive for us humans. The, the, the idea that this country-

Ray Kurzweil 1:15:20 I mean, we don't... If you create a replicant that has certain... I mean, I've talked to people about this, including my wife, who'd l- like to get back her father. Um, and she doesn't worry about, uh, who has rights to what. She, she would have somebody that she could visit with and, like, give her some satisfaction, uh, and they wouldn't... She wouldn't care about any, any of these other rights.

Lex Fridman 1:15:49 What does your wife think about multiple Ray Kurzweils?

Ray Kurzweil 1:15:53 I haven't-

Lex Fridman 1:15:53 Have you had that discussion?

Ray Kurzweil 1:15:54 I haven't addressed that with her. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:15:58 (laughs) I thi- I think ultimately, that's an important question. Loved ones, how they feel about... There's a, there's something about love and-

Ray Kurzweil 1:16:04 Well, that's the key thing, right? If, if the loved one's rejected, it's not gonna work very well, so... So the, the loved ones really are the key determinant whether or not this works or not.

Lex Fridman 1:16:19 But there's also ethical rules. Um, we have to contend with the idea, and we have to contend with that idea with AI.

Ray Kurzweil 1:16:27 But, but what's gonna motivate it is... I mean, I talk to people who really miss-

Lex Fridman 1:16:33 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:16:33 ... people who are gone, and they would love to get s- something back, even if it's, isn't perfect. Uh, and that's what's gonna motivate this.

Lex Fridman 1:16:44 (sighs) And that person lives on in some form, and is it, the more data we have, the more we're able to reconstruct that person and allow them to live on.

Ray Kurzweil 1:16:57 Right, right. And, uh, eventually, as we go forward, we're gonna have more and more of this data because w- we're gonna have nanobots that are inside our neocortex and we're gonna collect a lot of data. In fact, anything that's data is, is always collected.

Lex Fridman 1:17:15 There is something a little bit sad, which is becoming... Or maybe it's hopeful, which is more and more common these days, which when a person passes away, you have their Twitter account, you know, and you have the last tweet they tweeted, like something they tweeted-

Ray Kurzweil 1:17:35 And you can recreate them now with large language models and so on. I mean, you can create somebody that's just like them and can actually continue to, uh, communicate.

Lex Fridman 1:17:45 I think that's really exciting because I think in some sense, like, if I were to die today, in some sense, I would continue on if I continued tweeting. I tweet, therefore I am.

Ray Kurzweil 1:17:58 Yeah, well that-

Lex Fridman 1:17:59 (laughs) In some sense.

Ray Kurzweil 1:18:00 I, I, I mean, that's one of the advantages of a replicant, that they can recreate th- the communications of that, that person.

Lex Fridman 1:18:10 Do you hope, do you think, do you hope humans will become a multi-planetary species? You've talked about the phases, the six epochs, and one of them is reaching out into the stars, in part.

Ray Kurzweil 1:18:23 Yes, but, uh, the kind of attempts we're making now to go to other s- planetary objects doesn't excite me that much 'cause it's not really advancing anything.

Lex Fridman 1:18:38 It's not efficient enough?

Ray Kurzweil 1:18:41 Yeah, we're, and we're also putting out other, uh, human beings, which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects. What I'm really talking about in the l- in the sixth epoch, the universe wakes up, it's where we can spread our super intelligence throughout the universe. And that doesn't mean s- sending very soft, squishy creatures like humans.

Lex Fridman 1:19:10 Yeah. The universe wakes up.

Ray Kurzweil 1:19:13 I mean, we, we would send intelligence, masses of nanobots, which can then th- go out and, um, colonize these o- these other parts of the universe.

Lex Fridman 1:19:29 Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that our bots might meet?

Ray Kurzweil 1:19:35 My hunch is no.Most people say yes, absolutely. I mean, in, in the-

Lex Fridman 1:19:41 The universe is too big.

Ray Kurzweil 1:19:43 ... and they'll, and they'll cite the Drake Equation. Uh, and I think in, uh, Singularity Is Near, um, I have two analyses of the Drake Equation, both with very reasonable assumptions. And one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations in each galaxy, and another one gives you one civilization, and we know of one. A lot of the analyses are forgetting the exponential growth of, of, of computation, because we've gone from where the fastest way I could send a message to somebody was with a pony.

Lex Fridman 1:20:28 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 1:20:30 Which was what, like, uh, a century and a half ago?

Lex Fridman 1:20:33 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:20:34 Uh, to the advanced civilization we have today. And, and, and if you accept what I've said, go forward a few decades, you can have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization compared to a pony, and that's in a couple of hundred years.

Lex Fridman 1:20:50 Yeah, the speed and the scale of information transfer is just expo- is growing exponentially.

Ray Kurzweil 1:20:56 So-

Lex Fridman 1:20:56 In a blink of an eye.

Ray Kurzweil 1:20:58 Now, think about these other civilizations. They're gonna be spread out at, at cosmic times. So if something is like ahead of us or behind us, it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions of years, which isn't that much. I mean, the, the, the world is billions of years old, 14 billion or something. So even 1,000 years, if, if two or three hundred years is enough to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization, we would see that. So o- of other civilizations that have occurred, okay, some might be h- behind us, but some might be ahead of us. If they're ahead of us, they're ahead of us by thousands, millions of years, and they would be so far beyond us, they would be doing galaxy-wide engineering.

Lex Fridman 1:21:55 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:21:56 But we don't see anything doing galaxy-wide engineering.

Lex Fridman 1:22:00 So either they don't exist or this very universe is a construction of an alien species. We're living inside a video game.

Ray Kurzweil 1:22:11 Well, that's another explanation, that yes, uh, you've got some teenage kids in another civilization.

Lex Fridman 1:22:19 Do you, do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment, that we're living in a simulation?

Ray Kurzweil 1:22:25 The universe is computational. So we are an example in a computational world. Therefore, uh, it is a simulation. It doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world, but it's nonetheless is taking place in a computational world, and everything that's going on is, is basically a form of, of computation. Um, so you really have to define what you mean by, uh, this, this whole world being a simulation.

Lex Fridman 1:23:06 Well, then it's the, it's the teenager that, that makes the video game. You know, us humans with our current limited cognitive capability have, um, strived to understand ourselves and we have created religions, we think of God, whatever that is. Do you think God exists? And if so, who is God?

Ray Kurzweil 1:23:35 I alluded to this before when we started out with lots of particles going around.

Lex Fridman 1:23:42 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:23:42 And there's nothing that represents love and creativity. Um, and somehow we've gotten into a world where love actually exists, and that has to do actually with consciousness because you can't have love without consciousness. So to me that's God, the fact that we have something where love, where you can be devoted to someone else and, and really feel the love. Um, that's, that's God. And if you look at the Old Testament, it was actually created by several different ra- rabbinate in, in there. And I think they've identified three of them. One, one of them dealt with God, uh, as a person that you can make deals with, and he gets angry, and he wreaks rev- uh, vengeance on various people. But two of them actually talk about God as a, a, a symbol of love and peace and harmony and, and so forth. Uh, that's how they describe God. And, and so that's my view of God. Not, not as a person in the sky that, that you can make deals with.

Lex Fridman 1:25:09 It's whatever the magic that goes from basic elements to things like consciousness and love. Do you think... One of the things I find extremely beautiful and powerful is cellular automata, which you also touch on. Do you think whatever the heck happens in cellular automata where interesting complicated objects emerge, God is in there too? The emergence of love in this seemingly primitive universe-

Ray Kurzweil 1:25:37 Well, that's the goal of, of, of creating a replicant is that...They would love you, and you would love them. There wouldn't be much point of doing it if that didn't happen.

Lex Fridman 1:25:52 But all of it... I guess what I'm saying about cellular automata is, it's, uh, primitive building blocks, and they somehow create beautiful things. Is there some deep truth to that about how our universe works? Is the, the emergence from simple rules, beautiful complex objects can emerge? Is that the thing that made us?

Ray Kurzweil 1:26:16 Yeah. Well-

Lex Fridman 1:26:17 As we went through all the six phases of reality.

Ray Kurzweil 1:26:21 That's a good way to look at it. It does make some point to the whole value of having a universe.

Lex Fridman 1:26:31 Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of it?

Ray Kurzweil 1:26:36 Yes, but I, I keep going back to my i-idea of being able to expand human life quickly enough, uh, in advance of our getting there. Longevity escape velocity. Um, which we're not quite at yet, but I think we're actually pretty close, uh, particularly with, for example, doing simulated biology. Uh, I think we can probably get there within, say, by the end of this decade, and that's my goal. An-

Lex Fridman 1:27:12 Do you hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity... Do you hope to achieve immortality?

Ray Kurzweil 1:27:20 Well, immortality is hard to say. I- I can't really come on your program saying, "I've done it. I've achieved immortality-"

Lex Fridman 1:27:27 Right.

Ray Kurzweil 1:27:28 ... because it's never forever.

Lex Fridman 1:27:30 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:27:31 Um, but-

Lex Fridman 1:27:32 A long time, a long time of living well.

Ray Kurzweil 1:27:35 But we'd like to actually advance human life expectancy, advance my life expectancy more than a year every year. And I think we can get there within... by the end of this decade.

Lex Fridman 1:27:47 How do you think we'd do it? So there's practical things, uh, in Transcend: The Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, your book. You describe just that. There's practical things like health, exercise, all those things. And I notice

Narrator 1:28:02 Yeah.

Ray Kurzweil 1:28:02 I mean, we live in a body that doesn't last forever. There's no reason why it can't, though. And we're discovering things, I think, that will extend it. Um, uh, but you do have to deal with... I mean, I've got various issues. Went to Mexico 40 years ago, developed salmonella that created pancreatitis, which gave me a strange form of diabetes. Um, it's not, uh, type 1 diabetes 'cause that's an autoimmune d-disorder that destroys your pancreas. I don't have that. But it's also not type 2 diabetes 'cause type 2 diabetes is your pancreas works fine, but your cells don't absorb the insulin well.

Lex Fridman 1:28:55 Mm-hmm.

Ray Kurzweil 1:28:55 I don't have that either. Uh, the pancreatitis I had, uh, partially damaged my pancreas, but it was a one-time thing. It didn't continue. Um, and I've learned now how to control it. But so that's just something I had to do, uh, in order to continue to exist.

Lex Fridman 1:29:18 So it's your particular biological system, you had to figure out a few hacks and the ideas that science would be-

Ray Kurzweil 1:29:24 Yes, exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:29:24 ... able to do that much better, actually.

Ray Kurzweil 1:29:26 Yeah. So I mean, I, I do spend a lot of time just tinkering with my own body to keep it going. Uh, so I do think I'll last 'til the end of this decade, and I think we'll achieve longevity escape velocity. I think that will start with people who are very diligent about this. Eventually, it'll become sort of routine that, that people will be able to do it. So if you're talking about kids today, or even people in their 20s or 30s, uh, that's really not a, a very serious problem. I have had some discussions with relatives who are like almost 100 and saying, "Well, we're working on it as quickly as possible," but I don't know if that's gonna work. Um...

Lex Fridman 1:30:16 Is there a case... This is a difficult question, but is there a case to be made against living forever, that a finite life, that mortality is a feature, not a bug, that, that living-

Ray Kurzweil 1:30:31 No.

Lex Fridman 1:30:32 ... a shorter... So dying makes ice cream taste delicious, makes life intensely beautiful more than, uh-

Ray Kurzweil 1:30:41 Most people-

Lex Fridman 1:30:42 ... it otherwise might be.

Ray Kurzweil 1:30:42 ... believe that way, except if you present a death of anybody they care about or love, they find that extremely depressing. And I know people who feel that way 20, 30, 40 years later. They still want them back. Um, so I mean, death is not something to celebrate, but we've lived in a world where people just accept this. "Well, life is short." You see it all the time on TV. "Ah, life's short, you have to take advantage of it." And nobody accepts the fact that you could actually go beyond normal lifetimes. But anytime we talk about death or death of a person, even one death is a, a terrible tragedy. If you have somebody that lives to 100 years old, we still love them in, in return. And there's no limi- li-limitation to that. In fact, these kinds of, uh, trends are gonna provide...... greater and greater opportunity for everybody, even if we have more people.

Lex Fridman 1:31:57 So, let me ask about an alien species or a super-intelligent AI 500 years from now that will look back and, uh, remember Ray Kurzweil version zero, the, uh, before the replicants spread. Uh, w- how do you hope they remember you? In a, um, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summary of Ray Kurzweil, what do you hope your legacy is?

Ray Kurzweil 1:32:24 Well, I mean, I do hope to be around, so that's-

Lex Fridman 1:32:26 Some version of you, yes.

Ray Kurzweil 1:32:27 So, um-

Lex Fridman 1:32:29 Do you think you'll be the same person around?

Ray Kurzweil 1:32:32 I mean, am I the same person I was when I was-

Lex Fridman 1:32:34 That's true.

Ray Kurzweil 1:32:34 ... 20 or 10, or-

Lex Fridman 1:32:35 It's different. You would be the same person in that same way, but, yes, we're different. We're different.

Ray Kurzweil 1:32:42 Um...

Lex Fridman 1:32:44 All we have of that... All you have of that person is your memories, which are probably, um, distorted in some way. Maybe you just remember the good parts, depending on your psyche. You might focus on the bad parts, might focus on the good parts.

Ray Kurzweil 1:33:02 Right. But, uh, I mean, I'd still have a relationship to the way I was when I was earlier, when I was younger.

Lex Fridman 1:33:11 How will you and the other super-intelligent AIs remember you of today from 500 years ago? What do you hope to be remembered by this version of you, before the singularity?

Ray Kurzweil 1:33:25 Well, I think it's expressed well in my books, trying to create some new realities that, that people will accept. I mean, that's something that gives me great pleasure. Um... And great- greater insight into what, what makes humans, uh, valuable. I'm not the only person who's, uh, tempted to comment on that, but...

Lex Fridman 1:33:57 And, uh, optimism that permeates your work.

Ray Kurzweil 1:34:00 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:34:00 Optimism about the future, because ultimately that optimism paves the way for building a better future.

Ray Kurzweil 1:34:06 Yeah, no, I j- I, I agree with that.

Lex Fridman 1:34:10 So you, uh, asked your dad about the meaning of life, and he said, "Love." Let me ask you the same question. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This beautiful journey that we're on in phase four, s- reaching for phase five of this evolution and information processing. Why?

Ray Kurzweil 1:34:35 Uh, I think I'd give the same answer as, as my father, um...

Lex Fridman 1:34:40 (laughs)

Ray Kurzweil 1:34:42 Because if there were no love, and we didn't care about anybody, there'd be no point existing.

Lex Fridman 1:34:49 Love is the meaning of life. The AI version of your dad had a good point. Well, I think that's a beautiful way to end it. Ray, thank you for your work. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for dreaming about a beautiful future, and, uh, creating it, uh, along the way. And thank you so much for, uh, spending your really valuable time with me today. This was awesome.

Ray Kurzweil 1:35:11 Well, it was my pleasure, and, uh, you have some great insights, both into me and into humanity as well. So, I appreciate that.

Lex Fridman 1:35:21 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ray Kurzweil. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Isaac Asimov. "It is change, continuous change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.