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

1. 0:00 – 1:06

   Introduction

   1. RKRay Kurzweil0:00

      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.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:13

      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.

2. 1:06 – 14:51

   Turing test

   1. LFLex Fridman1:06

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

   2. RKRay Kurzweil1:14

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:15

      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?

   4. RKRay Kurzweil1:27

      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-

   5. LFLex Fridman2:10

      The Age of Spiritual Machines.

   6. RKRay Kurzweil2:12

      Right.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:12

      And then you repeated the prediction in 2005.

   8. RKRay Kurzweil2:15

      In 2005.

   9. LFLex Fridman2:16

      Yeah.

   10. RKRay Kurzweil2:17

       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.

   11. LFLex Fridman3:18

       For the Turing test?

   12. RKRay Kurzweil3:20

       For the Turing test.

   13. LFLex Fridman3:22

       (laughs) So it's coming down.

   14. RKRay Kurzweil3:23

       And I was still saying 2029.

   15. LFLex Fridman3:25

       Yeah.

   16. RKRay Kurzweil3:26

       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.

   17. LFLex Fridman3:47

       So Alan Turing formulated the Turing test and-

   18. RKRay Kurzweil3:51

       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.

   19. LFLex Fridman5:15

       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?

   20. RKRay Kurzweil5:25

       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.

   21. LFLex Fridman5:52

       So you really want the human to challenge the system-

   22. RKRay Kurzweil5:55

       Exactly. Exactly.

   23. LFLex Fridman5:57

       ... on its ability to do things like commonsense reasoning, perhaps?

   24. RKRay Kurzweil6:00

       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.

   25. LFLex Fridman6:22

       Mm-hmm.

   26. RKRay Kurzweil6:22

       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-

   27. LFLex Fridman7:08

       (laughs)

   28. RKRay Kurzweil7:08

       They don't seem to understand the question.

   29. LFLex Fridman7:11

       Do all humans understand that question?

   30. RKRay Kurzweil7:14

       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.
3. 14:51 – 26:31

   Brain–computer interfaces

   1. LFLex Fridman14:51

      the singularity.

   2. RKRay Kurzweil14:52

      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.

   3. LFLex Fridman15:21

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

   4. RKRay Kurzweil15:29

      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.

   5. LFLex Fridman16:08

      (laughs) Yeah.

   6. RKRay Kurzweil16:08

      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.

   7. LFLex Fridman16:41

      So going from active to passive where it just permeates your whole life...

   8. RKRay Kurzweil16:46

      Yeah, exactly.

   9. LFLex Fridman16:47

      ... the way your brain does when you're awake. Your brain is always there.

   10. RKRay Kurzweil16:51

       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.

   11. LFLex Fridman17:07

       Yeah.

   12. RKRay Kurzweil17:08

       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.

   13. LFLex Fridman18:14

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

   14. RKRay Kurzweil18:19

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

   15. LFLex Fridman18:26

       Yet, right?

   16. RKRay Kurzweil18:27

       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.

   17. LFLex Fridman19:07

       And maybe communication between two people would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language.

   18. RKRay Kurzweil19:14

       Yes.

   19. LFLex Fridman19:14

       Of spoken word.

   20. RKRay Kurzweil19:15

       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.

   21. LFLex Fridman20:03

       Mm-hmm.

   22. RKRay Kurzweil20:04

       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...

   23. LFLex Fridman20:50

       And maybe other things other than elephants have trunks.

   24. RKRay Kurzweil20:54

       Yes.

   25. LFLex Fridman20:54

       You might get really confused.

   26. RKRay Kurzweil20:55

       Yes. Yeah, exactly. Um...

   27. LFLex Fridman20:57

       I'm not sure which animals have trunks, but you know.

   28. RKRay Kurzweil21:00

       Um...

   29. LFLex Fridman21:00

       Plus, how do you define a trunk? But yeah, that's one parameter.

   30. RKRay Kurzweil21:05

       So these th-
4. 26:31 – 32:51

   Singularity

   1. RKRay Kurzweil26:31

   2. LFLex Fridman26:32

      Do you still think that singularity will happen in 2045? And what does that look like?

   3. RKRay Kurzweil26:40

      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-

   4. LFLex Fridman26:55

      Yeah, so looking at price/performance of computation from 1939 to 2021?

   5. RKRay Kurzweil26:59

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

   6. LFLex Fridman27:05

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RKRay Kurzweil27:06

      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.

   8. LFLex Fridman27:20

      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-

   9. RKRay Kurzweil27:35

      Ouch.

   10. LFLex Fridman27:36

       ... to inflation. And it's growing linearly on the log scale, which means it's growing exponentially.

   11. RKRay Kurzweil27:41

       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.

   12. LFLex Fridman28:34

       So, it's not just transistor count or transistor size.

   13. RKRay Kurzweil28:37

       Right. I mean, this started with re-

   14. LFLex Fridman28:38

       It's a bunch of different components.

   15. RKRay Kurzweil28:39

       ... with relays, then went to vacuum tubes, then went to individual transistors an- and then to integrated circuits.

   16. LFLex Fridman28:48

       Yes.

   17. RKRay Kurzweil28:49

       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.

   18. LFLex Fridman29:19

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

   19. RKRay Kurzweil29:29

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

   20. LFLex Fridman29:34

       Sure. (laughs)

   21. RKRay Kurzweil29:34

       But yes, uh, the- the exponential growth of computing is continuing.

   22. LFLex Fridman29:40

       Yes.

   23. RKRay Kurzweil29:41

       Uh... and has never stopped.

   24. LFLex Fridman29:43

       From various sources.

   25. RKRay Kurzweil29:44

       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.

   26. LFLex Fridman30:22

       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.

   27. RKRay Kurzweil30:51

       Yeah, it's the computational power that created these models. And that's doubled every six months.

   28. LFLex Fridman30:57

       Which is even faster than

   29. RKRay Kurzweil30:59

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman30:59

       ... transistor division.
5. 32:51 – 35:31

   Virtual reality

   1. LFLex Fridman32:51

      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?

   2. RKRay Kurzweil33:02

      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?

   3. LFLex Fridman33:31

      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.

   4. RKRay Kurzweil33:49

      I actually know somebody who's marrying somebody that they never met.

   5. LFLex Fridman33:53

      Yeah.

   6. RKRay Kurzweil33:54

      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...

   7. LFLex Fridman34:10

      That's a beautiful story, but do you think that story-

   8. RKRay Kurzweil34:12

      (laughs)

   9. LFLex Fridman34:13

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

   10. RKRay Kurzweil34:22

       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.

   11. LFLex Fridman34:37

       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-

   12. RKRay Kurzweil34:50

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

   13. LFLex Fridman34:57

       (laughs) Great.

   14. RKRay Kurzweil34:57

       Um...

   15. LFLex Fridman34:58

       So the touch, the sense, it's all just senses. It's all just-

   16. RKRay Kurzweil35:02

       Yeah. I mean, touch is-

   17. LFLex Fridman35:03

       ... could be replicated.

   18. RKRay Kurzweil35:03

       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.

   19. LFLex Fridman35:17

       Are you excited by that future? Do you worry about that future?

   20. RKRay Kurzweil35:23

       I have certain worries about the future, but not-

   21. LFLex Fridman35:26

       Not that.

   22. RKRay Kurzweil35:26

       ... virtual touch. (laughs)

   23. LFLex Fridman35:29

       (laughs) Well, I agree with you.

6. 35:31 – 41:57

   Evolution of information processing

   1. LFLex Fridman35:31

      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?

   2. RKRay Kurzweil35:51

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

   3. LFLex Fridman36:00

      So, so the very beginning of the universe.

   4. RKRay Kurzweil36:02

      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.

   5. LFLex Fridman36:56

      And all of this is happening faster and faster.

   6. RKRay Kurzweil36:58

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

   7. LFLex Fridman37:12

      Uh-

   8. RKRay Kurzweil37:12

      '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.

   9. LFLex Fridman37:34

      This, uh, physical manipulator device-

   10. RKRay Kurzweil37:37

       Right.

   11. LFLex Fridman37:37

       ...that's useful for puzzle solving in the physicals reality.

   12. RKRay Kurzweil37:41

       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.

   13. LFLex Fridman37:56

       Yeah.

   14. RKRay Kurzweil37:57

       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.

   15. LFLex Fridman38:39

       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

   16. RKRay Kurzweil38:50

       (intriguing music) We ride along, but a lot of people don't see that.

   17. LFLex Fridman38:52

       Yes.

   18. RKRay Kurzweil38:52

       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.

   19. LFLex Fridman39:09

       Yeah.

   20. RKRay Kurzweil39:10

       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."

   21. LFLex Fridman39:25

       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?

   22. RKRay Kurzweil39:43

       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.

   23. LFLex Fridman40:41

       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-

   24. RKRay Kurzweil40:53

       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.

   25. LFLex Fridman41:04

       Yeah.

   26. RKRay Kurzweil41:05

       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.

   27. LFLex Fridman41:26

       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

7. 41:57 – 51:57

   Automation

   1. LFLex Fridman41:57

      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?

   2. RKRay Kurzweil42:20

      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.

   3. LFLex Fridman43:41

      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.

   4. RKRay Kurzweil44:02

      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.

   5. LFLex Fridman44:20

      Yeah, they were these big, sexy, uh, phones.

   6. RKRay Kurzweil44:22

      And, and, and they didn't work very well.

   7. LFLex Fridman44:24

      Yeah.

   8. RKRay Kurzweil44:24

      They did almost nothing.

   9. LFLex Fridman44:25

      (laughs)

   10. RKRay Kurzweil44:26

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

   11. LFLex Fridman44:34

       (laughs) So-

   12. RKRay Kurzweil44:35

       Um-

   13. LFLex Fridman44:35

       So, achieving scale is... And, uh, making it inexpensive is part of making the thing work well.

   14. RKRay Kurzweil44:42

       Exactly. So, these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty, pretty cheap.

   15. LFLex Fridman44:47

       Yeah.

   16. RKRay Kurzweil44:47

       Uh, I mean, you can get them for few hundred dollars.

   17. LFLex Fridman44:52

       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.

   18. RKRay Kurzweil45:00

       Yeah, absolutely.

   19. LFLex Fridman45:02

       And the same will be true with AI.

   20. RKRay Kurzweil45:03

       I mean, I see homeless people have their own cellphones and...

   21. LFLex Fridman45:07

       Yeah. So, your sense is any kind of advanced technology will take the same trajectory?

   22. RKRay Kurzweil45:14

       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.

   23. LFLex Fridman45:39

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

   24. RKRay Kurzweil45:45

       Well, I have... I mean, I have 50 charts in there-

   25. LFLex Fridman45:48

       (laughs) Yeah.

   26. RKRay Kurzweil45:49

       ... where everything is getting better.

   27. LFLex Fridman45:51

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

   28. RKRay Kurzweil45:58

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

   29. LFLex Fridman46:08

       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.

   30. RKRay Kurzweil46:21

       70% thought it had gotten worse.
8. 51:57 – 53:51

   Nanotechnology

   1. RKRay Kurzweil51:57

      the book.

   2. LFLex Fridman51:57

      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?

   3. RKRay Kurzweil52:10

      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.

   4. LFLex Fridman52:38

      In a high bandwidth way.

   5. RKRay Kurzweil52:40

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

   6. LFLex Fridman52:49

      So nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth. How much intelligence would those nanobots have?

   7. RKRay Kurzweil52:56

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

   8. LFLex Fridman53:04

      Just primarily about communication-

   9. RKRay Kurzweil53:06

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman53:07

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

   11. RKRay Kurzweil53:19

       Well, I mean, this is the great goo chal- challenge.

   12. LFLex Fridman53:22

       Yes.

   13. RKRay Kurzweil53:23

       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.

9. 53:51 – 55:57

   Nuclear war

   1. RKRay Kurzweil53:52

   2. LFLex Fridman53:52

      So you mentioned nuclear weapons.

   3. RKRay Kurzweil53:54

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman53:57

      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?

   5. RKRay Kurzweil54:38

      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...

   6. LFLex Fridman54:50

      It's unlikely in your mind?

   7. RKRay Kurzweil54:52

      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.

   8. LFLex Fridman55:20

      Yeah, we're doing pretty good.

   9. RKRay Kurzweil55:22

      We've never had a- another one go off through anger.

   10. LFLex Fridman55:27

       But people forget. People forget the lessons of history.

   11. RKRay Kurzweil55:31

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

   12. LFLex Fridman55:37

       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?

   13. RKRay Kurzweil55:47

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

10. 55:57 – 1:03:38

    Uploading minds

    1. RKRay Kurzweil55:57

    2. LFLex Fridman55:57

       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?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil56:17

       Let me describe one thing I've already done with my father.

    4. LFLex Fridman56:21

       That's a great story (laughs) .

    5. RKRay Kurzweil56:23

       (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...

    6. LFLex Fridman58:18

       So you could have a... essentially a, uh, a question and answer conversation with him?

    7. RKRay Kurzweil58:21

       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.

    8. LFLex Fridman58:34

       He'd be concerned about the day-to-day, versus the big questions.

    9. RKRay Kurzweil58:37

       Exactly, yeah.

    10. LFLex Fridman58:39

        And you did ask about the meaning of life, and he answered, "Love."

    11. RKRay Kurzweil58:43

        Yeah.

    12. LFLex Fridman58:44

        (laughs) Do you miss him?

    13. RKRay Kurzweil58:48

        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.

    14. LFLex Fridman59:19

        What did you learn about life from your father? What, what part of him is, is with you now?

    15. RKRay Kurzweil59:29

        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.

    16. LFLex Fridman59:55

        Do you have that in you, that...

    17. RKRay Kurzweil59:57

        Yeah, yeah.

    18. LFLex Fridman59:57

        ... kind of light that shines?

    19. RKRay Kurzweil59:59

        I mean, I, uh, I got involved with technology at, like, age five.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:00:06

        And you fell in love with it in the same way he did with music?

    21. RKRay Kurzweil1:00:09

        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...

    22. LFLex Fridman1:00:26

        (laughs) .

    23. RKRay Kurzweil1:00:27

        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.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:01:42

        Hmm.

    25. RKRay Kurzweil1:01:42

        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.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:02:01

        And the magic was still there for you? (laughs)

    27. RKRay Kurzweil1:02:02

        The magic was still there even if you knew how it worked.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:02:05

        Yeah.

    29. RKRay Kurzweil1:02:07

        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.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:02:27

        Yeah.
11. 1:03:38 – 1:10:08

    How to think

    1. RKRay Kurzweil1:03:38

    2. LFLex Fridman1:03:38

       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?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil1:04:07

       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...

    4. LFLex Fridman1:04:34

       (laughs) How it works? (laughs)

    5. RKRay Kurzweil1:04:37

       Exactly. (laughs)

    6. LFLex Fridman1:04:38

       That's really interesting. You paint the world that you would like to exist, you think can exist, and reverse engineer that.

    7. RKRay Kurzweil1:04:45

       And, and then you actually imagine you're giving a speech about how you created this.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:04:50

       Yeah.

    9. RKRay Kurzweil1:04:50

       Well, you'd have to then work backwards as to h- h- how you would create it in order to make it work.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:04:57

        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.

    11. RKRay Kurzweil1:05:07

        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.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:05:31

        How much of a good idea is about timing? How much is it about your genius versus th- that it's time has come?

    13. RKRay Kurzweil1:05:41

        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.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:06:27

        So futurism, in some sense, is a study of timing, trying to understand how the world will evolve.

    15. RKRay Kurzweil1:06:33

        Yeah, yeah.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:06:34

        And when will the capacity for certain ideas e- emerge.

    17. RKRay Kurzweil1:06:38

        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.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:07:01

        Optical character recognition.

    19. RKRay Kurzweil1:07:02

        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.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:07:14

        So you were thinking through timing when you were developing those things.

    21. RKRay Kurzweil1:07:17

        Yeah.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:07:17

        Has its time come?

    23. RKRay Kurzweil1:07:19

        Yeah.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:07:21

        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-

    25. RKRay Kurzweil1:07:32

        Yeah.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:07:32

        ... and how it gets there.

    27. RKRay Kurzweil1:07:33

        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.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:07:51

        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.

    29. RKRay Kurzweil1:08:22

        Well, it's good that you picked that quote, because I think that does symbolize what Danielle is about.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:08:27

        Courage. So how can each of us have that courage to ques- question assumptions?
12. 1:10:08 – 1:19:28

    Digital afterlife

    1. RKRay Kurzweil1:10:08

    2. LFLex Fridman1:10:08

       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?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil1:10:36

       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.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:11:14

       Is there such a thing as a perfect memory? Maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel a certain way.

    5. RKRay Kurzweil1:11:25

       Yeah. Well, I think that would be the goal.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:11:28

       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.

    7. RKRay Kurzweil1:11:37

       Yeah. Yeah.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:11:37

       And they get morphed through memory, but ultimately they make us smile.

    9. RKRay Kurzweil1:11:41

       I think we, we definitely can do that, and that would be very worthwhile.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:11:46

        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?

    11. RKRay Kurzweil1:12:06

        Um...

    12. LFLex Fridman1:12:07

        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)

    13. RKRay Kurzweil1:12:23

        Uh, doesn't strike, uh, me as a problem. Um...

    14. LFLex Fridman1:12:28

        Which, which you? (laughs)

    15. RKRay Kurzweil1:12:29

        Wh- wh- what-

    16. LFLex Fridman1:12:29

        The original?

    17. RKRay Kurzweil1:12:30

        Would, would you str- would that, uh, cause a problem for you as a...

    18. LFLex Fridman1:12:34

        No. I, I enjoy... I would really very much enjoy it.

    19. RKRay Kurzweil1:12:37

        No, not just hanging out with me, but if somebody hung out with you, a, a replicant of you.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:12:43

        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.

    21. RKRay Kurzweil1:13:13

        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...

    22. LFLex Fridman1:13:24

        (laughs) So it's... Uh, but it is a kind of...... death of this version of you.

    23. RKRay Kurzweil1:13:32

        Well, not necessarily. I mean, you, you can still be alive, right?

    24. LFLex Fridman1:13:36

        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.

    25. RKRay Kurzweil1:13:42

        Yeah, exactly.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:13:45

        Hmm. (laughs)

    27. RKRay Kurzweil1:13:48

        Uh, it does bring up new issues, but, uh, it seems like an opportunity.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:13:55

        Well, that, that replicant should probably have the same rights as you do.

    29. RKRay Kurzweil1:13:59

        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...

    30. LFLex Fridman1:14:25

        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.
13. 1:19:28 – 1:22:18

    Intelligent alien life

    1. RKRay Kurzweil1:19:28

    2. LFLex Fridman1:19:29

       Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that our bots might meet?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil1:19:35

       My hunch is no.Most people say yes, absolutely. I mean, in, in the-

    4. LFLex Fridman1:19:41

       The universe is too big.

    5. RKRay Kurzweil1:19:43

       ... 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.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:20:28

       Mm-hmm.

    7. RKRay Kurzweil1:20:30

       Which was what, like, uh, a century and a half ago?

    8. LFLex Fridman1:20:33

       Yeah.

    9. RKRay Kurzweil1:20:34

       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.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:20:50

        Yeah, the speed and the scale of information transfer is just expo- is growing exponentially.

    11. RKRay Kurzweil1:20:56

        So-

    12. LFLex Fridman1:20:56

        In a blink of an eye.

    13. RKRay Kurzweil1:20:58

        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.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:21:55

        Yeah.

    15. RKRay Kurzweil1:21:56

        But we don't see anything doing galaxy-wide engineering.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:22:00

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

    17. RKRay Kurzweil1:22:11

        Well, that's another explanation, that yes, uh, you've got some teenage kids in another civilization.

14. 1:22:18 – 1:26:31

    Simulation hypothesis

    1. RKRay Kurzweil1:22:19

    2. LFLex Fridman1:22:19

       Do you, do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment, that we're living in a simulation?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil1:22:25

       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.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:23:06

       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?

    5. RKRay Kurzweil1:23:35

       I alluded to this before when we started out with lots of particles going around.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:23:42

       Yeah.

    7. RKRay Kurzweil1:23:42

       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.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:25:09

       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-

    9. RKRay Kurzweil1:25:37

       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.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:25:52

        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?

    11. RKRay Kurzweil1:26:16

        Yeah. Well-

    12. LFLex Fridman1:26:17

        As we went through all the six phases of reality.

    13. RKRay Kurzweil1:26:21

        That's a good way to look at it. It does make some point to the whole value of having a universe.

15. 1:26:31 – 1:34:10

    Mortality

    1. LFLex Fridman1:26:31

       Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of it?

    2. RKRay Kurzweil1:26:36

       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-

    3. LFLex Fridman1:27:12

       Do you hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity... Do you hope to achieve immortality?

    4. RKRay Kurzweil1:27:20

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

    5. LFLex Fridman1:27:27

       Right.

    6. RKRay Kurzweil1:27:28

       ... because it's never forever.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:27:30

       (laughs)

    8. RKRay Kurzweil1:27:31

       Um, but-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:27:32

       A long time, a long time of living well.

    10. RKRay Kurzweil1:27:35

        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.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:27:47

        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

    12. NANarrator1:28:02

        Yeah.

    13. RKRay Kurzweil1:28:02

        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.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:28:55

        Mm-hmm.

    15. RKRay Kurzweil1:28:55

        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.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:29:18

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

    17. RKRay Kurzweil1:29:24

        Yes, exactly.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:29:24

        ... able to do that much better, actually.

    19. RKRay Kurzweil1:29:26

        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...

    20. LFLex Fridman1:30:16

        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-

    21. RKRay Kurzweil1:30:31

        No.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:30:32

        ... a shorter... So dying makes ice cream taste delicious, makes life intensely beautiful more than, uh-

    23. RKRay Kurzweil1:30:41

        Most people-

    24. LFLex Fridman1:30:42

        ... it otherwise might be.

    25. RKRay Kurzweil1:30:42

        ... 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.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:31:57

        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?

    27. RKRay Kurzweil1:32:24

        Well, I mean, I do hope to be around, so that's-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:32:26

        Some version of you, yes.

    29. RKRay Kurzweil1:32:27

        So, um-

    30. LFLex Fridman1:32:29

        Do you think you'll be the same person around?
16. 1:34:10 – 1:36:05

    Meaning of life

    1. RKRay Kurzweil1:34:10

    2. LFLex Fridman1:34:10

       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?

    3. RKRay Kurzweil1:34:35

       Uh, I think I'd give the same answer as, as my father, um...

    4. LFLex Fridman1:34:40

       (laughs)

    5. RKRay Kurzweil1:34:42

       Because if there were no love, and we didn't care about anybody, there'd be no point existing.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:34:49

       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.

    7. RKRay Kurzweil1:35:11

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

    8. LFLex Fridman1:35:21

       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.

Episode duration: 1:36:11