#2117 - Ray Kurzweil
2024-03-12 02:03:02
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Good to see you, sir.
Great to see you.
I was telling you before, I'm admiring your suspenders, and you told me you have how many pairs of these things?
30 of them, yeah. How did you... I wear them every day.
Do you really? Every day? Yeah, yeah. Why do you like suspenders?
Um.
Practicality thing?
No, it's, uh.
. Expresses my personality. Hmm. And different ones have different, uh...
Different personalities that express how I feel that day.
I see. So it's just another style point.
Yeah. See, the reason why I was asking... You don't see any hand-painted suspenders. Have you ever seen one?
Uh, I don't know. I would have not noticed. I only noticed because you were here. I'm not really a suspender aficionado.
Yeah.
But the reason why I'm asking is because you're, you know, basically a technologist. I mean, you know a lot about technology. Wouldn't you think that suspenders are kind of outdated tech?
Uh.
Well, people like them.
Clearly. Yeah.
And I'm surprised I haven't caught on.
But you have to have somebody who can actually paint them. I mean, these are hand-painted suspenders.
So the ones that you have, right here, these are hand-painted? Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so that's part of it. So you're wearing art.
Exactly. Got it.
So, uh.
And art is part of technology. I mean, we're using technology to create art now, so...
Well, that's true. And it's...
In fact, the very first.
. I mean, I've been now in AI for 61 years, which is actually a record. And the first thing I did was create something that could write music.
Writing music now with AI, is a major field today, but this was actually the first time that it had ever been done.
Yeah, that was one of your many inventions.
That was the first one, yeah.
So when you.
. Why did you go about doing that? What was your desire to create artificial intelligence music?
Well, my father was a musician, and felt this would be a good way to relate to him. And he actually worked with me on it.
And you could feed in music, like you could feed in, let's say, Mozart or Chopin, and it would figure out how they created melodies, and then write melodies in the same style. So you could actually tell, this is Mozart, this is Chopin. It wasn't as good, but that's the first time that that had been done.
It wasn't as good then. What are the capabilities now? Because now they can do some pretty extraordinary things.
Yeah, it's still not up to what humans can do, but it's getting there. And it's actually pleasant to listen to. We still have a while to do art, both art, music, so on.
Well, one of the main arguments against AI art comes from actual artists, who are upset that what essentially they're doing is, like you could say,
create a painting in the style of Frank Frazetta, for instance. And what it would be, it would take all of Frazetta's work that he's ever done, which is all documented on the internet, and then you create an image that's representative of that. So you're essentially, in one way or another, you're kind of taking from the art.
Right, but it's not quite as good. It will be as good. I mean, I think we'll match human experience by 2029.. That's been my idea.
It's not as good.
Which is the best image generator right now, Jamie?
They really change almost from day to day. right now. Mid-Journey was the most popular one at first, and then Dolly, I think, is a really good one, too. Mid-Journey is incredibly impressive. Incredibly impressive graphics.
I've seen some of the Mid-Journey stuff. It's just, it's mind-blowing.
It's still not quite as good.
Not as good. But, boys, it's so much better than it was five years ago. That's what's scary. Yeah. It's so quick.
I mean, it's never going to reach its limit. We're not going to get to a point, Okay, this is how good it's going to be. It's going to keep getting better.
And what would that look like? If it can get to a certain point, it will far exceed what human creativity is capable of.
Yes. I mean, when we reach the ability of humans, it's not going to just match one human. It's going to match all humans, and it's going to do everything that any human can do. If it's playing a game like Go, it's going to play it better than any human.
Right. Well, that's already been proven, right? That they have invented moves. AI has invented moves that have now been implemented by humans. Right.
In a very complex game that they never thought that AI was going to be able to be, because it requires so much creativity.
Right. Arthur, we're not quite there, but we will be there. And by 2029, it will match any person.
That's it? 2029?? That's just a few years away.
Well, I'm actually considered conservative. People think that will happen like next year, the year after. I actually said that in 1999.. I said we would match any person by 2029, so 30 years. People thought that was totally crazy.
In fact, Stanford had a conference. They invited several hundred people from around the world to talk about my prediction. And people came in, and people thought that this would happen, but not by 2029.. They thought it would take a hundred years.
Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that, but I think people are amending those. Is it because human beings have a very difficult time grasping the concept of exponential growth?
That's exactly right.
In fact, still, economists have a linear view. And if you say, well, it's going to grow exponentially, they say, yeah, but maybe 2% a year.
It actually doubles in 14 years.
And I brought a chart. I can show you that really illustrates this.
Is this chart available online, so we can show people?
Yeah, it's in the book.
But is it available online, that chart? Where Jamie can pull it up, and someone can see it? Just so the folks watching the podcast can see it, too. Or I can just hold it up to the camera. What's it called?
What's the title of it? It says, Price Performance of Computation 1939 to 2023.. You have it. Okay, great. Jamie already has it.
Yeah, the climb is insane. It's like the San Juan Mountains.
What's interesting is that it's an exponential curve, and a straight line represents exponential growth. And that's an absolute straight line for 80 years.
The very first point, this is the speed of computers. It was 0.000007 calculations per second per constant dollar. The last point is 35 billion calculations per second. So there's a 20 quadrillion fold increase in those 80 years. But the speed with which it gained is actually the same throughout the entire 80 years.
Because if it was sometimes better and sometimes worse, this curve would bend. It would bend up, bend down. It's really very much a straight line.
So the speed with which we increased it was the same regardless of the technologies. And the technology was radically different at the beginning versus the end. And yet it increased the speed exactly the same for 80 years. In fact, the first 40 years, nobody even knew this was happening. So it's not like somebody was in charge and saying, okay, next year we have to get to here, and people would try to match that.
We didn't even know this was happening for 40 years. Forty years later, I noticed this. For various reasons, I predicted it would stay the same, the same speed increase each year, which it has. In fact, we just put the last dot, like two weeks ago, and it's exactly where it should be.
So technology, and computation is certainly a prime form of technology, increases at the same speed. And this goes through war and peace. You might say, well, maybe it's greater during war. No, it's exactly the same. You can't tell when there's war or peace or anything else on here.
It just matches from one type of technology to the next. And it's also true of other things, like, for example, getting energy from the sun. That's also exponential. It's also just like this.
It's increased.
We now are getting about a thousand times as much energy from the sun that we did 20 years ago.
Because of the implementation of solar panels and the like?
Yeah.
Has the function of it increased exponentially as well? What I had understood was that there was a bottleneck in the technology as far as how much you could extract from the sun from those panels.
No, not at all.
No?
I mean, it's increased 99.
7% since we started.
Right.
And it does the same every year. It's an exponential curve. And if you look at the curve, we'll be getting 100% of all the energy we need in 10 years.
The person who told me that was Elon. And Elon was telling me that this is the reason why you can't have a fully solar-powered electric car. Because it's not capable of absorbing that much from the sun with a small panel like that. He said there's a physical limitation in the panel size.
No, I mean, it's increased 99.
7% since we started.
Since what year?
This is about 35 years ago.
35 years ago. And 99% of the ability of it, as well as the expansion of use?
I mean, you might have to store it. We're also making exponential gains in storage of electricity.
Right. Battery technology.
Right. So you don't have to get it all from a solar panel that fits in a car.
The concept was, could you make a solar-paneled car? A car that has solar panels on the roof. And would that be enough to power the car? And he said no. He said it's just not really there yet.
Right. It's not there yet, but it will be there in 10 years.
You think so? Yeah. He seemed to doubt that. He thought that there's a limitation of the amount of energy you can get from the sun, period, how much it gives out and how much those solar panels can absorb.
Well, you're not going to be able to get it all from the solar panel that fits in a car. You're going to have to store some of that energy.
Right. So you wouldn't just be able to drive indefinitely on solar power. Yeah, that was what he was saying. But you can obviously power a house. And especially if you have a roof, like Tesla has those solar-paneled roofs now.
But you can also store the energy for a car.
We're going to go to all renewable energy, wind and sun, within 10 years, including our ability to store the energy.
All renewable in 10 years? So what are they going to do with all these nuclear plants and coal-powered plants?
That's completely unnecessary. People say we need nuclear power, which we don't. You can get it all from the sun and wind within 10 years.
So in 10 years you'll be able to power Los Angeles with sun and wind?
Yes.
Really?
Yeah.
I was not aware that we were anywhere near that kind of timeline.
That's because people are not taking into account exponential growth.
So the exponential growth also of the grid? Because, just to pull the amount of power that you would need to charge X amount of million... If everyone has an electric vehicle by 2035, let's say, then, the amount of change you would need on the grid would be pretty substantial.
Well, we're making exponential gains on that as well. Are we?
Yeah. I wasn't aware. I had this impression that there was a problem with that, especially in Los Angeles. They've actually asked people at certain times when it's hot out, to not charge your car.
They're not looking at the future. That's true now, but it's growing exponentially.
In every field of technology, then, essentially.
Is the bottleneck a battery technology? And how close are they to solving some of these problems with conflict minerals and the things that we need in order to power these batteries?
I mean, our ability to store energy, is also growing exponentially. So putting all that together, we'll be able to power everything we need within 10 years. Wow.
Most people don't think that. So you're thinking that, based on this idea, that people have a limited idea...
I didn't imagine that computation would grow like this. It's just continuing to do that. And so we have large language models, for example. No one expected that to happen like five years ago. And we had them two years ago, but they didn't work very well.
So it began a little less than two years ago that we could actually do large language models. And that was very much a surprise to everybody.
So that's probably the primary example of exponential growth.
We had Sam Altman on. One of the things that he and I were talking about was that AI figured out a way to lie. That they used AI to go through a CAPTCHA system, and the AI told the system that it was vision impaired. Which is not technically a lie, but it used it to bypass, are you a robot?
What we don't know now is for large language models to say they don't know something. So you ask it a question, and if the answer to that question is not in the system, it still comes up with an answer. So it'll look at everything and give you its best answer. And if the best answer is not there, it still gives you an answer. But that's considered a hallucination.
A hallucination?
Yeah, that's what it's called.
AI hallucination. So they cannot be wrong?
So far, we're actually working on being able to tell if it doesn't know something. So if you ask it something, it'll say, oh, I don't know that. Right now, it can't do that.
Oh, wow. That's interesting.
So it gives you some answer, and if the answer's not there, it just makes something up. It's the best answer, but the best answer isn't very good because it doesn't know the answer. And the way to fix hallucinations is to actually give it more capabilities to memorize things and give it more information. so it knows the answer to it. If you tell it an answer to a question, it will remember that and give you that correct answer.
But these models, we don't know everything.
We have to be able to scan and answer to every single question, which we can't quite do. It'd be actually better if it could actually answer, well, gee, I don't know that.
Right.
Particularly, say, when it comes to exploration of the universe, there's a vast amount of the universe we have not explored. So if it has to answer questions about that, it would just come up with an answer?
Right. It'll just come up with an answer, which will likely be wrong.
That's interesting. That would be a real problem if someone was counting on the AI to have a solution for something too soon, right?
Right. They don't know everything. Search engines actually are pretty well vetted, and if it actually answers something, it's usually correct.
Unless it's curated.
But large language models don't have that capability. So it would be good, actually, if they knew that they were wrong. That would also tell us what we have to fix.
What about the idea that AI models are influenced by ideology? That AI models have been programmed with certain ideologies?
I mean, they do learn from people.
Yeah.
And people have ideologies, some of which are not correct. And that's a large way in which it will make things up, because it's learning from people.
So right now, if somebody has access to a good search engine, they will check before they actually answer something with the search engine to make sure that it's correct. Because search engines are generally much more accurate.
Generally. Right. When it comes to this idea that people enter information into a computer and then the computer relies on that ideology, do you anticipate that with artificial general intelligence, it will be agnostic to ideology? That it will be able to reach a point where, instead of deciding things based on social norms or whatever the culture is accepted currently, that it would look at things more objectively and rationally?
Well, eventually. Eventually. But we still call it artificial general intelligence, even if it didn't do that. And people certainly are influenced by whatever people that they respect feel is correct,
and will be as influenced by it as people are.
And we'll still call it artificial general intelligence.
We are starting to check what large language models come up with search engines, and that's actually making them more correct. But we have to actually continue on this curve. We need more data to be able to store everything. This is not enough data to be able to store everything correctly. This is a large amount of large language models for which we don't have storage for the data.
So that's what's holding us back is data and storage?
Yeah, and we also have to have the correct storage.
So that's really where the effort is going, to be able to get rid of these hallucinations.
That's a fun thing to say, hallucinations, in terms of artificial intelligence.
Well, we usually come up with the wrong things. Large language models is not really the correct way to talk about this. It does know language, but there's a lot of other things it knows. We're using them now to come up with medicines. For example, the Moderna vaccine, we wrote down every possible type of medicine that might work.
It was actually several billion mRNA sequences. We then tested them all and did that in two days. We actually came up with several billion and decided on it in two days. We then tested it with people. We'll be able to overcome that as well, because we'll be able to test it with machines.
But we actually did test it with people for ten months. There was still a record.
So for machines, when they start testing medications with machines, how will they audit that? So the concept will be that you take into account biological variability, all the different factors that would lead to a person having an adverse reaction to a certain compound. And then you program all the known data about how things interact with the body.
Right. You need to be able to simulate all the different possibilities.
And then come up with a number of how many people will be adversely affected by something.
That's one of the things you would look at.
And then efficacy based on age, health.
But that could be done literally in a matter of days rather than years.
Right.
But the question would be who's in charge of that data and how does that get resolved? And if artificial intelligence is still prone to hallucinations, and they start using those hallucinations to justify medications, that could be a bit of an issue. Especially if it's controlled by a corporation that wants to make a lot of money.
Well, that's the issue, to be able to do it correctly.
So there's going to have to be a point in time where we all decide that artificial intelligence has reached this place where we can trust it implicitly.
Right. Well, that's why they take now the leading candidate and actually test it with people.
But we'll be able to get rid of the testing with people once we can have reliance on the simulation. So we've got to make the simulations correct.
But right now we actually test it with people and that takes, well, it took 10 months in this case.
When you look at artificial intelligence and you look at the expansion of it and the ultimate place that it will eventually be, what do you see happening inside of our lifetime, like inside of 20 years? What kind of revolutionary changes on society would this have?
Well, one thing I feel will happen in five years, by 2029, is we'll reach longevity escape velocity. So right now you go through a year and you use up a year of your longevity, you're then a year older. However, we do have scientific progress and we're making, coming up with new cures for diseases and so on. Right now you're getting back about four months. So you lose a year, but through scientific progress, you're getting back four months.
So you're only losing eight months. However, the scientific progress is progressing exponentially. And by 2029, you'll get back a full year. So you lose a year, but you get back a year and you pretty much stay in the same place.
So by 2029, you'll be static.
And past 2029, you'll actually get back more than a year. You'll get back...
Can I be a baby again?
No, but in terms of your longevity, you'll get back more than a year.
Right. So you'll be able to essentially go back in biological age. Lengthening of the telomeres, changing the elasticity of the skin, muscle density.
Eventually, you'll be able to do that.
It doesn't guarantee you living forever. I mean, you could have a 10-year-old and you could compute, okay, he's got many decades of longevity and he could die tomorrow. Sure.
But overall, there'd be an expansion of the age that most people die.
And that's something that we're going to get. Also, using the same type of logic as large language models, but that's not language. You're actually creating medications. So we should call it large event models, not large language models, because it's not just dealing with language. It's dealing with all kinds of things.
When I talked to you 10 years ago, you were telling me about this pretty extensive supplement routine that you're on.
Are you still doing that? I'm trying to get to the point where we have longevity, escape velocity in good shape. And yes, I do follow that. I take maybe 80 pills a day and some injections and so on. Peptides?
Yes, peptides. So, so far it works.
Have you ever gone off of it to see what you feel like normally?
No.
Well, I do that, right?
Yeah. I mean, it seems to work. And there's evidence behind it.
How old are you now?
76.
You look good. You look good for 76, man. That's great. So it's doing something.
Yeah, I think it's working.
And so your goal is to get to that point where they start doing the. you live a year, you stay static, and then eventually get back to youthfulness.
Right. And it's not that far off. If you're diligent, I think we'll get there by 2029.. But not everybody's diligent. Correct.
Of course. Now, past that, this is for life extension, which is great. But what about how AI is going to change society?
Yes. Well, that's a very big issue. And it's already doing lots of things.
Makes some people uncomfortable. What we're actually doing is increasing our intelligence. I mean, right now you have a brain. It has different modules in it that deal with different things. But really, it's able to connect one concept to another concept.
And that's what your brain does.
We can actually increase that by, for example, carrying around a phone. This has connections in it. It's a little bit of a hassle to use. If I ask you to do something, you've got to kind of mess with it. Actually, it would be good if this actually listened to your conversation.
Oh, it does.
And without saying anything, you're just talking. And it says, oh, the name of that actress is so-and-so.
Yeah, but then it's a busy body. It's like interfering with your life, talking to you all the time.
Well, there's ways of dealing with that, too.
You shut it off.
So we haven't done that yet. But that's a way of expanding your connections.
What a large language model does, it has connections in it as well. And, in fact, it's getting now to a point that's getting fairly comparable to the human brain. We have about a trillion connections in our brain. Things like the top model from Google or GPT-4, they have about 400 billion connections approximately.
They'll be at a trillion, probably within a year. That's pretty comparable to what the human brain does. Eventually, it'll go beyond that. And we'll have access to that. So it's basically making us smarter.
So if you have the ability to be smarter,
that's something, that's positive, really.
If we were like mice today and we had the opportunity to become like humans, we wouldn't object to that. In fact, we are humans and we don't object to that.
And we used to be shrews.
And this is going to basically make us smarter. Eventually, we'll be much smarter than we are today. And that's a positive thing. We'll be able to do things today that we find bothersome in a way that's much more palatable.
The idea of us getting smarter sounds great. It'd be great to be smarter.
Right, but people object to that because it's like competition.
In what way?
Well, I mean,
Google has, I don't know, 60,000, 70,000 programmers. How many programmers exist in the world? How much longer is that going to be a viable career?
Because large language models already can code. Not quite as good as a real expert coder. But how long is that going to be? It's not going to be 100 years. It's going to be a few years.
So people see it as competition. I have a slightly different view of that. I see these things as actually adding to our own intelligence. And we're merging with these kinds of computers and making ourselves smarter by merging with it. And eventually, it'll go inside our brain and be able to make us smarter instantly.
Just like we had more connections inside our own brain.
Well, I think people have reservations always when it comes to great change. And this is probably the greatest change. The greatest change we've ever experienced in our lifetimes, for sure, has been the Internet. And this will make that look like nothing. It'll change everything.
And it seems inevitable. I understand that people are upset about it, but it just seems like what human beings were sort of designed to do.
Right. We're the only animal that actually creates technology. It's a combination of our brain and something else. Which is our thumb. So I can imagine something.
Oh, if I take that leaf from a tree, I could create a tool with it.
Other animals have actually a bigger brain. Like the whale.
Dolphins.
Dolphins. Elephants. They have a larger brain than we do, but they don't have something equivalent to the thumb. Monkey has a thing that looks like the thumb, but it's actually an inch down and it doesn't actually work very well. So they can actually create a tool, but they don't create a tool that's powerful enough to create the next tool.
So we're actually able to use our tools and create something that's that much more significant.
So we can create tools. And that's really part of who we are. It makes us that much more intelligent. And that's a good thing.
So here's U.
S. personal income per capita. So this is the average amount that we make per person in constant dollars.
There. it is right here. It's on the screen.
And we make a lot more money, but things cost a lot more money too, right?
No. This is constant dollars.
Constant dollars in relation to the inflation?
Yeah. So this does not show you inflation. These are constant dollars. And so we're actually making that much more each year on average.
Right, but it doesn't take into account inflation, correct? So it's not taking into account the rise of cost of things.
No, it is taking that.
Oh, it is. Okay.
So we're making that much more in constant dollars. If you look over the past hundred years, we've made about ten times as much.
I wonder if there's a similar chart about consumerism. Just about material possessions.
I wonder how much more we're purchasing and creating. I've always felt like that's one of the things, that materialism is. One of those instincts that human beings sort of look down upon. And this aimless pursuit of buying things. But I feel like that motivates technology.
Because the constant need for the newest, greatest thing. Is one of the things that fuels the creation and innovation of new things.
But if you were to go back a hundred years, you'd be very unhappy.
Oh yeah.
Because you wouldn't have a computer, for example.
You wouldn't have anything. You'd have most things. you've grown accustomed to.
Unless. that's why you want to live. Also, we didn't live very long.
Right, medical expenses.
Average life was 48 years in 1900.
. It's 35 years in 1800.. Go back a thousand years, it was 20 years.
That takes into account child mortality too, though, right? But it's also injuries, death. Some people did live long. There was people that lived back then. If nothing happened to you, you did live to be 80 like a normal person.
That was actually very rare.
Because most things happen to people. Most people, by the time you get to 80, you've had at least one hospital visit. Something's gone wrong. Broken arm, broken this, broken that.
It was very rare to make it to 80 200 years ago.
But the human body was physically capable of doing it. Right.
Well, our human body can go on forever if you fix things properly.
There's nothing in our body that means that you have to die at 100 or even 120.
. We can go on really indefinitely.
Well, that's the groundbreaking work today, right? They're treating disease, or excuse me, age, as if it is a disease, not just an inevitable consequence of being alive.
And our FDA doesn't accept that, but they're actually beginning to accept it now.
Well, as they get older.
Yeah, exactly.
They're forced into it. The concept of artificial general intelligence scares a lot of people, also because of Hollywood, right? Because of the Terminator films and things along those lines. How far away are we, do you think, from actual artificial humans? Or will we ever get there?
Will we integrate before that takes place?
I mean, all of this. additional intelligence that we're creating is something that we use. And it's just like it came with us. So we're actually making ourselves more intelligent. And ultimately, that's a good thing.
And if we have it, and then we say, well, gee, we don't really like this. Let's take it away. People would never accept that. They may be against the idea of general intelligence, but once they get it, nobody wants to give that up. And it will be beneficial.
The low lights started 200 years ago because the Cotton Ginny came out. And all these people that were making money with the Cotton Ginny were against it. And they would actually destroy these machines at night.
And they said, gee, if this keeps going, all jobs are going to go away. And indeed, people using the Cotton Ginny to create more wealth, that did go away. But we actually made more money because we created things that didn't exist then. We didn't have anything like electronics, for example.
And, as we can actually see, we make 10 times as much in constant dollars as we did 100 years ago.
And if you were to ask, well, what are people going to be doing? You couldn't answer it because we didn't understand the internet, for example.
And there's probably some technologies down the pipe that are going to have a similar impact.
Exactly. And they're going to extend life, for example.
But are they going to create life?
Well.
We know how to create life.
We don't.
Well, that's an interesting question.
What do you mean by create life?
What I think is that human beings are some sort of a biological caterpillar that makes a cocoon that gives birth to an electronic butterfly. I think we are creating a life form. And that we're merely conduits for this thing. And that all of our instincts and ego and emotions and all these things feed into it. Materialism feeds into it.
We keep buying and keep innovating. And technology keeps increasing exponentially. And eventually it's going to be artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is going to create better artificial intelligence and a form of being that has no limitations in terms of what it's capable of doing. And capable of traveling anywhere and not having any biological limitations.
But that's going to be ourselves. I mean, we're going to be able to create life that is like humans, but far greater than we are today.
With an integration of technology. If we choose to go that route. But that's the prediction that you have. That we will go that route like a Neuralink type. deal.
Something along those lines.
Right. So I don't see this competition. Like these things are going to...
No, I don't think it's competition.
Well, it will seem like that. I mean, if you have a job doing coding, and suddenly they don't really want you anymore because they can do coding with a large language model, it's going to feel like it's competition.
Well, there's an issue now with films. Tyler Perry owns and he was building an $800 million television studio and he stopped production. What is it called? Sora? Is that what it's called, Jamie?
Yeah. He stopped production when he saw the capabilities of AI just for creating visuals, scenes, movies. There's one that's incredibly impressive. It's Tokyo. They're walking down the street of Tokyo in the winter.
So it's snowing, and they're walking down the street and you look at it and you're like, this is insane. This looks like a film. See if you can find that film. Because it's incredible.
But would you want to get rid of that?
Get rid of what?
The capability.
No. I don't want to get rid of the capability.
But people do want to get rid of it.
People that make movies. People that actually film things with cameras and use actors, are going to be very upset. So this. This is all fake. Which is insane.
Beautiful, snowy Tokyo City is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes. And this is what you get.
This is insanely good.
The variability. Just the way people are dressed. If you saw this somewhere else. Look at this. A robot's life in a cyberpunk setting.
If you saw this, you would say, oh, they filmed this. But just look at what they're able to do with animation and kids movies and things along those lines.
It's going to get better.
It's just incredible.
I mean it's a new art form.
So, right there, the smoke looks a little uniform. But yeah.
I mean there's some problems with this.
But not much. And you imagine what it was like five years ago and then imagine what it's going to be like five years from now.
Absolutely.
And it's insane. No one took into consideration the idea that kids are going to be cheating on their school papers using chat GPT. But my kids tell me that's a real problem in school now.
Yes. Definitely.
So no one saw that coming. No one saw this coming. And what we're at now is with chat GPT 4. 4.5.. Is that what it is?
Well, 4.
5 is coming.
4.
5 is coming. 5 is supposed to be the massive leap.
It'll be a leap. Just like 3 to 4 was a massive leap.
Yeah.
But it's going to continue. It's never going to be finished.
Right. It'll keep going. And it will also be able to make better versions of itself. Correct?
Yes. Well, we do that. I mean technology. does that already.
Right. But if you scale that out 100 years from now, what are you looking at? You're looking at a god.
Well it'll be less than 100 years.
So you're looking at a god in 50 years?
Less than that.
So we need to emulate everything that humans can do. And not just one human, but all humans. Yes. And that's only like 2029.. That's only five years from now.
And then it will make better versions of that. So it will probably solve a lot of the problems that we have in terms of energy storage, data storage, data speeds. Right. Computation speeds.
And also medications.
For us.
For humans. Yeah.
So it's got to be biological.
I mean ultimately, that's what we're going to be able to do.
You think that's going to happen?
Yeah.
So do you think that we'll be able to.
I mean we'll be able to create.
. I mean the singularity is when we multiply our intelligence a million fold. And that's 2045.. So that's not that long from now. That's like 20 years from now.
Right.
And therefore most of your intelligence will be handled by the computer part of ourselves.
The only thing that won't be captured is what comes with our body originally. We'll ultimately be able to do that as well. It'll take a little longer. But we'll be able to actually capture what comes with our normal body.
and be able to recreate that. So that also has to do with how long we live. Because if everything is backed up... I mean right now, anytime you put anything into a phone or any kind of electronics, it's backed up. So I mean I could...
This has a lot of data. I could flip it and it ends up in a river and we can't capture it anymore. I can recreate it because it's all backed up.
And you think that's going to be the case of consciousness?
That's going to be the case of our normal biological body as well.
What's to stop someone like Donald Trump from just making 100,000 versions of himself?
Like, if you can back someone up, could you duplicate it? Couldn't you have three or four of them? Couldn't you have a bunch of them? Couldn't you live multiple lives?
Yes.
Would you be interacting with each other while you're living multiple lives, having consultations about what is St. Louis Ray doing? Well, I don't know, let's talk to San Francisco Ray. San Francisco Ray is talking to Florida Ray.
It's basically a matter of increasing our intelligence and being able to multiply Donald Trump, for example. that comes with that.
Do you think there will be regulations on that, to stop people from making 100,000 versions of themselves that operate a city?
There will be lots of regulations. There's lots of regulations we have already. You can't just create a medication and sell it to people that cures this disease. We have a tremendous amount of regulations.
Sure, but we don't really with phones. Like with your phone, you could essentially, if you had the money, you could make as many copies of that as you wanted.
Yeah.
There are some regulations. We regulate everything. But you're right, generally electronics.
doesn't have as much regulation. Right.
And when you get to a certain point, we will be electronics.
Yes, yes. I mean certainly. if we multiply our intelligence a million fold, everything of that additional million fold of yours is not regulated.
Right. When you think about the concept of integration and technological integration, when do you think that will start taking place and what will be the initial usage of it? Like, what will be the first versions and what would they provide?
Well, we have it now. Large language models are pretty impressive. If you look at what they can do.
I'm talking about physical integration with the human body, like a Neuralink type thing.
Right. Some people feel that we could actually understand what's going on in your brain and actually put things into your brain without actually going into the brain with something like Neuralink.
So something that like sits on the outside of your head?
Yeah.
It's not clear to me if that's feasible or not. I've been assuming that you have to actually go in. Now. Neuralink isn't exactly what we want, because it's too slow.
And it's actually, we'll do what it's advertised to do. Like, if, I actually know some people like this, who were active people and they completely lost the ability to speak and to understand language, and so on.
And so they can't actually say anything to you.
And we can use something like Neuralink to actually have them express something. They could think something and then have it be expressed to you.
Right. And they're doing that, right? They had the first patient. The first patient. that was, yeah.
And apparently that person can move a cursor around on a screen.
Right. And therefore you can do anything. It's fairly slow, though. And Neuralink is slow. If you really want to extend your brain, you need to do it at a much faster pace.
But isn't that going to increase exponentially as well?
Absolutely.
So how long do you think it'll be before it's implemented?
Well, it's got to be by 2045.
Because that's when the singularity exists and we can actually
multiply our intelligence on the order of a million fold.
And when you say 2045, what is the source of that estimation?
Because we'll be able to,
based actually on this chart and also the increase in.
the ability of software to also expand, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence a million fold.
And we'll be able to.
put that inside of our brain. And it'll be just like it's part of our brain.
So this is just following the current graph of progress?
Yeah, exactly.
So, if you follow the current graph of progress and if you do understand exponential growth, then what we're looking at in 2045 is inevitable. Right. Does that concern you at all? Are you excited about it? Do you think it's just a thing that is happening and you're a part of it and you're experiencing it?
I think we'll be enthusiastic about it.
I mean, imagine if you were to ask a mouse, would you like to actually be as intelligent as a human?
It's hard to know what people would say, but generally that's a positive thing.
Generally, yeah.
And that's what it's going to be like. We're going to be that much smarter. And once we're, there, is someone going to say, no, I don't really like this. I want to be stupid, like human beings used to be.
Nobody's really going to say that. Do human beings now say, gee, I'm really too smart. I'd really like to be like a mouse?
Not necessarily, but what people do say is that technology is too invasive and that it's too much a part of my life, and I'd like to sort of have a bit of an electronic vacation and separate from it. And there's a lot of people that I know.
But nobody does that. Nobody becomes stupid like we used to be when we were mice.
Right, but I'm not saying stupid. I'm saying some people, just like being a human, the way humans are now. Because one of the complications that comes with the integration of technology is what we're seeing now, with people. Massive increases in anxiety from social media use, being manipulated by algorithms, the effect that it has on culture, misinformation and disinformation, propaganda. There's so many different factors that are at play now that make people more anxious and more depressed statistically than ever.
I'm not sure we had more anxiety.
You're not sure?
today than we used to have.
Well, we certainly had more when the Mongols were invading. We certainly had more anxiety when we were worried constantly about war. But I think people have a pretty heightened level.
of social anxiety.
We had 100 million people die in Europe and Asia from World War II. We're very concerned about wars today and they're terrible. But we're not losing millions of people.
Right, but we could. We most certainly could. With what's going on with Israel and Gaza, what's going on with Ukraine and Russia, it could easily escalate.
Well, it's thousands of people. It's not millions of people. For now.
Yeah, but if it escalates to a hot war where it's involving the entire world.
What would really cause a tremendous amount of danger is something that's not really artificial intelligence. It was invented when I was a child, which is atomic weapons. Right. I remember when I was like five or six, we'd actually go outside, put our hands behind our back, to protect us from a nuclear war.
Yeah, drills.
And it seemed to work. We're still here.
Do you remember those things where they tell kids to get under the desk?
Yes, that's right. We went under the desk.
Which is hilarious, as if a desk is going to protect you from a nuclear bomb.
Right, but that's not AI.
Right. No, but AI applied to nuclear weapons makes them significantly more dangerous. And isn't one of the problems with AI is that AI will find a solution to a problem. Say, if you have AI running your military and AI says, what do you want me to do? And you say, well, I'd like to take over Taiwan.
And AI says, well, this is how to do it. And it just implements it with no morals, no thought of any sort of diplomacy or just force.
Right. Hasn't happened yet. Because we do have people in charge and the people are enhanced with AI, and AI can actually help us to avoid that kind of problem by thinking through the implications of different solutions.
Sure, if it has some sort of autonomy. But if we get to the point where one superpower has AI, artificial general intelligence, and the other one doesn't. How much of a significant advantage would that be?
I mean, I do think there are problems. Basically, there's problems with intelligence. And we like to say stupid.
But actually, it's better to be intelligent.
I believe it's better to be, to have greater intelligence.
Sure, right. But my question was, if there's a race to achieve AGI, how close is this race? Is it neck and neck? Who's at the lead? And how much capital is being put into these companies that are at the lead?
And whoever achieves it first, if that is under the control of a government, it's completely dependent upon what are the morals and ethics of that government? What's the constitution? What if it happens in China? What if it happens in Russia? What if it happens somewhere other than the United States?
And even if it does happen in the United States, who's controlling it?
I mean, the knowledge of how to create these things, is pretty widespread. It's not like somebody can just.
capitalize on a way to do it, and nobody else understands it.
Knowledge of how to create a large language model, or how to create the type of chips that would enable you to create this, is actually pretty widespread.
So do you think? essentially the competition is pretty even in all the countries currently? And there's also probably espionage. There's espionage where they're stealing information and sharing information and selling information.
And in terms of differences,
the United States actually has superior AI compared to other places.
Well, that's good for us.
I mean, we're actually way ahead of China, I would say.
Right, but China has a way of figuring out what we're doing and copying it. They're pretty good at that.
They have been, yeah.
So do you have any concern whatsoever in the idea that AI gets in the hands of the wrong people? So when it first gets implemented, that's the big problem, is before it exists, before artificial general intelligence really exists, it doesn't, and then it does, and who has it? And then, once it does, can that AGI stop other people from getting it? Can you program it to make sure, can you sabotage grids? Can you do whatever you can to take down the internet in these opposing places?
Could you inject their computations with viruses? What could you do to stop other people from getting to where you're at if you have an infinitely superior intelligence?
First. If that's what your goal is, then yes, you could do that.
Are you worried about that at all?
Yes, I worry about it.
What is your main worry? Do you worry about the implementation?
of AI? I'm worried if people who have a destructive idea of how to use these capabilities get into control.
Right.
And that could happen. I've got a chapter in the book about perils that are like what we're talking about.
And what do you think that could look like if the wrong people got a hold of this technology?
Well, you know, if you look at actually who controls atomic weapons, which is not AI, it's some of the worst people in the world. Right.
And if you were to ask people right after we used two atomic weapons within a week, 80 years ago, what's the likelihood that we're going to go another 80 years and not have that happen again? Everybody would say zero. But it actually has happened.
Shockingly.
And I think there's actually some message there.
Mutual assured destruction. But the thing is, would artificial general intelligence...
But that has not happened.
Right. It has not happened yet.
Would artificial general intelligence in the control of the wrong people negate that mutually assured destruction that keeps people from doing things? Obviously, we did drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right. We did. We did indiscriminately kill who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people with those weapons.
We did it. And if human beings were capable of doing it because no one else had it, if artificial general intelligence reaches that sentient level and is in control of the wrong people, what's to stop them from doing... There's no mutually assured destruction. if you're the one who's got it. You're the only one who's got it.
And you possibly.
. My concern is that whoever gets it could possibly stop it from being spread everywhere else and control it completely. And then you're looking at a completely dystopian world.
Right. So that's... If you ask me what I'm concerned about, it's along those lines.
Because that's what I always want to get out of you guys. Because there's so many people that are rightfully so, so high on this technology and the possibilities for enhancing our lives. But the concern that a lot of people have is that at what cost and what are we signing up for?
Right. But I mean, if we want to, for example, live indefinitely, this is what we need to do. We can't do...
What if you're denying yourself heaven? You ever thought of that possibility? That concept. But if heaven is real, if the idea of the afterlife is real and it's the next level of existence and you're constantly going through these cycles of life, what if you're stepping in and artificially denying that?
That's hard to imagine.
It is hard to imagine, but so is life. So is the universe itself. So is the Big Bang. So is black holes.
My father died when I was 22.
And.
. It's hard... And he was actually a great musician and he created fantastic music, but he hasn't done that since he died.
And.
. There's nothing that exists that is at all creative based on him. We have his memories, actually created a large language model that represented him. I can actually talk to him.
You do that now?
Yeah, it's in the book.
When you do that, have you thought about implementing some sort of a Sora-type deal where you're talking to him?
Well, you can do that now with language.
Right, but I mean physically like looking at him, like you're on a Zoom call with him.
That's a little bit in the future to be able to actually capture the way he looks. But that's also feasible.
It seems pretty feasible. Yeah. And certainly it could be something representative of what he looks based on photographs that you have, right?
So things like that is a reason to continue, so that we can create that and create our own ability.
to continue to exist. You talk to people and they say, well, I don't really want to live past 90 or whatever, 100..
But in my mind, if you don't exist,
there's nothing for you to experience.
That's true in this dimension. My thought on that, people saying that I don't want to live past 90.. It's like, okay, are you alive now? Do you like being alive now? What are you doing now in 90??
Is it just a number or is it a deterioration of your physical body? How much effort have you put into mitigating the deterioration of your natural body so that you can enjoy life now?
Exactly. And we've actually seen who would want to take their lives. People do take their lives if they are experiencing something that's miserable.
Right.
If they're suffering physically,
spiritually, and they just cannot stand the way life is carrying on, then they want to take their lives. Otherwise, people don't. If they're enjoying their lives, they continue. And people say, I don't want to live past 100.. But then when they get to be,
99.
9, they don't want to disappear unless they're suffering.
Unless they're suffering. That's what's interesting about the positive aspects of AI. Once we can manipulate human neurochemistry to the point where we figure out what is causing great depression, what is causing anxiety, what is causing a lot of these schizophrenic people.
And we definitely had that before. We didn't have the terms. We didn't understand schizophrenia, but people definitely had it.
This is what's going on in the human brain.
That's why we're continuing.
I was saying that's a good thing. That's a positive aspect of this technology.
Profoundly. Think about how many people do take their lives and with this technology would not just live happily, but also be productive and also contribute to whatever society is doing.
That's why we're carrying on with this. But in order to do that, we do have to overcome.
some sort of fear. I think what a lot of people are terrified of is that these people that are creating this technology,
there's oversight, but it's oversight by people that don't necessarily understand it the way, the people that are creating it. And they don't know what guardrails are in place. How safe is this? Especially when it's implemented with some sort of weapons technology or some sort of a military application,
that can be insanely profitable. And the motivations behind utilizing that are that profit. And then we do horrible things and somehow or another justify it.
I think democracy is actually an important issue here, because democratic nations tend not to go to war with each other.
You look at the way we're handling military technology.
If everybody was a democracy, I think there'd be much less war.
As long as it's a legitimate democracy that's not controlled by money. Right. As long as it's a legitimate democracy that's not controlled by the military-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical industry, or whoever puts the people that are in elected places, who puts them in there? How do they get funded?
Are they there for their own career? Do they bypass the safety and the future of the people for their own personal gain, which we've seen politicians do? There's certain problems with every system that involves human beings. This is another thing that technology may be able to do. One of the things, if you think about the worst attributes of humans, whether it's war,
crime,
imagine that technology can find what causes those thoughts and behaviors in human beings and mitigate them. I've joked around about this, but if we came up with something that would elevate dopamine just 300% worldwide, there'd be no more war. It'd be over. Everybody would be loving everybody. We'd be interacting with each other.
Well, that's the point of doing this.
But there'd also be no sad songs.
Or do we? Maybe we don't. Maybe that's just a byproduct of our monkey minds and that one day we'll surpass that and get to this point of enlightenment.
Enlightenment seems possible without technological innovation, but maybe not. I've never really met a truly enlightened person. I've met some people that are pretty close. But if you could get there,
all of our conflicts become erased.
Just for starters, if you could actually live longer, quite aside from the motivations of people, most people die not because of people's motivations, but because our body system won't last that long.
And a lot of people say, you know, I don't want to live longer, which makes no sense to me.
And not be able to have any kind of experience.
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