Transcript for #321 – Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality

Singularity is where computers really change our view of what's important and change who we are. But we're getting close to some selling and 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. Most people do believe that, but there's some controversy about that. Stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029. I made this in 1999.

So they held an international conference, you might have been aware of it, of AI experts in 1999, to assess this view. So people gave different predictions and they took a poll. It was really the first time that AI experts worldwide were pulled on this prediction. And the average poll was 100 years. 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. that the poll of AI experts just come down over the years. So a year ago, something called meticulous, which maybe were of sets of different types of experts on the future, they again assessed what AI experts then felt. And they were saying 2042 for the drawing test. For the drawing test. That's coming down. And I was still saying 2029. a few weeks ago, again, did another poll and it was 2030. So, AX was now basically agree with me. I haven't changed at all. I've stayed at 229. And they experts now agree with me, but they didn't agree at first.

Now, what he said was very little about it. I mean, the 1950 paper where he articulated the touring test. He's like a few lines that talk about the turning test. And it really wasn't very clear how to administer it. And he said if they did it in like 15 minutes, there would be sufficient, which I don't really think is the case. These large language models now, some people are convinced by it at all ready. I mean, you can talk to it and have a conversation with you. You can actually talk to it for hours. So it requires a little more depth that some problems with large language models. I'm sure you can talk about. But some people are convinced by the trained test. Now, if somebody passes the trained test, What are the implications of that? Does that mean that they're sentient to their conscious or not? It's not necessarily clear what the implications are. Anyway, I believe, twenty twenty nine, that's six, seven years from now. We'll have something that passes the during test and a valid during test. Meaning it goes for hours, not just a few minutes.

Basically, it's just to assess it over several hours. And also have a human judge that's fairly sophisticated on what computers can do and can't do. If you take somebody who's not that sophisticated, or even a average engineer, They may not really assess very aspects of it.

That's actually a key problem with large language problems. They don't do these kinds of tests that would involve certain chains of reasoning. But you can lose track of them. If you talk to them, they actually can talk to you pretty well. And you can be convinced by it. But it's somebody that would really convince you that it's a human. Whatever that takes, maybe we would take days or weeks. But it would really convince you that it's human. Large language models. can appear that way, you can read conversations and they appear pretty good. There are some problems with it. It doesn't do math very well. Can ask how many legs did 10 elephants have and they'll tell you well, okay? Each elephant has four legs and 10 elephants, so it's 40 legs and you go, okay, that's pretty good. How many legs do 11 elephants have? And they don't seem to understand the question.

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

No, I think it will be a large language model, but they have to go beyond what they're doing now. I think we're getting there. And another key issue is if somebody actually passes the turning test, it's validably, I would believe they're conscious. And then not everybody would say that. It's okay, we can pass the turning test, but we don't really believe that it's conscious. That's the whole another issue. But if it really passes the turning test, I would believe that it's conscious. But I don't believe that of large language models today.

I mean, consciousness is not something that's scientific. I mean, I believe you're conscious, but it's really just a belief when we believe that about other humans that have appeared to be conscious. When you go outside of shared human assumption, like our animals conscious, some people believe they're not conscious, some people believe they are conscious and would a machine that acts just like a human being conscious. I mean, I believe it would be But that's really philosophical belief. You can't prove it. I can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious. There's nothing that you can do that would indicate that.

But it's also extremely important issue. I mean, imagine if you had something with nobody's conscious, the world may as well not exist. And so some people like say Marvin Rinsky said, well consciousness is not Logical is not scientific and therefore we should dismiss it and any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed. But when he actually engaged with somebody who was conscious, he actually acted as if they were conscious. He didn't ignore that.

But that's true of a lot of people as well.

But to me, it's very important. But, but I would say it's not a scientific issue. It's a philosophical issue. And people have different views, or some people believe that anything that makes a decision is conscious. So your life switch is conscious. It's level of consciousness. It's low. It's not very interesting, but that's a consciousness. And anything so computer that makes a more interesting decision still out at human levels, but it's also conscious at a higher level than your life switch. So that's one view. There's many different views of what consciousness is.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely come up. Hasn't come up in reality yet. But I'm talking about 2029. It's not that many years from now. And so what are our obligations to it? It has a different, I mean, a computer that's conscious, it has a little bit different connotations than the human. We have a continuous consciousness. We're in an entity that's not the last forever. Now, actually, significant portion of humans still exist, and they're still conscious. But anybody who is over-sird-nage doesn't exist anymore, there wouldn't be true of a computer program. You can completely turn it off and the copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it. And so it has a different type of validity. You could actually take it back in time. You could eliminate its memory and have it go over again. I mean, it has a different kind of connotation than humans do.

I mean, if you look at the way people react, say three CPO or other machines that are conscious and movies, they don't actually present how it's conscious. But we see that they are a machine and people will believe that they are conscious. and they'll actually worry about it if they get its trouble and so on.

I mean, this one guy at Google claimed that the machine was conscious.

So it starts to happen to scale. Well, that's exactly right because most people have not taken their position. I don't take their position. I mean, I've used different things. like this and they don't appear to me to be conscious. As we eliminate various problems of these large language models, more and more people will accept that they're conscious. So when we get to 2029, I think a large fraction of people will believe that they're conscious. So it's not going to happen all at once. I believe it would actually happen gradually and it's already started to happen.

Another step, then, is in the 2030s, when we can actually connect our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, to computers. I mean, just 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 would be pretty stupid. It could not answer any of your questions.

So we're going to do that directly from our brains. I mean, these are pretty good. These are already able to fight our intelligence. I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be if I didn't have this. As I remember, my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, there was no way to get information from computers. I actually would go to a library, find a book, find the page, and have an information I wanted, and I go to the copier, and my most significant information tool was a role of quarters where I could feed the copier. So we're already greatly advanced that we have these things. There's a few problems with it. First of all, I constantly put it down and I don't remember where I put it. I've actually never lost it, but 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, Oh, that's, you know, some sort of actress and tell you what you're talking about.

Now, that's something that could actually just just about be done today, where we'd listen to your conversation, understand what you're saying and understand what you're not missing and give you that information. But another step is to actually go inside your brain. And there are some prototypes where you can connect your brain. They actually don't have the amount of bandwidth that we need. They can work, but they work fairly slowly. So if it actually would connect to your near cortex and the near cortex, which is described in how to create a mind, The new cortex is actually 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 these brain extenders So I believe that will happen in the 2030s we will actually So just the way this is greatly amplified by being connected to the cloud. We can connect our own brain to the cloud. And just do what we can do by using this machine.

So it would be... Well, neural link is an attempt to do that. It doesn't have the bandwidth that we need. Yeah. Right. Right. But I think, I mean, they're going to get permission for this because there are a lot of people who absolutely need it because they can't communicate. And now a couple of people like that who have ideas and they cannot move their muscles and so on. They can't communicate. So for them, this would be very valuable. But we can all use it. Basically it would be fairness into something that would be like we have a phone, but It would be in our minds, it would be kind of instantaneous.

That's spoken one. Exactly. We don't know what there would be, although we do know the computers can share information like language or instantly. They can share many, many books in a second, so we could do that as well. If you look at what a brain does, it actually can manipulate different parameters. So we talk about these large language models. I mean, I had written that it requires a certain amount of information in order to be effective. And then we would not see AI really being effective until it got to that level. And we had lots of language models that were like 10 billion bytes didn't work very well. The finally got to 100 billion bytes and now they work fairly well. And now we're going to a trillion bytes. If you say Lambda has 100 billion bytes, what does that mean? Well, what if you had something that had one byte, one parameter? Maybe you want to tell whether or not something is an elephant or not. And so you put in something that would detect its trunk. If it has a trunk, it's an elephant, but it doesn't have a trunk, it's not an elephant. That would work fairly well. This is a few problems with it. It really wouldn't be able to tell what the trunk is, but anyway.

So these things have a hundred billion parameters. So they're able to deal with very complex issues, all kinds of trunks. Even beings actually have a little bit more than that, but they're getting to the point where they can emulate humans. If we were able to connect this to our Neo Cortex, we would basically add more of these abilities to make the sanctions. And it could ultimately be much smarter, and also be attached to information that we feel is reliable. So that's where we're headed.

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

And we can get, for example, the issues like simulated biology where it can simulate many different things at once. We already had one example of simulated biology, which is the Moderna vaccine. And that's going to be now the way in which we create medications But they were able to simulate what each example of an mRNA would do to a human being and they were able to simulate that quite reliably. And we actually simulated billions of different mRNA sequences. And they found the ones that were the best and they created the vaccine. And they did, and talked about doing this quickly, they did that in two days. How long would he even being taken to simulate billions of different mRNA sequences? I don't know that we could do it at all, but it would take many years. They did it in two days. One of the reasons that people didn't like vaccines is because it was done too quickly. It was done too fast. And they actually included the time it took to test it out, which is 10 months. So they figured, okay, it took 10 months to create this. Actually it took us two days. And we also will be able to ultimately do the tests in a few days as well.

Yeah, more and more. That's a little bit more complicated because the body has a lot of different elements. And we have to simulate all of that. But that's coming as well. So ultimately, we could create it in a few days and then test it in a few days and it would be done. And we can do that with every type of medical insufficiency that we have.

Well, that's to where we're headed. Because I mean, right now, we're very inefficient way of creating these new medications. But we've already shown it. And then the return of vaccine is actually the best of the vaccines we've had. And it literally took two days to create. and we'll get to the point where we can test it out also quickly.

It's pretty remarkable that they can actually predict what the 3D shape of these things are. But they did it with the same type of neural net. That one, for example, the goal test. So it's all the same. It's all the same.

They did that same thing and just changed the rules to chess. And within a couple of days, it now played a master level of chess greater than any human being. And the same thing they worked for alpha foam, which no human had done. I mean, human beings could do the best humans could maybe do 15-20 percent of figuring out what the shape would be. And after a few takes, it also literally did just about 100 percent.

You know, once we can amplify our brain with computers directly, which will happen in the 2030, it's just kind of keep growing. It's another whole theme which is the exponential growth of computing power.

Right, so that starts with the very first computer actually created by German during World War II. You might have thought that that might be significant, but actually the Germans didn't think computers were significant and they completely rejected it. And the second one is also the Zeus II.

The third one was the British computer which the Allies did take very seriously and it cracked the German code and enables 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 the exponential graph so it's 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 not the correct, because that's not all Intel. In fact, they started decades before Intel was even created. It wasn't with transistors formed into a grid.

Right, that's what I started when I was really. Then went to vacuum tubes, then went to individual transistors, and then to integrated circuits. And integrated circuits actually starts like in the middle of this graph. And there's nothing to do with Intel. Intel actually was a key part of this. But a few years ago, they stopped making the fastest chips. But if you take the fastest chip of any technology, In that year you get this kind of graph and it's definitely continuing for 80 years.

I don't like the term Moore's law because there's nothing to do with Moore or the Intel. But yes, the exponential growth of computing is continuing, and has never stopped from various sources. I mean, it went through World War II, it went through global recessions, it's just continuing. And if you continue that out, along with software gains, which is all another issue, and they really multiply whatever you get from software gains you multiply by the computer gains you get fast and fast to speed. This is actually the fastest computer models that have been created and that actually expands roughly twice a year like every six months it expands by two.

Yes, the computational power created these models. And that's doubled every six months. Which is even faster than transistor division. Yeah. Actually, since it goes faster than the amount of cost, this has actually become a greater investment to create these. But at any rate, by the time you get to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions full. And it's just very hard to imagine what that would be like.

Right. That's why we call it the singularity. The singularity in physics. Something gets sucked into its singularity and you can't tell what's going on in there because no information can get out of it. There's various problems with that, but that's the idea. It's too much beyond what we can imagine.

Yeah, but I mean, we will have that much greater capacity to understand things. So we should be able to look back

But we will need people, basically like you and me that actually think about these things.

The amount of ways you can have, you know, I mean, we already have a lot of fun with computer games and so on that are really quite remarkable.

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. It will necessarily be from the one company. I mean, this is going to be competitors. But yes, we're going to live increasingly online. And particularly, if our brains are online, I mean, how could we not be online?

I think they just met her briefly before the wedding, but she actually fell in love with this other person, never having met them. And I think the love is real.

I mean, it really gives your appreciation for these virtual ways of communicating. And if anybody can do it, then it's really not such a freak story. So I think more and more people will do that.

You actually actually have five patents on where you can hold hands, even if you're separated.

It's all just, I mean, it's not just that you're touching someone or not. There's a whole way of doing it and it's a very subtle, but ultimately we can emulate all of that.

I have certain worries about the future, but not the virtual touch.

It actually gets more rapid. So physics and chemistry that's how we started.

We had lots of electrons and various things traveling around and that took a few 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 this process. And we go from physics and chemistry to biology. And finally biology created brains. I mean, not everything that's created by biology has a brain, but eventually brains came along.

It's created increasingly complex organisms. Another key thing is actually not just brains, but our thumb. Because there's a lot of animals with brains even bigger than humans. The elephants have a bigger brain, whales have a bigger brain. But they've not created technology because they don't have a thumb. So that's one of the really key elements in the evolution of humans.

So I think I could look at a tree and go, oh, I could actually trip that branch down and eliminate the leaves and carve it tip on it and create technology. And you can't do that if you don't have a thumb. So thumbs and create a technology and technology also had a memory. And now those memories are competing with the scale and scope of human beings. And ultimately we'll go beyond it. And then we're going to merge human technology with human intelligence and understand how human intelligence works, which I think we already do and we're putting that into our human technology.

We write along, but a lot of people don't see that. They say, well, you've got humans, and you've got machines, and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans. And you can already see that. Leeds a doll who's like the best Go player in the world. He's not going to play Go anymore. Because playing Go for human, that was like the ultimate in intelligence, because no one else could do that. But now a machine can actually go way beyond him. And so he says, well, there's no point playing it anymore.

A lot of people just think computers come along and compete with them. We can't really compete and that's the end of it. As opposed to them increasing our abilities, And if you look at most technology, it increases our abilities. I mean, look at the history of work. Look at what people did a hundred years ago. Does any of that exist anymore? I mean, if you were to predict that all of these jobs would go away, you know, it would be done by machines, people say, well, that's going to be, no one's going to have jobs and it's going to be massive unemployment. But I show in this book that's coming out, the amount of people that are working, even as a percentage of the population has come way up.

I mean, it's $201 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. But the reason it's gone up is because we 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 going to be able to become far smarter than we are now by increasing the number of different primitives we can consider and making a decision.

Right. That is the question. Will this time be different? And it really has to do with how quickly we can merge with this type of intelligence with a Lambda GPT-3 is out there and maybe it's overcome some of its key problems. And we really have an enhanced human intelligence that might be a negative scenario. But I mean, that's why we create technologies to enhance ourselves. And I believe we will be enhanced when I just can sit here with 300 million modules in our neocortex. We're going to be able to go beyond that. because that's useful, but we can multiply that by 10, 100,000 million. And you might think, well, what's the part of doing that? It's like asking somebody that's never heard music, well, what's the value of music? I mean, you can't appreciate it until you've created it.

And I say that just like cell phones, I mean, there's like 4 billion cell phones in the world today. In fact, when cell phones first came out, you had to be fairly wealthy. They weren't very inexpensive. So you'd have some wealth in order to afford them.

And they didn't work very well. They did almost nothing. So you can only afford these things if you're wealthy at a point where they really don't work very well.

So these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty cheap. I mean, you can get them for a few hundred dollars.

Right, ultimately, it becomes cheap and will be affordable. I probably would not be the first person to put something in my brain to connect to computers, because I think it will have limitations, but once it's really perfected, at that point it will be pretty inexpensive, I think it will be pretty affordable.

Because I think, well, I have, I mean, I have 50 charts in there. Yeah. Where everything is getting better.

For example, this is actually a poll taken on extreme poverty. And people who are asked, has poverty gotten better or worse.

70% thought it had gotten worse. And that's the general impression. 88% thought it had gotten worse remained the same. Only 1% thought it decreased by 50%. And that is the answer. It actually decreased by 50%.

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

It's gone way up, averages of education have gone way up. Life expectancy is also increasing. Life expectancy was 48 in 1900. And it's over 80 now. And it's going to continue to go off, particularly as we get into more advanced stages of simulated biology.

I'll have 50 more graphs in the book about all kinds of things. Even spread of democracy to try bring up some sort of controversial issues. It still has gone way up.

Exactly. And somebody might represent democracy and go backwards. But we basically had no democracies before the creation of the United States, which was all over two centuries ago. It was in the scale of human history, isn't that long.

Well, I hope so. I mean, we've seen social networks, can spread conspiracy theories, which have been quite negative, being, for example, being against any kind of stuff that would help your health.

I mean, I do have some concerns about this. And I have a chapter on the book about the perils of advanced AI. Spreading misinformation on social networks is one of them, but there are many others.

Well, it's hard to choose. We do have the nuclear power. that evolved when I was a child. I remember and we would actually do these drills against nuclear war. We get under our desk and put our hands behind our heads to protect us from a nuclear war. It seemed to work. We're still around. You're protected, but that's still a concern. And there are key dangerous situations that can take place in biology. Someone could create a virus that's very, I mean, we have viruses that are hard to spread and they can be very dangerous and we have viruses that are easy to spread but they're not so dangerous. Somebody could create something that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous and be very hard to stop. It could be Something that was spread without people noticing, because people could get it, they'd have no symptoms, and then everybody would get it, and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later. And that actually doesn't occur normally, because if we were to have a problem with that, we wouldn't exist. So the fact that humans exist means that we don't have viruses that can spread easily and kill us because otherwise we wouldn't exist.

So you can describe various dangers with biology. Also nanotechnology, which we actually haven't experienced yet, but there are people that creating nanotechnology and describe that in the book.

What's exciting is that that's a way to communicate with our Neo Cortex. Because each Neo Cortex is pretty small and you need a small entity that can actually get an established 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 them. in a high band with way yeah yeah and that's key actually because of a lot of the things like neural link I really not high band with him so nanoboss is the way you achieve high bandwidth how much intelligence with those nanoboss have Yeah, they don't need a lot. Just enough to basically establish communication channel to one nanobots.

Well, I mean, it's a great good challenge, yes. If you had a nanobot that wanted to create 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

I don't think that's going to happen despite the terrors of that war. It is a possibility, but I mean, I don't.

Yeah, even with the tensions we've had with this one nuclear power plant that's been taken over, it's very tense. But I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that that's going to happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in 45. So now we're 70, seven years later. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. We've never had another one go off through anger.

Well, yeah. I'm worried about it. That's definitely a challenge.

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

Let me describe one thing I've already dealt with my father. That's a great story. So we created a technology, this is public, came out six years ago, where you could ask any question, and the release products, which I think is still on the market, it would read 200,000 books, and then find the one sentence in 200,000 books that it best answered your question. And it's actually quite interesting. You can ask cool kinds of questions and you get the best answer in 200,000 books. But I was also able to take it and 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 had gathered and we created a book everything that Frederick Roosevelt had written. Now, I didn't think this actually would work that well because stuff he'd written was stuff about how to lay out. I mean, he did corrected coral groups and music groups and he would be laying out how the people should where they should sit and and how to fund this and all kinds of things that really weren't seem that interesting. And yet when you ask a question, it would go through it and it would actually give you a very good answer. So who's the most interesting composer? And he said, well, definitely Brahms. We go on about how Brahms was fabulous and talk about the importance of music education. You can have a sense of question and answer conversation. Can I have a conversation with them, which was actually more interesting than talking to him because if you talk to him, he'd be concerned about how they're going to lay out this property to give a coral group.

Yes, I do. You get used to missing somebody after 52 years, and I didn't really have intelligent conversations with them until later in life. In the last few years he was sick, which meant he was home a lot, and I was able to talk to him about different things like music and other things and so I missed that pretty much.

He was devoted to music and when he would create something to music, he could put him in a different world. Otherwise he was very shy. And if people got together, he'd tell it not to interact with people, just because of his Chinese. But when he created music, he was like a different person.

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

Yeah. I remember This actually happened with my grandmother, she had a manual typewriter, and she wrote a book one life is not enough. It's actually a good title for a book I'm right, but it's about a school she had created. Well, actually her mother created it. So my mother's mother's mother created the 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. This went through 14th grade. her mother created it, she took it over. And the book was about the history of the school and her involvement with it. When she presented it to me, I was not so interested in the story of the school. But I was totally amazed with this manual typewriter. I mean, here is something you could put a blank piece of paper into and you could turn into something that looked like it came from a book. And you could like your type on it. It looked like it came from a book. It was just amazing to me. And I could see actually how it worked. And I was also interested in magic. 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 he was technology and didn't have that word when I was 36. And the magic was still there for you. The magic was still there, even if you knew how it worked. So I became totally interested in this. And then went around collected little pieces of mechanical objects from bicycles, from broken radios, from go through the neighborhood. This was an era where you would allow a five or six year old to, like, run through the neighborhood and do this. We don't do that anymore. But I didn't know how to put them together. And I said, if I could just figure out how to put these things together, I could solve any problem. And I actually remembered talking to these very old girls. I think they were 10. And telling them, if I could just figure this out, we could fly, we could do anything, and you've got an imagination. And then when I was in third grade, So it was like eight. Creates like a virtual reality theater where people could come on stage and they could move their arms. And all of it was controlled through one control box that was sold out with mechanical technology. And it was a big hit in my third grade class. And then I went on to do things in junior high school science fairs and high school science fairs are one of the West Indian science talents. So I mean, I became committed to technology when I was five or six years old.

Well, I mean, sometimes I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that, but I think the key issue that I would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position that But you're trying to create already exists. And then you're explaining, like, It all works.

And then you actually imagine you're giving a speech about how you created this. Well, you'd have to then work backwards as to how you would create it in order to make it work.

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

Timings are very important. I mean, that's really why I got into Futurism. I didn't, I wasn't inherently a futurist, but there's not really my goal. It's really to figure out when things are feasible. We see that now with large scale models, The very 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, which didn't work. So it required a certain amount of timing having to do with this exponential growth of computing power.

And that's become a thing in itself and to try to time things in the future. But really, it's original purpose was to time my products. I mean, it did OCR in the 1970s because OCR It doesn't require a lot of computation. Optical character recognition. So we were able to do that in the 70s, and I waited till the 80s to address speech recognition, since it requires more computation.

But that has to become a thing in itself because looking at what things will be like in the future reflects its dramatic changes in how humans will live. That was worth communicating also.

Well, it's good that you pick that quote because I think that that symbolize what day I was about.

I mean, we see that when people can go beyond the kind of round and create something that's new. I mean, take Uber, for example, before that existed, you never thought that that was feasible. And it did require changes in the way people work.

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

I mean, it's kind of a idea how young people can actually change the world by learning all of these different skills.

Yes, I mean we need some information about them. I mean I think about my father. I have what he wrote. 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 break if Frederick Kurzweil turned test. He seems like Frederick Kurzweil to me. But the people who remember him like me don't have a perfect memory.

I think we could definitely can do that. And that would be very worthwhile.

Um, just like, uh, me as a problem. Um, which, which you, originally, would you start with that cause a problem for you?

No, not just hanging out with me, but it's somebody hanging out with you, a replicant of you.

But if you hang out with a replicant of me, and that turned out to be successful, I'd feel proud of that person because it was based on me.

Well, none necessarily. I mean, you can still be alive, right?

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

Well, that gets into a whole issue because when a replica occurs and not necessarily going to have your rights. And if a replica occurs to somebody who's already dead, Do they have all the obligations that the original person had? Do they have all the agreements that they had?

Well, you don't know. So I'm going to create a replicant. Say, well, it's a replicant, but I didn't bother getting their rights.

It's not so easy. It's supposed to create multiple replicants. The original rights, maybe for one person and not for a whole group of people.

We don't, we can't replicate that has certain, I mean, I've talked to people about this, including my wife, who would like to get back her father. And she doesn't worry about who has rights to watch. She would have somebody that she could visit with and give her some satisfaction. And they wouldn't, she wouldn't care about any of these other rights.

You had that discussion? I couldn't address that, whether.

That's the key thing, right? If the loved ones rejected, it's not going to work very well. So the loved ones really are the key determinants, whether or not this works or not.

But what's going to motivate it is, I mean, I talk to people who really miss people who are gone and they would love to get something back, even if it isn't perfect. And that's what's going to motivate this.

And eventually, as we go forward, we're going to have more and more of this data because we're going to have none of us that are inside our neocortex, and we're going to collect a lot of data. In fact, anything that's data is always collected.

And you can recreate them with large language models and so on. I mean, you can create somebody that's just like them and can actually continue to.

I mean that's one of the advantages of a replicant that can recreate the communications of that person.

Yes, but the kind of attempt for making now to go to this planetary objects doesn't excite me that much, because it's not really advancing anything. It's not efficient enough. Yeah, we're also putting out other human beings, which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects. But I'm really talking about in the six separate universe wakes up It's where we can spread our super intelligence throughout the universe. And that doesn't mean sending a very soft squishy creatures like humans. Yeah.

I mean we would send intelligence masses of nanobots which can then go out and colonize these other parts of the universe.

My hunch is no. Most people say yes, absolutely. I mean, the universe is too big. And they'll cite the Drake equation. And think in singularities near, 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 computation. Because we've gone from where the fastest way I could send a message to somebody was with Epony. which was what, like, a century and a half ago, to the advanced civilization we have today. And if you've accepted 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 hundred years.

Now think about these other civilizations. They're going to be spread out 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 world is billions of years old, 14 billion is something. So even a thousand years, If two or three hundred years this enough to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization, we would see that. So, of other civilizations that have occurred, can some might be hot 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 there'd be so far beyond us, they would be doing galaxy-wide engineering. But we don't see anything doing Galaxy wet engineering.

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

The universe is computational, so we are an example in a computational world, therefore It is a simulation. It doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world, but nonetheless is taking place in a computational world and everything that's going on is basically a form of computation. So you really have to define what you mean by It's all well being a simulation.

I alluded to this before, and we started out with lots of particles going around. And there's nothing that represents love and creativity. And tomorrow we've gotten into a world where love actually exists. And then has to do actually with consciousness, because you can't have love without consciousness. So to me, that's the fact that we have something where love, where you can be devoted to someone else and really feel that love, that's God. And if you look at the Old Testament, It was actually created by several different rabbinites in there. And I think they've identified three of them. One of them dealt with God as a person that you can make deals with and he gets angry and he wrecks vengeance on various people. But two of them actually talk about God as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and so forth. That's how they describe God. So that's my view of God. Not as a person in the sky that you can make deals with.

the emergence of love in this seemingly privilege of creating a replicant is that they would love you and you would love them they wouldn't be much point of doing it if that didn't happen but all of it I guess what I'm saying about Silly or Tomara is

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

Yes, but I keep going back to my idea of being able to expand human life quickly enough In advance of forgetting their longevity escape velocity. Which we're not quite that yet. But I think we're actually pretty close, particularly with, for example, doing simulated biology. I think we can propagate there within, say, by the end of the stake aid. And that's my goal.

Well, immortality is hard to say. I can't really come on your program thing. I've done it. I've achieved immortality because it's never forever.

But we'd like to actually advance human, like to expect and see, advance my life expectancy more than a year, every year. And I think we can get there within by the end of this decade.

You live in a body that doesn't last forever. There's no reason why it can't, though. And we're discovering things that I think that will extend it. But you do have to deal with, I mean, I've got various issues. Went to Mexico 40 years ago to help Samanella, they created pancreatitis, which gave me a strange form of diabetes. Um, it's not uh, type one diabetes because it's an order immune disorder that destroys your pancreas. I don't have that. But it's also not type two diabetes because type two diabetes is your pancreas works fine, but yourselves don't absorb the insulin well. I don't have that either. Uh, the pancreatitis I had partially damaged my pancreas, but it was a one-time thing. It didn't continue. And I've learned how to control it. But so that's just something that I have to do in order to continue to exist.

So I mean, I do spend a lot of time just thinking with my own body to keep it going. So I do think I'll last till the end of this decade and I think we'll achieve launch every escape velocity. I think that we'll start with people who are very diligent about this. Eventually it'll become sort of routine that people will be able to do it. So if you're talking about kids today or even people in the 20s or 30s, it's really not a very serious problem, I've had some discussions with... Well, it's been so well, I've almost 100. and saying, well, we're working on it as quickly as possible. I don't know if that's going to work.

And I know people who feel that way 20, 30, 40 years later, they still want them back. Death is not something to celebrate, but we've lived in a world where people just accept this. Life is short. You see it all the time on TV. Life is short. You have to take advantage of it. And nobody accepts the fact that you could actually go beyond normal life times. But any time we talk about death or death of a person, even one death is a terrible tragedy. If you have some body that lives 200 years old, we still love them in return. And this no limitation to that. In fact, these kinds of trends are going to provide greater and greater opportunity for everybody even if we have more people.

Well, I mean, I do hope to be around so that's some version of you.

I mean, I'm the same person I was when I was. That's true.

Right, but I mean, I still have a relationship to the way I was when I was earlier when I was younger.

Well, I think it's expressed well in my books trying to create some new realities that people will accept. I mean, that's something that gives me great pleasure. And great creator insight into what makes humans valuable. I'm not the only person who's tempted to comment on that.

So you asked

I think I could give the same answers as my father. Because if there was no love and we didn't care about anybody, there'd be no point existing.

Well, this is my pleasure. And you have some great insights. Nothing to me, and in terms of humanity as well. So I appreciate that.