Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality
生物与进化AI 与机器学习音乐与艺术技术与编程心理与人性
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AI 智能总结
雷·库兹韦尔谈奇点、超级智能与永生
这是 Lex Fridman 与发明家、未来学家 Ray Kurzweil 的深度对话。库兹韦尔分享了他对技术指数增长的预测、2045 年奇点的愿景、人类与 AI 融合的路径，以及他对死亡和永生的独特看法。
奇点超级智能纳米技术永生人机融合指数增长未来学
Ray Kurzweil 是美国发明家、未来学家，现任 Google 工程总监，著有《奇点临近》《如何创造思维》等书，以对技术发展的精准预测而闻名，是技术乐观主义的最重要代言人。
📌 核心观点
- 奇点预测：库兹韦尔预测到 2045 年，AI 将超越人类智能，人类将能够将自己的智能扩大数百万倍。他的预测基于技术指数增长的规律，他声称过去 30 年的预测准确率超过 86%。
- 纳米技术与医学革命：库兹韦尔预测到 2030 年代，纳米机器人将在我们的血液中运行，修复细胞损伤、消灭疾病、逆转衰老。他认为衰老是一种可以被工程化解决的疾病。
- 人机融合：库兹韦尔认为人类的未来不是被 AI 取代，而是与 AI 融合——通过脑机接口将人类意识与云端 AI 连接，创造出超越当前人类能力的混合智能。
- 关于死亡和永生：库兹韦尔相信他的父亲（已故）的信息模式可以被重建，他正在努力活到能够受益于长寿技术的那一天。他每天服用大量补充剂，将自己的身体视为一个需要优化的系统。
- 对批评者的回应：面对对奇点预测的怀疑，库兹韦尔坚持认为批评者低估了指数增长的力量，就像 1990 年代的人无法想象今天的互联网一样，我们也难以想象 2045 年的世界。
✨ 金句摘录
库兹韦尔：到 2045 年，我们将能够将自己的智能扩大数百万倍——很难想象那会是什么样子。
库兹韦尔：衰老是一种疾病，而疾病是可以被治愈的——这是我们这一代人面临的最重要的工程挑战。
库兹韦尔：批评者总是低估指数增长的力量——就像 1990 年代的人无法想象今天的互联网。
📋 章节目录
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🔑 关键词
donhumanconsciousablecreatedtestdidnbookturingsingularityhumanspersonbrainsomebodytechnologytalkkeylargemodelsdoesn
💬 精彩语录
暂无语录
🎙️ 完整对话（1779 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
By the time he gets to 2045,
当他到达2045年时，
Lex Fridman (00:02.800)
we'll be able to multiply our intelligence
我们将能够成倍增加我们的智力
Lex Fridman (00:05.320)
many millions fold.
数百万人折叠。
Lex Fridman (00:07.680)
And it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like.
很难想象那会是什么样子。
Lex Fridman (00:13.560)
The following is a conversation with Ray Kurzweil,
以下是与雷·库兹韦尔的对话，
Ray Kurzweil (00:16.840)
author, inventor, and futurist,
作家、发明家和未来学家，
Lex Fridman (00:19.480)
who has an optimistic view of our future
谁对我们的未来持乐观态度
Ray Kurzweil (00:22.280)
as a human civilization,
作为人类文明，
Lex Fridman (00:24.320)
predicting that exponentially improving technologies
预测技术将呈指数级改进
Ray Kurzweil (00:27.280)
will take us to a point of a singularity
将带我们到达一个奇点
Lex Fridman (00:29.880)
beyond which superintelligent artificial intelligence
除此之外还有超级智能人工智能
Ray Kurzweil (00:33.480)
will transform our world in nearly unimaginable ways.
将以几乎难以想象的方式改变我们的世界。
Lex Fridman (00:38.380)
18 years ago, in the book Singularity is Near,
18年前，在《奇点临近》一书中，
Ray Kurzweil (00:41.280)
he predicted that the onset of the singularity
他预言奇点的开始
Lex Fridman (00:44.000)
will happen in the year 2045.
将会发生在2045年。
Ray Kurzweil (00:47.360)
He still holds to this prediction and estimate.
他仍然坚持这个预测和估计。
Lex Fridman (00:50.800)
In fact, he's working on a new book on this topic
事实上，他正在写一本关于这个主题的新书
Ray Kurzweil (00:53.440)
that will hopefully be out next year.
希望明年就能发布。
Lex Fridman (00:56.520)
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
这是莱克斯·弗里德曼的播客。
Ray Kurzweil (00:58.320)
To support it, please check out our sponsors
为了支持它，请查看我们的赞助商
Lex Fridman (01:00.360)
in the description.
Lex Fridman (01:01.640)
And now, dear friends, here's Ray Kurzweil.
Lex Fridman (01:06.360)
In your 2005 book titled The Singularity is Near,
Ray Kurzweil (01:10.960)
you predicted that the singularity will happen in 2045.
Lex Fridman (01:15.400)
So now, 18 years later, do you still estimate
Lex Fridman (01:18.460)
that the singularity will happen on 2045?
Lex Fridman (01:22.480)
And maybe first, what is the singularity,
Lex Fridman (01:24.960)
the technological singularity, and when will it happen?
Lex Fridman (01:27.760)
Singularity is where computers really change our view
Ray Kurzweil (01:31.640)
of what's important and change who we are.
Lex Fridman (01:35.840)
But we're getting close to some salient things
Ray Kurzweil (01:39.560)
that will change who we are.
Lex Fridman (01:42.800)
A key thing is 2029,
Ray Kurzweil (01:45.680)
when computers will pass the Turing test.
Lex Fridman (01:50.120)
And there's also some controversy
Ray Kurzweil (01:51.520)
whether the Turing test is valid.
Lex Fridman (01:53.680)
I believe it is.
Ray Kurzweil (01:55.080)
Most people do believe that,
Lex Fridman (01:57.920)
but there's some controversy about that.
Lex Fridman (01:59.680)
But Stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029.
Lex Fridman (02:06.520)
I made this in 1999 in my book.
Ray Kurzweil (02:10.520)
The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Lex Fridman (02:12.120)
Right.
Lex Fridman (02:12.960)
And then you repeated the prediction in 2005.
Lex Fridman (02:15.600)
In 2005.
Ray Kurzweil (02:16.600)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:17.520)
So they held an international conference,
Ray Kurzweil (02:19.480)
you might have been aware of it,
Lex Fridman (02:20.800)
of AI experts in 1999 to assess this view.
Lex Fridman (02:26.620)
So people gave different predictions,
Lex Fridman (02:29.580)
and they took a poll.
Ray Kurzweil (02:30.840)
It was really the first time that AI experts worldwide
Lex Fridman (02:34.240)
were polled on this prediction.
Lex Fridman (02:37.720)
And the average poll was 100 years.
Lex Fridman (02:41.420)
20% believed it would never happen.
Lex Fridman (02:44.320)
And that was the view in 1999.
Lex Fridman (02:48.120)
80% believed it would happen,
Lex Fridman (02:50.640)
but not within their lifetimes.
Lex Fridman (02:53.200)
There's been so many advances in AI
Ray Kurzweil (02:56.920)
that the poll of AI experts has come down over the years.
Lex Fridman (03:01.840)
So a year ago, something called Meticulous,
Ray Kurzweil (03:05.440)
which you may be aware of,
Lex Fridman (03:07.080)
assesses different types of experts on the future.
Ray Kurzweil (03:11.560)
They again assessed what AI experts then felt.
Lex Fridman (03:16.440)
And they were saying 2042.
Ray Kurzweil (03:18.940)
For the Turing test.
Lex Fridman (03:20.440)
For the Turing test.
Lex Fridman (03:22.440)
So it's coming down.
Lex Fridman (03:23.560)
And I was still saying 2029.
Ray Kurzweil (03:26.320)
A few weeks ago, they again did another poll,
Lex Fridman (03:30.200)
and it was 2030.
Lex Fridman (03:32.960)
So AI experts now basically agree with me.
Lex Fridman (03:37.920)
I haven't changed at all, I've stayed with 2029.
Lex Fridman (03:42.820)
And AI experts now agree with me,
Lex Fridman (03:44.520)
but they didn't agree at first.
Lex Fridman (03:46.840)
So Alan Turing formulated the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (03:50.120)
and...
Ray Kurzweil (03:50.960)
Right, now, what he said was very little about it.
Lex Fridman (03:54.480)
I mean, the 1950 paper
Ray Kurzweil (03:55.920)
where he had articulated the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (03:59.440)
there's like a few lines that talk about the Turing test.
Lex Fridman (04:06.840)
And it really wasn't very clear how to administer it.
Lex Fridman (04:12.040)
And he said if they did it in like 15 minutes,
Ray Kurzweil (04:16.520)
that would be sufficient,
Lex Fridman (04:17.680)
which I don't really think is the case.
Ray Kurzweil (04:20.600)
These large language models now,
Lex Fridman (04:22.960)
some people are convinced by it already.
Ray Kurzweil (04:25.560)
I mean, you can talk to it and have a conversation with it.
Lex Fridman (04:28.440)
You can actually talk to it for hours.
Lex Fridman (04:31.760)
So it requires a little more depth.
Lex Fridman (04:35.360)
There's some problems with large language models
Ray Kurzweil (04:38.120)
which we can talk about.
Lex Fridman (04:41.840)
But some people are convinced by the Turing test.
Ray Kurzweil (04:46.460)
Now, if somebody passes the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (04:50.160)
what are the implications of that?
Ray Kurzweil (04:52.160)
Does that mean that they're sentient,
Lex Fridman (04:53.720)
that they're conscious or not?
Ray Kurzweil (04:56.280)
It's not necessarily clear what the implications are.
Lex Fridman (05:00.880)
Anyway, I believe 2029, that's six, seven years from now,
Ray Kurzweil (05:07.640)
we'll have something that passes the Turing test
Lex Fridman (05:10.360)
and a valid Turing test,
Ray Kurzweil (05:12.480)
meaning it goes for hours, not just a few minutes.
Lex Fridman (05:15.320)
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Lex Fridman (05:16.600)
What is your formulation of the Turing test?
Lex Fridman (05:21.160)
You've proposed a very difficult version
Lex Fridman (05:23.180)
of the Turing test, so what does that look like?
Lex Fridman (05:25.420)
Basically, it's just to assess it over several hours
Lex Fridman (05:30.760)
and also have a human judge that's fairly sophisticated
Lex Fridman (05:36.440)
on what computers can do and can't do.
Ray Kurzweil (05:40.800)
If you take somebody who's not that sophisticated
Lex Fridman (05:43.800)
or even an average engineer,
Ray Kurzweil (05:48.360)
they may not really assess various aspects of it.
Lex Fridman (05:52.080)
So you really want the human to challenge the system.
Ray Kurzweil (05:55.680)
Exactly, exactly.
Lex Fridman (05:57.040)
On its ability to do things
Ray Kurzweil (05:58.520)
like common sense reasoning, perhaps.
Lex Fridman (06:00.800)
That's actually a key problem with large language models.
Ray Kurzweil (06:04.680)
They don't do these kinds of tests
Lex Fridman (06:08.080)
that would involve assessing chains of reasoning,
Lex Fridman (06:17.400)
but you can lose track of that.
Lex Fridman (06:18.960)
If you talk to them,
Ray Kurzweil (06:20.200)
they actually can talk to you pretty well
Lex Fridman (06:22.760)
and you can be convinced by it,
Lex Fridman (06:24.840)
but it's somebody that would really convince you
Lex Fridman (06:27.400)
that it's a human, whatever that takes.
Ray Kurzweil (06:32.200)
Maybe it would take days or weeks,
Lex Fridman (06:34.800)
but it would really convince you that it's human.
Ray Kurzweil (06:40.880)
Large language models can appear that way.
Lex Fridman (06:45.320)
You can read conversations and they appear pretty good.
Ray Kurzweil (06:49.760)
There are some problems with it.
Lex Fridman (06:52.260)
It doesn't do math very well.
Ray Kurzweil (06:55.000)
You can ask how many legs did 10 elephants have
Lex Fridman (06:58.160)
and they'll tell you, well, okay,
Ray Kurzweil (07:00.020)
each elephant has four legs
Lex Fridman (07:01.440)
and it's 10 elephants, so it's 40 legs.
Lex Fridman (07:03.700)
And you go, okay, that's pretty good.
Lex Fridman (07:05.840)
How many legs do 11 elephants have?
Lex Fridman (07:07.960)
And they don't seem to understand the question.
Lex Fridman (07:11.520)
Do all humans understand that question?
Ray Kurzweil (07:14.160)
No, that's the key thing.
Lex Fridman (07:15.880)
I mean, how advanced a human do you want it to be?
Lex Fridman (07:19.440)
But we do expect a human
Lex Fridman (07:21.360)
to be able to do multi chain reasoning,
Ray Kurzweil (07:24.840)
to be able to take a few facts
Lex Fridman (07:26.320)
and put them together, not perfectly.
Lex Fridman (07:29.840)
And we see that in a lot of polls
Lex Fridman (07:32.800)
that people don't do that perfectly at all.
Lex Fridman (07:39.220)
So it's not very well defined,
Lex Fridman (07:42.020)
but it's something where it really would convince you
Ray Kurzweil (07:44.320)
that it's a human.
Lex Fridman (07:45.600)
Is your intuition that large language models
Ray Kurzweil (07:48.840)
will not be solely the kind of system
Lex Fridman (07:52.320)
that passes the Turing test in 2029?
Lex Fridman (07:55.600)
Do we need something else?
Lex Fridman (07:56.800)
No, I think it will be a large language model,
Lex Fridman (07:58.720)
but they have to go beyond what they're doing now.
Lex Fridman (08:02.960)
I think we're getting there.
Lex Fridman (08:05.760)
And another key issue is if somebody
Lex Fridman (08:09.240)
actually passes the Turing test validly,
Ray Kurzweil (08:12.200)
I would believe they're conscious.
Lex Fridman (08:13.640)
And then not everybody would say that.
Ray Kurzweil (08:15.000)
It's okay, we can pass the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (08:17.440)
but we don't really believe that it's conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (08:20.080)
That's a whole nother issue.
Lex Fridman (08:23.120)
But if it really passes the Turing test,
Ray Kurzweil (08:24.920)
I would believe that it's conscious.
Lex Fridman (08:26.720)
But I don't believe that of large language models today.
Ray Kurzweil (08:32.760)
If it appears to be conscious,
Lex Fridman (08:35.520)
that's as good as being conscious, at least for you,
Ray Kurzweil (08:38.240)
in some sense.
Lex Fridman (08:40.700)
I mean, consciousness is not something that's scientific.
Ray Kurzweil (08:46.640)
I mean, I believe you're conscious,
Lex Fridman (08:49.760)
but it's really just a belief,
Lex Fridman (08:51.100)
and we believe that about other humans
Lex Fridman (08:52.800)
that at least appear to be conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (08:57.400)
When you go outside of shared human assumption,
Lex Fridman (09:01.720)
like are animals conscious?
Ray Kurzweil (09:04.520)
Some people believe they're not conscious.
Lex Fridman (09:06.200)
Some people believe they are conscious.
Lex Fridman (09:08.680)
And would a machine that acts just like a human be conscious?
Lex Fridman (09:14.520)
I mean, I believe it would be.
Lex Fridman (09:17.040)
But that's really a philosophical belief.
Lex Fridman (09:20.800)
You can't prove it.
Ray Kurzweil (09:22.720)
I can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious.
Lex Fridman (09:25.480)
There's nothing that you can do
Ray Kurzweil (09:27.280)
that would indicate that.
Lex Fridman (09:30.360)
It's like saying a piece of art is beautiful.
Ray Kurzweil (09:32.780)
You can say it.
Lex Fridman (09:35.000)
Multiple people can experience a piece of art as beautiful,
Lex Fridman (09:39.300)
but you can't prove it.
Lex Fridman (09:41.320)
But it's also an extremely important issue.
Ray Kurzweil (09:44.840)
I mean, imagine if you had something
Lex Fridman (09:47.040)
where nobody's conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (09:49.140)
The world may as well not exist.
Lex Fridman (09:55.660)
And so some people, like say Marvin Minsky,
Ray Kurzweil (10:02.620)
said, well, consciousness is not logical,
Lex Fridman (10:05.940)
it's not scientific, and therefore we should dismiss it,
Lex Fridman (10:08.380)
and any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed.
Lex Fridman (10:15.500)
But when he actually engaged with somebody
Ray Kurzweil (10:18.500)
who was conscious, he actually acted
Lex Fridman (10:20.660)
as if they were conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (10:22.620)
He didn't ignore that.
Lex Fridman (10:24.260)
He acted as if consciousness does matter.
Ray Kurzweil (10:26.860)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (10:28.180)
Whereas he said it didn't matter.
Ray Kurzweil (10:30.500)
Well, that's Marvin Minsky.
Lex Fridman (10:31.780)
Yeah.
Ray Kurzweil (10:32.620)
He's full of contradictions.
Lex Fridman (10:34.060)
But that's true of a lot of people as well.
Lex Fridman (10:37.660)
But to you, consciousness matters.
Lex Fridman (10:39.620)
But to me, it's very important.
Lex Fridman (10:42.160)
But I would say it's not a scientific issue.
Lex Fridman (10:45.640)
It's a philosophical issue.
Lex Fridman (10:49.240)
And people have different views.
Lex Fridman (10:50.720)
Some people believe that anything
Ray Kurzweil (10:52.800)
that makes a decision is conscious.
Lex Fridman (10:54.520)
So your light switch is conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (10:56.760)
Its level of consciousness is low,
Lex Fridman (10:59.400)
not very interesting, but that's a consciousness.
Lex Fridman (11:05.120)
So a computer that makes a more interesting decision
Lex Fridman (11:09.120)
is still not at human levels,
Lex Fridman (11:10.440)
but it's also conscious and at a higher level
Lex Fridman (11:12.560)
than your light switch.
Lex Fridman (11:13.720)
So that's one view.
Lex Fridman (11:17.360)
There's many different views of what consciousness is.
Lex Fridman (11:20.080)
So if a system passes the Turing test,
Lex Fridman (11:24.600)
it's not scientific, but in issues of philosophy,
Ray Kurzweil (11:30.000)
things like ethics start to enter the picture.
Lex Fridman (11:32.600)
Do you think there would be,
Ray Kurzweil (11:35.500)
we would start contending as a human species
Lex Fridman (11:39.920)
about the ethics of turning off such a machine?
Ray Kurzweil (11:42.840)
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely come up.
Lex Fridman (11:47.400)
Hasn't come up in reality yet.
Ray Kurzweil (11:49.600)
Yet.
Lex Fridman (11:50.560)
But I'm talking about 2029.
Ray Kurzweil (11:52.400)
It's not that many years from now.
Lex Fridman (11:56.080)
So what are our obligations to it?
Ray Kurzweil (11:59.960)
It has a different, I mean, a computer that's conscious,
Lex Fridman (12:03.240)
it has a little bit different connotations than a human.
Ray Kurzweil (12:08.240)
We have a continuous consciousness.
Lex Fridman (12:15.600)
We're in an entity that does not last forever.
Ray Kurzweil (12:22.080)
Now, actually, a significant portion of humans still exist
Lex Fridman (12:27.400)
and are therefore still conscious.
Lex Fridman (12:31.760)
But anybody who is over a certain age
Lex Fridman (12:34.880)
doesn't exist anymore.
Ray Kurzweil (12:37.160)
That wouldn't be true of a computer program.
Lex Fridman (12:40.320)
You could completely turn it off
Lex Fridman (12:42.000)
and a copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it.
Lex Fridman (12:46.120)
And so it has a different type of validity.
Ray Kurzweil (12:51.160)
You could actually take it back in time.
Lex Fridman (12:52.920)
You could eliminate its memory and have it go over again.
Ray Kurzweil (12:55.840)
I mean, it has a different kind of connotation
Lex Fridman (12:59.800)
than humans do.
Ray Kurzweil (13:01.800)
Well, perhaps it can do the same thing with humans.
Lex Fridman (13:04.400)
It's just that we don't know how to do that yet.
Ray Kurzweil (13:06.880)
It's possible that we figure out all of these things
Lex Fridman (13:09.400)
on the machine first.
Lex Fridman (13:12.320)
But that doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious.
Lex Fridman (13:15.480)
I mean, if you look at the way people react,
Ray Kurzweil (13:17.640)
say, 3CPO or other machines that are conscious in movies,
Lex Fridman (13:25.000)
they don't actually present how it's conscious,
Lex Fridman (13:26.740)
but we see that they are a machine
Lex Fridman (13:30.120)
and people will believe that they are conscious
Lex Fridman (13:33.280)
and they'll actually worry about it
Lex Fridman (13:34.640)
if they get into trouble and so on.
Lex Fridman (13:37.480)
So 2029 is going to be the first year
Lex Fridman (13:40.840)
when a major thing happens.
Ray Kurzweil (13:43.440)
Right.
Lex Fridman (13:44.280)
And that will shake our civilization
Ray Kurzweil (13:46.520)
to start to consider the role of AI in this world.
Lex Fridman (13:50.280)
Yes and no.
Ray Kurzweil (13:51.120)
I mean, this one guy at Google claimed
Lex Fridman (13:54.560)
that the machine was conscious.
Lex Fridman (13:58.440)
But that's just one person.
Lex Fridman (14:00.160)
Right.
Ray Kurzweil (14:01.000)
When it starts to happen to scale.
Lex Fridman (14:03.080)
Well, that's exactly right because most people
Ray Kurzweil (14:06.320)
have not taken that position.
Lex Fridman (14:07.760)
I don't take that position.
Ray Kurzweil (14:08.940)
I mean, I've used different things like this
Lex Fridman (14:17.240)
and they don't appear to me to be conscious.
Ray Kurzweil (14:20.500)
As we eliminate various problems
Lex Fridman (14:22.840)
of these large language models,
Ray Kurzweil (14:26.960)
more and more people will accept that they're conscious.
Lex Fridman (14:30.480)
So when we get to 2029, I think a large fraction
Ray Kurzweil (14:35.760)
of people will believe that they're conscious.
Lex Fridman (14:39.080)
So it's not gonna happen all at once.
Ray Kurzweil (14:42.440)
I believe it will actually happen gradually
Lex Fridman (14:44.360)
and it's already started to happen.
Lex Fridman (14:47.280)
And so that takes us one step closer to the singularity.
Lex Fridman (14:52.360)
Another step then is in the 2030s
Ray Kurzweil (14:55.560)
when we can actually connect our neocortex,
Lex Fridman (14:59.800)
which is where we do our thinking, to computers.
Lex Fridman (15:04.880)
And I mean, just as this actually gains a lot
Lex Fridman (15:09.280)
to being connected to computers
Ray Kurzweil (15:12.200)
that will amplify its abilities,
Lex Fridman (15:15.360)
I mean, if this did not have any connection,
Ray Kurzweil (15:17.400)
it would be pretty stupid.
Lex Fridman (15:19.360)
It could not answer any of your questions.
Ray Kurzweil (15:21.860)
If you're just listening to this, by the way,
Lex Fridman (15:24.400)
Ray's holding up the all powerful smartphone.
Lex Fridman (15:29.400)
So we're gonna do that directly from our brains.
Lex Fridman (15:33.520)
I mean, these are pretty good.
Ray Kurzweil (15:35.040)
These already have amplified our intelligence.
Lex Fridman (15:37.720)
I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be
Ray Kurzweil (15:40.040)
if I didn't have this.
Lex Fridman (15:42.600)
Because I remember my first book,
Ray Kurzweil (15:44.240)
The Age of Intelligent Machines,
Lex Fridman (15:49.060)
there was no way to get information from computers.
Ray Kurzweil (15:52.080)
I actually would go to a library, find a book,
Lex Fridman (15:55.400)
find the page that had an information I wanted,
Lex Fridman (15:58.440)
and I'd go to the copier,
Lex Fridman (15:59.920)
and my most significant information tool
Ray Kurzweil (16:04.360)
was a roll of quarters where I could feed the copier.
Lex Fridman (16:08.480)
So we're already greatly advanced
Ray Kurzweil (16:11.400)
that we have these things.
Lex Fridman (16:13.280)
There's a few problems with it.
Ray Kurzweil (16:15.460)
First of all, I constantly put it down,
Lex Fridman (16:17.280)
and I don't remember where I put it.
Ray Kurzweil (16:19.680)
I've actually never lost it.
Lex Fridman (16:21.220)
But you have to find it, and then you have to turn it on.
Lex Fridman (16:26.080)
So there's a certain amount of steps.
Lex Fridman (16:28.160)
It would actually be quite useful
Ray Kurzweil (16:30.100)
if someone would just listen to your conversation
Lex Fridman (16:33.440)
and say, oh, that's so and so actress,
Lex Fridman (16:38.920)
and tell you what you're talking about.
Lex Fridman (16:41.160)
So going from active to passive,
Ray Kurzweil (16:43.160)
where it just permeates your whole life.
Lex Fridman (16:46.240)
Yeah, exactly.
Ray Kurzweil (16:47.280)
The way your brain does when you're awake.
Lex Fridman (16:49.560)
Your brain is always there.
Ray Kurzweil (16:51.220)
Right.
Lex Fridman (16:52.060)
That's something that could actually
Ray Kurzweil (16:53.800)
just about be done today,
Lex Fridman (16:55.840)
where we'd listen to your conversation,
Ray Kurzweil (16:57.400)
understand what you're saying,
Lex Fridman (16:58.600)
understand what you're not missing,
Lex Fridman (17:01.840)
and give you that information.
Lex Fridman (17:04.520)
But another step is to actually go inside your brain.
Lex Fridman (17:09.720)
And there are some prototypes
Lex Fridman (17:12.740)
where you can connect your brain.
Ray Kurzweil (17:15.280)
They actually don't have the amount
Lex Fridman (17:17.040)
of bandwidth that we need.
Ray Kurzweil (17:19.160)
They can work, but they work fairly slowly.
Lex Fridman (17:21.940)
So if it actually would connect to your neocortex,
Lex Fridman (17:26.160)
and the neocortex, which I describe
Lex Fridman (17:30.180)
in How to Create a Mind,
Ray Kurzweil (17:33.000)
the neocortex is actually,
Lex Fridman (17:36.700)
it has different levels,
Lex Fridman (17:38.180)
and as you go up the levels,
Lex Fridman (17:39.980)
it's kind of like a pyramid.
Ray Kurzweil (17:41.780)
The top level is fairly small,
Lex Fridman (17:44.340)
and that's the level where you wanna connect
Ray Kurzweil (17:47.820)
these brain extenders.
Lex Fridman (17:50.140)
And so I believe that will happen in the 2030s.
Lex Fridman (17:58.100)
So just the way this is greatly amplified
Lex Fridman (18:01.580)
by being connected to the cloud,
Ray Kurzweil (18:04.420)
we can connect our own brain to the cloud,
Lex Fridman (18:07.420)
and just do what we can do by using this machine.
Lex Fridman (18:14.260)
Do you think it would look like
Lex Fridman (18:15.660)
the brain computer interface of like Neuralink?
Lex Fridman (18:18.920)
So would it be?
Lex Fridman (18:19.760)
Well, Neuralink, it's an attempt to do that.
Ray Kurzweil (18:22.500)
It doesn't have the bandwidth that we need.
Lex Fridman (18:26.300)
Yet, right?
Ray Kurzweil (18:27.660)
Right, but I think,
Lex Fridman (18:30.320)
I mean, they're gonna get permission for this
Ray Kurzweil (18:31.980)
because there are a lot of people
Lex Fridman (18:33.160)
who absolutely need it because they can't communicate.
Ray Kurzweil (18:36.660)
I know a couple people like that
Lex Fridman (18:38.420)
who have ideas and they cannot,
Ray Kurzweil (18:42.660)
they cannot move their muscles and so on.
Lex Fridman (18:44.580)
They can't communicate.
Lex Fridman (18:45.800)
And so for them, this would be very valuable,
Lex Fridman (18:52.040)
but we could all use it.
Ray Kurzweil (18:54.820)
Basically, it'd be,
Lex Fridman (18:59.000)
turn us into something that would be like we have a phone,
Lex Fridman (19:02.520)
but it would be in our minds.
Lex Fridman (19:05.120)
It would be kind of instantaneous.
Lex Fridman (19:07.360)
And maybe communication between two people
Lex Fridman (19:09.440)
would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language.
Ray Kurzweil (19:14.080)
Yes, exactly.
Lex Fridman (19:15.640)
We don't know what that would be,
Ray Kurzweil (19:17.280)
although we do know that computers can share information
Lex Fridman (19:22.400)
like language instantly.
Ray Kurzweil (19:24.640)
They can share many, many books in a second.
Lex Fridman (19:28.880)
So we could do that as well.
Ray Kurzweil (19:31.200)
If you look at what our brain does,
Lex Fridman (19:34.240)
it actually can manipulate different parameters.
Lex Fridman (19:39.120)
So we talk about these large language models.
Lex Fridman (19:46.560)
I mean, I had written that
Ray Kurzweil (19:51.520)
it requires a certain amount of information
Lex Fridman (19:55.000)
in order to be effective
Lex Fridman (19:58.600)
and that we would not see AI really being effective
Lex Fridman (1:00:06.620)
And you fell in love with it
Lex Fridman (1:00:07.620)
in the same way he did with music?
Lex Fridman (1:00:09.380)
Yeah, yeah.
Ray Kurzweil (1:00:11.300)
I remember this actually happened with my grandmother.
Lex Fridman (1:00:16.940)
She had a manual typewriter
Lex Fridman (1:00:20.060)
and she wrote a book, One Life Is Not Enough,
Lex Fridman (1:00:23.060)
which actually a good title for a book I might write,
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.240)
but it was about a school she had created.
Lex Fridman (1:00:30.260)
Well, actually her mother created it.
Lex Fridman (1:00:33.800)
So my mother's mother's mother created the school in 1868.
Lex Fridman (1:00:38.300)
And it was the first school in Europe
Ray Kurzweil (1:00:40.620)
that provided higher education for girls.
Lex Fridman (1:00:42.660)
It went through 14th grade.
Ray Kurzweil (1:00:45.620)
If you were a girl and you were lucky enough
Lex Fridman (1:00:48.260)
to get an education at all,
Ray Kurzweil (1:00:50.700)
it would go through like ninth grade.
Lex Fridman (1:00:52.940)
And many people didn't have any education as a girl.
Ray Kurzweil (1:00:56.660)
This went through 14th grade.
Lex Fridman (1:01:00.620)
Her mother created it, she took it over,
Lex Fridman (1:01:04.060)
and the book was about the history of the school
Lex Fridman (1:01:09.420)
and her involvement with it.
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:12.980)
When she presented it to me,
Lex Fridman (1:01:14.020)
I was not so interested in the story of the school,
Lex Fridman (1:01:19.020)
but I was totally amazed with this manual typewriter.
Lex Fridman (1:01:25.400)
I mean, here is something you could put a blank piece
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:27.860)
of paper into and you could turn it into something
Lex Fridman (1:01:31.080)
that looked like it came from a book.
Lex Fridman (1:01:33.780)
And you can actually type on it
Lex Fridman (1:01:34.620)
and it looked like it came from a book.
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:36.440)
It was just amazing to me.
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.120)
And I could see actually how it worked.
Lex Fridman (1:01:42.720)
And I was also interested in magic.
Lex Fridman (1:01:44.840)
But in magic, if somebody actually knows how it works,
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:50.420)
the magic goes away.
Lex Fridman (1:01:52.540)
The magic doesn't stay there
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:53.780)
if you actually understand how it works.
Lex Fridman (1:01:56.600)
But here was technology.
Ray Kurzweil (1:01:57.820)
I didn't have that word when I was five or six.
Lex Fridman (1:02:01.020)
And the magic was still there for you?
Ray Kurzweil (1:02:02.660)
The magic was still there, even if you knew how it worked.
Lex Fridman (1:02:06.900)
So I became totally interested in this
Lex Fridman (1:02:08.780)
and then went around, collected little pieces
Lex Fridman (1:02:12.580)
of mechanical objects from bicycles, from broken radios.
Ray Kurzweil (1:02:17.580)
I would go through the neighborhood.
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.500)
This was an era where you would allow five or six year olds
Ray Kurzweil (1:02:23.700)
to run through the neighborhood and do this.
Lex Fridman (1:02:26.340)
We don't do that anymore.
Lex Fridman (1:02:27.740)
But I didn't know how to put them together.
Lex Fridman (1:02:30.700)
I said, if I could just figure out
Lex Fridman (1:02:32.220)
how to put these things together, I could solve any problem.
Lex Fridman (1:02:37.340)
And I actually remember talking to these very old girls.
Ray Kurzweil (1:02:41.660)
I think they were 10.
Lex Fridman (1:02:45.340)
And telling them, if I could just figure this out,
Ray Kurzweil (1:02:48.340)
we could fly, we could do anything.
Lex Fridman (1:02:50.120)
And they said, well, you have quite an imagination.
Lex Fridman (1:02:56.220)
And then when I was in third grade,
Lex Fridman (1:03:00.780)
so I was like eight,
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:02.860)
created like a virtual reality theater
Lex Fridman (1:03:05.900)
where people could come on stage
Lex Fridman (1:03:07.780)
and they could move their arms.
Lex Fridman (1:03:09.900)
And all of it was controlled through one control box.
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:13.540)
It was all done with mechanical technology.
Lex Fridman (1:03:16.980)
And it was a big hit in my third grade class.
Lex Fridman (1:03:21.100)
And then I went on to do things
Lex Fridman (1:03:22.980)
in junior high school science fairs
Lex Fridman (1:03:24.900)
and high school science fairs.
Lex Fridman (1:03:27.660)
I won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
Lex Fridman (1:03:30.720)
So I mean, I became committed to technology
Lex Fridman (1:03:33.940)
when I was five or six years old.
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:37.460)
You've talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think,
Lex Fridman (1:03:43.100)
to come up with ideas as a source of creativity.
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:45.900)
Because you maybe talk through that,
Lex Fridman (1:03:49.360)
maybe the process of how to,
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:52.020)
you've invented a lot of things.
Lex Fridman (1:03:54.060)
You've came up and thought through
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:55.620)
some very interesting ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:03:58.100)
What advice would you give,
Ray Kurzweil (1:03:59.520)
or can you speak to the process of thinking,
Lex Fridman (1:04:03.420)
of how to think, how to think creatively?
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:07.100)
Well, I mean, sometimes I will think through in a dream
Lex Fridman (1:04:10.460)
and try to interpret that.
Lex Fridman (1:04:12.340)
But I think the key issue that I would tell younger people
Lex Fridman (1:04:22.220)
is to put yourself in the position
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:25.080)
that what you're trying to create already exists.
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.660)
And then you're explaining, like...
Lex Fridman (1:04:34.980)
How it works.
Lex Fridman (1:04:35.820)
Exactly.
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:38.220)
That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:04:39.220)
You paint a world that you would like to exist,
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:42.780)
you think it exists, and reverse engineer that.
Lex Fridman (1:04:45.940)
And then you actually imagine you're giving a speech
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:47.900)
about how you created this.
Lex Fridman (1:04:50.140)
Well, you'd have to then work backwards
Ray Kurzweil (1:04:51.780)
as to how you would create it in order to make it work.
Lex Fridman (1:04:57.320)
That's brilliant.
Lex Fridman (1:04:58.160)
And that requires some imagination too,
Lex Fridman (1:05:01.420)
some first principles thinking.
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:03.140)
You have to visualize that world.
Lex Fridman (1:05:06.040)
That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:05:07.720)
And generally, when I talk about things
Lex Fridman (1:05:10.600)
we're trying to invent, I would use the present tense
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:13.160)
as if it already exists.
Lex Fridman (1:05:15.880)
Not just to give myself that confidence,
Lex Fridman (1:05:18.280)
but everybody else who's working on it.
Lex Fridman (1:05:21.840)
We just have to kind of do all the steps
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:26.640)
in order to make it actual.
Lex Fridman (1:05:31.040)
How much of a good idea is about timing?
Lex Fridman (1:05:35.400)
How much is it about your genius
Lex Fridman (1:05:37.040)
versus that its time has come?
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:41.620)
Timing's very important.
Lex Fridman (1:05:42.920)
I mean, that's really why I got into futurism.
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:46.200)
I didn't, I wasn't inherently a futurist.
Lex Fridman (1:05:50.500)
That was not really my goal.
Ray Kurzweil (1:05:54.320)
It's really to figure out when things are feasible.
Lex Fridman (1:05:57.400)
We see that now with large scale models.
Ray Kurzweil (1:06:01.680)
The very large scale models like GPT3,
Lex Fridman (1:06:06.400)
it started two years ago.
Ray Kurzweil (1:06:09.600)
Four years ago, it wasn't feasible.
Lex Fridman (1:06:11.160)
In fact, they did create GPT2, which didn't work.
Lex Fridman (1:06:18.800)
So it required a certain amount of timing
Lex Fridman (1:06:22.360)
having to do with this exponential growth
Ray Kurzweil (1:06:24.200)
of computing power.
Lex Fridman (1:06:27.400)
So futurism in some sense is a study of timing,
Ray Kurzweil (1:06:31.240)
trying to understand how the world will evolve
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.400)
and when will the capacity for certain ideas emerge.
Lex Fridman (1:06:38.320)
And that's become a thing in itself
Lex Fridman (1:06:40.040)
and to try to time things in the future.
Lex Fridman (1:06:43.960)
But really its original purpose was to time my products.
Lex Fridman (1:06:48.960)
I mean, I did OCR in the 1970s
Ray Kurzweil (1:06:55.480)
because OCR doesn't require a lot of computation.
Lex Fridman (1:07:01.440)
Optical character recognition.
Ray Kurzweil (1:07:02.760)
Yeah, so we were able to do that in the 70s
Lex Fridman (1:07:06.560)
and I waited till the 80s to address speech recognition
Ray Kurzweil (1:07:11.000)
since that requires more computation.
Lex Fridman (1:07:14.480)
So you were thinking through timing
Ray Kurzweil (1:07:16.000)
when you're developing those things.
Lex Fridman (1:07:17.480)
Yeah.
Ray Kurzweil (1:07:18.320)
Time come.
Lex Fridman (1:07:19.880)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:07:21.400)
And that's how you've developed that brain power
Lex Fridman (1:07:24.360)
to start to think in a futurist sense
Ray Kurzweil (1:07:26.720)
when how will the world look like in 2045
Lex Fridman (1:07:31.040)
and work backwards and how it gets there.
Lex Fridman (1:07:33.640)
But that has to become a thing in itself
Lex Fridman (1:07:35.360)
because looking at what things will be like in the future
Lex Fridman (1:07:40.360)
and the future reflects such dramatic changes in how humans will live
Lex Fridman (1:07:48.680)
that was worth communicating also.
Lex Fridman (1:07:51.240)
So you developed that muscle of predicting the future
Lex Fridman (1:07:56.360)
and then applied broadly
Lex Fridman (1:07:58.280)
and started to discuss how it changes the world of technology,
Lex Fridman (1:08:02.280)
how it changes the world of human life on earth.
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:06.800)
In Danielle, one of your books,
Lex Fridman (1:08:09.000)
you write about someone who has the courage
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:11.600)
to question assumptions that limit human imagination
Lex Fridman (1:08:15.040)
to solve problems.
Lex Fridman (1:08:16.640)
And you also give advice
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.560)
on how each of us can have this kind of courage.
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:22.760)
Well, it's good that you picked that quote
Lex Fridman (1:08:24.520)
because I think that does symbolize what Danielle is about.
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:27.480)
Courage.
Lex Fridman (1:08:28.760)
So how can each of us have that courage
Lex Fridman (1:08:30.760)
to question assumptions?
Lex Fridman (1:08:33.760)
I mean, we see that when people can go beyond
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:38.600)
the current realm and create something that's new.
Lex Fridman (1:08:43.880)
I mean, take Uber, for example.
Ray Kurzweil (1:08:45.520)
Before that existed, you never thought
Lex Fridman (1:08:48.120)
that that would be feasible
Lex Fridman (1:08:49.960)
and it did require changes in the way people work.
Lex Fridman (1:08:54.520)
Is there practical advice as you give in the book
Lex Fridman (1:08:57.840)
about what each of us can do to be a Danielle?
Lex Fridman (1:09:04.880)
Well, she looks at the situation
Lex Fridman (1:09:06.880)
and tries to imagine how she can overcome various obstacles
Lex Fridman (1:09:15.840)
and then she goes for it.
Lex Fridman (1:09:17.960)
And she's a very good communicator
Lex Fridman (1:09:19.680)
so she can communicate these ideas to other people.
Lex Fridman (1:09:25.080)
And there's practical advice of learning to program
Lex Fridman (1:09:27.640)
and recording your life and things of this nature.
Ray Kurzweil (1:09:32.000)
Become a physicist.
Lex Fridman (1:09:33.240)
So you list a bunch of different suggestions
Ray Kurzweil (1:09:36.880)
of how to throw yourself into this world.
Lex Fridman (1:09:39.120)
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an idea
Lex Fridman (1:09:42.200)
how young people can actually change the world
Lex Fridman (1:09:46.160)
by learning all of these different skills.
Lex Fridman (1:09:52.440)
And at the core of that is the belief
Lex Fridman (1:09:54.760)
that you can change the world.
Ray Kurzweil (1:09:57.840)
That your mind, your body can change the world.
Lex Fridman (1:10:00.480)
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman (1:10:02.760)
And not letting anyone else tell you otherwise.
Lex Fridman (1:10:06.640)
That's really good, exactly.
Ray Kurzweil (1:10:08.920)
When we upload the story you told about your dad
Lex Fridman (1:10:13.440)
and having a conversation with him,
Ray Kurzweil (1:10:16.160)
we're talking about uploading your mind to the computer.
Lex Fridman (1:10:21.720)
Do you think we'll have a future
Lex Fridman (1:10:23.160)
with something you call afterlife?
Lex Fridman (1:10:25.640)
We'll have avatars that mimic increasingly better and better
Ray Kurzweil (1:10:29.840)
our behavior, our appearance, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:10:33.520)
Even those that are perhaps no longer with us.
Ray Kurzweil (1:10:36.800)
Yes, I mean, we need some information about them.
Lex Fridman (1:10:42.840)
I mean, think about my father.
Ray Kurzweil (1:10:45.640)
I have what he wrote.
Lex Fridman (1:10:48.080)
Now, he didn't have a word processor,
Lex Fridman (1:10:50.480)
so he didn't actually write that much.
Lex Fridman (1:10:53.680)
And our memories of him aren't perfect.
Lex Fridman (1:10:56.000)
So how do you even know if you've created something
Lex Fridman (1:10:59.840)
that's satisfactory?
Ray Kurzweil (1:11:00.840)
Now, you could do a Frederick Kurzweil Turing test.
Lex Fridman (1:11:04.920)
It seems like Frederick Kurzweil to me.
Lex Fridman (1:11:07.920)
But the people who remember him, like me,
Lex Fridman (1:11:11.240)
don't have a perfect memory.
Lex Fridman (1:11:14.400)
Is there such a thing as a perfect memory?
Lex Fridman (1:11:16.320)
Maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel
Ray Kurzweil (1:11:24.760)
a certain way.
Lex Fridman (1:11:25.600)
Yeah, well, I think that would be the goal.
Lex Fridman (1:11:28.400)
And that's the connection we have with loved ones.
Lex Fridman (1:11:30.360)
It's not really based on very strict definition of truth.
Ray Kurzweil (1:11:35.120)
It's more about the experiences we share.
Lex Fridman (1:11:37.560)
And they get morphed through memory.
Lex Fridman (1:11:39.880)
But ultimately, they make us smile.
Lex Fridman (1:11:41.800)
I think we definitely can do that.
Lex Fridman (1:11:44.440)
And that would be very worthwhile.
Lex Fridman (1:11:46.800)
So do you think we'll have a world of replicants?
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.960)
Of copies?
Lex Fridman (1:11:51.280)
There'll be a bunch of Ray Kurzweils.
Ray Kurzweil (1:11:53.800)
Like, I could hang out with one.
Lex Fridman (1:11:55.320)
I can download it for five bucks
Lex Fridman (1:11:58.200)
and have a best friend, Ray.
Lex Fridman (1:12:01.680)
And you, the original copy, wouldn't even know about it.
Ray Kurzweil (1:12:07.160)
Is that, do you think that world is,
Lex Fridman (1:12:11.440)
first of all, do you think that world is feasible?
Lex Fridman (1:12:13.360)
And do you think there's ethical challenges there?
Lex Fridman (1:12:16.320)
Like, how would you feel about me hanging out
Lex Fridman (1:12:18.080)
with Ray Kurzweil and you not knowing about it?
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.480)
It doesn't strike me as a problem.
Lex Fridman (1:12:28.080)
Which you, the original?
Lex Fridman (1:12:30.240)
Would you strike, would that cause a problem for you?
Ray Kurzweil (1:12:34.240)
No, I would really very much enjoy it.
Lex Fridman (1:12:37.480)
No, not just hang out with me,
Lex Fridman (1:12:38.760)
but if somebody hang out with you, a replicant of you.
Lex Fridman (1:12:43.840)
Well, I think I would start, it sounds exciting,
Lex Fridman (1:12:46.800)
but then what if they start doing better than me
Lex Fridman (1:12:51.560)
and take over my friend group?
Lex Fridman (1:12:55.000)
And then, because they may be an imperfect copy
Lex Fridman (1:13:02.280)
or there may be more social, all these kinds of things,
Lex Fridman (1:13:05.320)
and then I become like the old version
Lex Fridman (1:13:07.640)
that's not nearly as exciting.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:10.240)
Maybe they're a copy of the best version of me
Lex Fridman (1:13:12.360)
on a good day.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:13.200)
Yeah, but if you hang out with a replicant of me
Lex Fridman (1:13:18.020)
and that turned out to be successful,
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:20.200)
I'd feel proud of that person because it was based on me.
Lex Fridman (1:13:24.960)
So it's, but it is a kind of death of this version of you.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:32.420)
Well, not necessarily.
Lex Fridman (1:13:33.960)
I mean, you can still be alive, right?
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:36.360)
But, and you would be proud, okay,
Lex Fridman (1:13:38.560)
so it's like having kids and you're proud
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:40.280)
that they've done even more than you were able to do.
Lex Fridman (1:13:42.720)
Yeah, exactly.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:48.280)
It does bring up new issues,
Lex Fridman (1:13:50.040)
but it seems like an opportunity.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:55.120)
Well, that replicant should probably have the same rights
Lex Fridman (1:13:57.840)
as you do.
Ray Kurzweil (1:13:59.680)
Well, that gets into a whole issue
Lex Fridman (1:14:05.420)
because when a replicant occurs,
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:07.400)
they're not necessarily gonna have your rights.
Lex Fridman (1:14:10.320)
And if a replicant occurs,
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:11.680)
if it's somebody who's already dead,
Lex Fridman (1:14:14.680)
do they have all the obligations
Lex Fridman (1:14:17.880)
and that the original person had?
Lex Fridman (1:14:21.160)
Do they have all the agreements that they had?
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:25.840)
I think you're gonna have to have laws that say yes.
Lex Fridman (1:14:30.200)
There has to be, if you wanna create a replicant,
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:33.260)
they have to have all the same rights as human rights.
Lex Fridman (1:14:35.720)
Well, you don't know.
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:37.080)
Someone can create a replicant and say,
Lex Fridman (1:14:38.400)
well, it's a replicant,
Lex Fridman (1:14:39.240)
but I didn't bother getting their rights.
Lex Fridman (1:14:40.920)
And so.
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:41.760)
Yeah, but that would be illegal, I mean.
Lex Fridman (1:14:43.720)
Like if you do that, you have to do that in the black market.
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:47.600)
If you wanna get an official replicant.
Lex Fridman (1:14:49.520)
Okay, it's not so easy.
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:51.000)
It's supposed to create multiple replicants.
Lex Fridman (1:14:55.360)
The original rights,
Ray Kurzweil (1:14:59.840)
maybe for one person and not for a whole group of people.
Lex Fridman (1:15:04.640)
Sure.
Lex Fridman (1:15:08.520)
So there has to be at least one.
Lex Fridman (1:15:10.600)
And then all the other ones kinda share the rights.
Ray Kurzweil (1:15:14.260)
Yeah, I just don't think that,
Lex Fridman (1:15:16.480)
that's very difficult to conceive for us humans,
Ray Kurzweil (1:15:18.680)
the idea that this country.
Lex Fridman (1:15:20.760)
You create a replicant that has certain,
Ray Kurzweil (1:15:24.600)
I mean, I've talked to people about this,
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.800)
including my wife, who would like to get back her father.
Lex Fridman (1:15:32.640)
And she doesn't worry about who has rights to what.
Lex Fridman (1:15:38.280)
She would have somebody that she could visit with
Lex Fridman (1:15:40.440)
and might give her some satisfaction.
Lex Fridman (1:15:44.300)
And she wouldn't care about any of these other rights.
Lex Fridman (1:15:49.240)
What does your wife think about multiple rake or as wells?
Lex Fridman (1:15:53.560)
Have you had that discussion?
Ray Kurzweil (1:15:54.400)
I haven't addressed that with her.
Lex Fridman (1:15:58.200)
I think ultimately that's an important question,
Ray Kurzweil (1:16:00.640)
loved ones, how they feel about.
Lex Fridman (1:16:03.560)
There's something about love.
Lex Fridman (1:16:05.040)
Well, that's the key thing, right?
Lex Fridman (1:16:06.400)
If the loved one's rejected,
Ray Kurzweil (1:16:07.960)
it's not gonna work very well, so.
Lex Fridman (1:16:12.320)
So the loved ones really are the key determinant,
Ray Kurzweil (1:16:15.960)
whether or not this works or not.
Lex Fridman (1:16:19.760)
But there's also ethical rules.
Ray Kurzweil (1:16:22.840)
We have to contend with the idea,
Lex Fridman (1:16:24.200)
and we have to contend with that idea with AI.
Lex Fridman (1:16:27.920)
But what's gonna motivate it is,
Lex Fridman (1:16:30.320)
I mean, I talk to people who really miss people who are gone
Lex Fridman (1:16:34.680)
and they would love to get something back,
Lex Fridman (1:16:37.760)
even if it isn't perfect.
Lex Fridman (1:16:40.840)
And that's what's gonna motivate this.
Lex Fridman (1:16:47.120)
And that person lives on in some form.
Lex Fridman (1:16:51.200)
And the more data we have,
Lex Fridman (1:16:52.880)
the more we're able to reconstruct that person
Lex Fridman (1:16:56.080)
and allow them to live on.
Lex Fridman (1:16:59.360)
And eventually as we go forward,
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:01.440)
we're gonna have more and more of this data
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.160)
because we're gonna have none of us
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:06.360)
that are inside our neocortex
Lex Fridman (1:17:08.360)
and we're gonna collect a lot of data.
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:11.120)
In fact, anything that's data is always collected.
Lex Fridman (1:17:15.800)
There is something a little bit sad,
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:18.680)
which is becoming, or maybe it's hopeful,
Lex Fridman (1:17:23.200)
which is more and more common these days,
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:26.800)
which when a person passes away,
Lex Fridman (1:17:28.360)
you have their Twitter account,
Lex Fridman (1:17:31.080)
and you have the last tweet they tweeted,
Lex Fridman (1:17:34.080)
like something they needed.
Lex Fridman (1:17:35.040)
And you can recreate them now
Lex Fridman (1:17:36.520)
with large language models and so on.
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:38.360)
I mean, you can create somebody that's just like them
Lex Fridman (1:17:40.880)
and can actually continue to communicate.
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:45.040)
I think that's really exciting
Lex Fridman (1:17:46.440)
because I think in some sense,
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:49.360)
like if I were to die today,
Lex Fridman (1:17:51.760)
in some sense I would continue on if I continued tweeting.
Ray Kurzweil (1:17:56.120)
I tweet, therefore I am.
Lex Fridman (1:17:58.880)
Yeah, well, I mean, that's one of the advantages
Ray Kurzweil (1:18:02.040)
of a replicant, they can recreate the communications
Lex Fridman (1:18:06.600)
of that person.
Lex Fridman (1:18:10.320)
Do you hope, do you think, do you hope
Lex Fridman (1:18:14.400)
humans will become a multi planetary species?
Ray Kurzweil (1:18:17.440)
You've talked about the phases, the six epochs,
Lex Fridman (1:18:20.040)
and one of them is reaching out into the stars in part.
Ray Kurzweil (1:18:23.600)
Yes, but the kind of attempts we're making now
Lex Fridman (1:18:28.240)
to go to other planetary objects
Ray Kurzweil (1:18:34.400)
doesn't excite me that much
Lex Fridman (1:18:36.560)
because it's not really advancing anything.
Lex Fridman (1:18:38.840)
It's not efficient enough?
Lex Fridman (1:18:41.160)
Yeah, and we're also putting out other human beings,
Ray Kurzweil (1:18:48.120)
which is a very inefficient way
Lex Fridman (1:18:50.440)
to explore these other objects.
Lex Fridman (1:18:52.600)
What I'm really talking about in the sixth epoch,
Lex Fridman (1:18:57.800)
the universe wakes up.
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:00.240)
It's where we can spread our super intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:19:03.080)
throughout the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:19:05.400)
And that doesn't mean sending a very soft,
Lex Fridman (1:19:08.120)
squishy creatures like humans.
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:10.200)
Yeah, the universe wakes up.
Lex Fridman (1:19:13.840)
I mean, we would send intelligence masses of nanobots
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:18.840)
which can then go out and colonize
Lex Fridman (1:19:24.880)
these other parts of the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:19:29.000)
Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations
Lex Fridman (1:19:31.600)
out there that our bots might meet?
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:35.240)
My hunch is no.
Lex Fridman (1:19:38.760)
Most people say yes, absolutely.
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:40.720)
I mean, and the universe is too big.
Lex Fridman (1:19:43.480)
And they'll cite the Drake equation.
Lex Fridman (1:19:46.160)
And I think in Singularity is Near,
Lex Fridman (1:19:52.560)
I have two analyses of the Drake equation,
Ray Kurzweil (1:19:56.200)
both with very reasonable assumptions.
Lex Fridman (1:20:00.000)
And one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:04.960)
in each galaxy.
Lex Fridman (1:20:07.440)
And another one gives you one civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:20:11.840)
And we know of one.
Lex Fridman (1:20:13.680)
A lot of the analyses are forgetting
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:16.600)
the exponential growth of computation.
Lex Fridman (1:20:21.200)
Because we've gone from where the fastest way
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:24.840)
I could send a message to somebody was with a pony,
Lex Fridman (1:20:30.160)
which was what, like a century and a half ago?
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:34.920)
To the advanced civilization we have today.
Lex Fridman (1:20:37.880)
And if you accept what I've said,
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:40.880)
go forward a few decades,
Lex Fridman (1:20:42.720)
you can have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:46.800)
compared to a pony, and that's in a couple hundred years.
Lex Fridman (1:20:50.400)
Yeah, the speed and the scale of information transfer
Ray Kurzweil (1:20:53.320)
is growing exponentially in a blink of an eye.
Lex Fridman (1:20:58.720)
Now think about these other civilizations.
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:01.680)
They're gonna be spread out at cosmic times.
Lex Fridman (1:21:06.320)
So if something is like ahead of us or behind us,
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:10.160)
it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions
Lex Fridman (1:21:14.280)
of years, which isn't that much.
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:16.440)
I mean, the world is billions of years old,
Lex Fridman (1:21:21.520)
14 billion or something.
Lex Fridman (1:21:23.960)
So even a thousand years, if two or 300 years is enough
Lex Fridman (1:21:29.760)
to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization,
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:33.920)
we would see that.
Lex Fridman (1:21:35.920)
So of other civilizations that have occurred,
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:39.720)
okay, some might be behind us, but some might be ahead of us.
Lex Fridman (1:21:43.960)
If they're ahead of us, they're ahead of us
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:45.800)
by thousands, millions of years,
Lex Fridman (1:21:49.560)
and they would be so far beyond us,
Ray Kurzweil (1:21:51.760)
they would be doing galaxy wide engineering.
Lex Fridman (1:21:56.200)
But we don't see anything doing galaxy wide engineering.
Lex Fridman (1:22:00.080)
So either they don't exist, or this very universe
Lex Fridman (1:22:05.120)
is a construction of an alien species.
Ray Kurzweil (1:22:08.340)
We're living inside a video game.
Lex Fridman (1:22:11.760)
Well, that's another explanation that yes,
Ray Kurzweil (1:22:14.840)
you've got some teenage kids in another civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:22:19.140)
Do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis
Lex Fridman (1:22:22.280)
as a thought experiment that we're living in a simulation?
Lex Fridman (1:22:25.640)
The universe is computational.
Lex Fridman (1:22:29.400)
So we are an example in a computational world.
Lex Fridman (1:22:34.400)
Therefore, it is a simulation.
Ray Kurzweil (1:22:39.120)
It doesn't necessarily mean an experiment
Lex Fridman (1:22:41.040)
by some high school kid in another world,
Lex Fridman (1:22:44.820)
but it nonetheless is taking place
Lex Fridman (1:22:47.800)
in a computational world.
Lex Fridman (1:22:50.120)
And everything that's going on
Lex Fridman (1:22:51.600)
is basically a form of computation.
Lex Fridman (1:22:58.080)
So you really have to define what you mean
Lex Fridman (1:23:00.640)
by this whole world being a simulation.
Ray Kurzweil (1:23:06.360)
Well, then it's the teenager that makes the video game.
Lex Fridman (1:23:12.400)
Us humans with our current limited cognitive capability
Ray Kurzweil (1:23:16.720)
have strived to understand ourselves
Lex Fridman (1:23:20.560)
and we have created religions.
Ray Kurzweil (1:23:23.840)
We think of God.
Lex Fridman (1:23:25.160)
Whatever that is, do you think God exists?
Lex Fridman (1:23:32.240)
And if so, who is God?
Lex Fridman (1:23:35.440)
I alluded to this before.
Ray Kurzweil (1:23:37.720)
We started out with lots of particles going around
Lex Fridman (1:23:42.840)
and there's nothing that represents love and creativity.
Lex Fridman (1:23:53.160)
And somehow we've gotten into a world
Lex Fridman (1:23:55.000)
where love actually exists
Lex Fridman (1:23:57.920)
and that has to do actually with consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:23:59.960)
because you can't have love without consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:24:03.120)
So to me, that's God, the fact that we have something
Lex Fridman (1:24:06.720)
where love, where you can be devoted to someone else
Lex Fridman (1:24:11.200)
and really feel the love, that's God.
Lex Fridman (1:24:19.080)
And if you look at the Old Testament,
Ray Kurzweil (1:24:21.040)
it was actually created by several different
Lex Fridman (1:24:26.680)
ravenants in there.
Lex Fridman (1:24:29.200)
And I think they've identified three of them.
Lex Fridman (1:24:34.080)
One of them dealt with God as a person
Ray Kurzweil (1:24:39.400)
that you can make deals with and he gets angry
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.440)
and he wrecks vengeance on various people.
Lex Fridman (1:24:48.320)
But two of them actually talk about God
Lex Fridman (1:24:50.440)
as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and so forth.
Ray Kurzweil (1:24:58.280)
That's how they describe God.
Lex Fridman (1:25:01.360)
So that's my view of God, not as a person in the sky
Ray Kurzweil (1:25:06.120)
that you can make deals with.
Lex Fridman (1:25:09.120)
It's whatever the magic that goes from basic elements
Ray Kurzweil (1:25:13.200)
to things like consciousness and love.
Lex Fridman (1:25:15.960)
Do you think one of the things I find
Ray Kurzweil (1:25:19.200)
extremely beautiful and powerful is cellular automata,
Lex Fridman (1:25:22.240)
which you also touch on?
Lex Fridman (1:25:24.640)
Do you think whatever the heck happens in cellular automata
Lex Fridman (1:25:27.720)
where interesting, complicated objects emerge,
Lex Fridman (1:25:31.480)
God is in there too?
Lex Fridman (1:25:33.480)
The emergence of love in this seemingly primitive universe?
Ray Kurzweil (1:25:38.480)
Well, that's the goal of creating a replicant
Lex Fridman (1:25:42.600)
is that they would love you and you would love them.
Ray Kurzweil (1:25:47.600)
There wouldn't be much point of doing it
Lex Fridman (1:25:50.840)
if that didn't happen.
Lex Fridman (1:25:52.720)
But all of it, I guess what I'm saying
Lex Fridman (1:25:54.880)
about cellular automata is it's primitive building blocks
Lex Fridman (1:25:59.280)
and they somehow create beautiful things.
Lex Fridman (1:26:03.440)
Is there some deep truth to that
Lex Fridman (1:26:06.280)
about how our universe works?
Lex Fridman (1:26:07.960)
Is the emergence from simple rules,
Lex Fridman (1:26:11.160)
beautiful, complex objects can emerge?
Lex Fridman (1:26:14.080)
Is that the thing that made us?
Ray Kurzweil (1:26:16.680)
Yeah, well. As we went through
Lex Fridman (1:26:18.120)
all the six phases of reality.
Ray Kurzweil (1:26:21.560)
That's a good way to look at it.
Lex Fridman (1:26:23.660)
It does make some point to the whole value
Ray Kurzweil (1:26:27.320)
of having a universe.
Lex Fridman (1:26:31.400)
Do you think about your own mortality?
Lex Fridman (1:26:34.040)
Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman (1:26:36.240)
Yes, but I keep going back to my idea
Ray Kurzweil (1:26:41.240)
of being able to expand human life quickly enough
Lex Fridman (1:26:48.080)
in advance of our getting there, longevity escape velocity,
Ray Kurzweil (1:26:55.880)
which we're not quite at yet,
Lex Fridman (1:26:58.600)
but I think we're actually pretty close,
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:01.520)
particularly with, for example, doing simulated biology.
Lex Fridman (1:27:06.600)
I think we can probably get there within,
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:08.920)
say, by the end of this decade, and that's my goal.
Lex Fridman (1:27:12.800)
Do you hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity?
Lex Fridman (1:27:16.400)
Do you hope to achieve immortality?
Lex Fridman (1:27:20.900)
Well, immortality is hard to say.
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:22.960)
I can't really come on your program saying I've done it.
Lex Fridman (1:27:26.080)
I've achieved immortality because it's never forever.
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:32.480)
A long time, a long time of living well.
Lex Fridman (1:27:35.280)
But we'd like to actually advance
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:37.180)
human life expectancy, advance my life expectancy
Lex Fridman (1:27:41.000)
more than a year every year,
Lex Fridman (1:27:44.000)
and I think we can get there within,
Lex Fridman (1:27:45.820)
by the end of this decade.
Lex Fridman (1:27:47.800)
How do you think we'd do it?
Lex Fridman (1:27:49.440)
So there's practical things in Transcend,
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:53.640)
the nine steps to living well forever, your book.
Lex Fridman (1:27:56.200)
You describe just that.
Ray Kurzweil (1:27:58.360)
There's practical things like health,
Lex Fridman (1:28:00.520)
exercise, all those things.
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:02.280)
Yeah, I mean, we live in a body
Lex Fridman (1:28:03.920)
that doesn't last forever.
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:08.280)
There's no reason why it can't, though,
Lex Fridman (1:28:11.160)
and we're discovering things, I think, that will extend it.
Lex Fridman (1:28:17.640)
But you do have to deal with,
Lex Fridman (1:28:19.400)
I mean, I've got various issues.
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:23.240)
Went to Mexico 40 years ago, developed salmonella.
Lex Fridman (1:28:28.240)
I created pancreatitis, which gave me
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:33.060)
a strange form of diabetes.
Lex Fridman (1:28:37.380)
It's not type one diabetes, because it's an autoimmune
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:42.900)
disorder that destroys your pancreas.
Lex Fridman (1:28:44.860)
I don't have that.
Lex Fridman (1:28:46.780)
But it's also not type two diabetes,
Lex Fridman (1:28:48.700)
because type two diabetes is your pancreas works fine,
Lex Fridman (1:28:51.740)
but your cells don't absorb the insulin well.
Lex Fridman (1:28:55.740)
I don't have that either.
Ray Kurzweil (1:28:58.460)
The pancreatitis I had partially damaged my pancreas,
Lex Fridman (1:29:04.560)
but it was a one time thing.
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:06.100)
It didn't continue, and I've learned now how to control it.
Lex Fridman (1:29:11.620)
But so that's just something that I had to do
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:15.300)
in order to continue to exist.
Lex Fridman (1:29:18.540)
Since your particular biological system,
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:20.460)
you had to figure out a few hacks,
Lex Fridman (1:29:22.540)
and the idea is that science would be able
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:24.900)
to do that much better, actually.
Lex Fridman (1:29:26.420)
Yeah, so I mean, I do spend a lot of time
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:29.340)
just tinkering with my own body to keep it going.
Lex Fridman (1:29:34.240)
So I do think I'll last till the end of this decade,
Lex Fridman (1:29:37.740)
and I think we'll achieve longevity, escape velocity.
Lex Fridman (1:29:41.660)
I think that we'll start with people
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:43.540)
who are very diligent about this.
Lex Fridman (1:29:46.180)
Eventually, it'll become sort of routine
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:48.860)
that people will be able to do it.
Lex Fridman (1:29:51.400)
So if you're talking about kids today,
Ray Kurzweil (1:29:54.300)
or even people in their 20s or 30s,
Lex Fridman (1:29:56.700)
that's really not a very serious problem.
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:01.300)
I have had some discussions with relatives
Lex Fridman (1:30:05.100)
who are like almost 100, and saying,
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:10.340)
well, we're working on it as quickly as possible.
Lex Fridman (1:30:13.380)
I don't know if that's gonna work.
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:16.460)
Is there a case, this is a difficult question,
Lex Fridman (1:30:18.400)
but is there a case to be made against living forever
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:23.400)
that a finite life, that mortality is a feature, not a bug,
Lex Fridman (1:30:29.620)
that living a shorter, so dying makes ice cream
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:36.020)
taste delicious, makes life intensely beautiful
Lex Fridman (1:30:40.260)
more than it otherwise might be?
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:42.220)
Most people believe that way, except if you present
Lex Fridman (1:30:46.820)
a death of anybody they care about or love,
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:51.500)
they find that extremely depressing.
Lex Fridman (1:30:55.300)
And I know people who feel that way
Ray Kurzweil (1:30:58.420)
20, 30, 40 years later, they still want them back.
Lex Fridman (1:31:06.200)
So I mean, death is not something to celebrate,
Lex Fridman (1:31:11.820)
but we've lived in a world where people just accept this.
Lex Fridman (1:31:16.260)
Life is short, you see it all the time on TV,
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:18.340)
oh, life's short, you have to take advantage of it
Lex Fridman (1:31:21.340)
and nobody accepts the fact that you could actually
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:23.860)
go beyond normal lifetimes.
Lex Fridman (1:31:27.940)
But anytime we talk about death or a death of a person,
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:31.580)
even one death is a terrible tragedy.
Lex Fridman (1:31:35.420)
If you have somebody that lives to 100 years old,
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:39.000)
we still love them in return.
Lex Fridman (1:31:43.820)
And there's no limitation to that.
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:47.660)
In fact, these kinds of trends are gonna provide
Lex Fridman (1:31:52.000)
greater and greater opportunity for everybody,
Ray Kurzweil (1:31:54.700)
even if we have more people.
Lex Fridman (1:31:57.100)
So let me ask about an alien species
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:00.320)
or a super intelligent AI 500 years from now
Lex Fridman (1:32:03.060)
that will look back and remember Ray Kurzweil version zero.
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:11.140)
Before the replicants spread,
Lex Fridman (1:32:13.140)
how do you hope they remember you
Lex Fridman (1:32:17.020)
in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summary of Ray Kurzweil?
Lex Fridman (1:32:21.420)
What do you hope your legacy is?
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:24.120)
Well, I mean, I do hope to be around, so that's.
Lex Fridman (1:32:26.740)
Some version of you, yes.
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:27.900)
So.
Lex Fridman (1:32:29.740)
Do you think you'll be the same person around?
Lex Fridman (1:32:32.140)
I mean, am I the same person I was when I was 20 or 10?
Lex Fridman (1:32:37.020)
You would be the same person in that same way,
Lex Fridman (1:32:39.780)
but yes, we're different, we're different.
Lex Fridman (1:32:44.420)
All we have of that, all you have of that person
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:46.900)
is your memories, which are probably distorted in some way.
Lex Fridman (1:32:53.700)
Maybe you just remember the good parts,
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:55.860)
depending on your psyche.
Lex Fridman (1:32:57.860)
You might focus on the bad parts,
Ray Kurzweil (1:32:59.740)
might focus on the good parts.
Lex Fridman (1:33:02.820)
Right, but I mean, I still have a relationship
Ray Kurzweil (1:33:06.500)
to the way I was when I was earlier, when I was younger.
Lex Fridman (1:33:11.860)
How will you and the other super intelligent AIs
Lex Fridman (1:33:14.220)
remember you of today from 500 years ago?
Lex Fridman (1:33:18.940)
What do you hope to be remembered by this version of you
Lex Fridman (1:33:22.860)
before the singularity?
Lex Fridman (1:33:25.640)
Well, I think it's expressed well in my books,
Ray Kurzweil (1:33:28.220)
trying to create some new realities that people will accept.
Lex Fridman (1:33:32.620)
I mean, that's something that gives me great pleasure,
Lex Fridman (1:33:40.320)
and greater insight into what makes humans valuable.
Lex Fridman (1:33:49.720)
I'm not the only person who's tempted to comment on that.
Lex Fridman (1:33:57.220)
And optimism that permeates your work.
Lex Fridman (1:34:00.700)
Optimism about the future is ultimately that optimism
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:04.700)
paves the way for building a better future.
Lex Fridman (1:34:06.780)
Yeah, I agree with that.
Lex Fridman (1:34:10.100)
So you asked your dad about the meaning of life,
Lex Fridman (1:34:15.360)
and he said, love, let me ask you the same question.
Lex Fridman (1:34:19.260)
What's the meaning of life?
Lex Fridman (1:34:21.200)
Why are we here?
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:22.900)
This beautiful journey that we're on in phase four,
Lex Fridman (1:34:26.900)
reaching for phase five of this evolution
Lex Fridman (1:34:32.540)
and information processing, why?
Lex Fridman (1:34:35.500)
Well, I think I'd give the same answers as my father.
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:42.020)
Because if there were no love,
Lex Fridman (1:34:43.860)
and we didn't care about anybody,
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:46.580)
there'd be no point existing.
Lex Fridman (1:34:49.540)
Love is the meaning of life.
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:51.460)
The AI version of your dad had a good point.
Lex Fridman (1:34:54.260)
Well, I think that's a beautiful way to end it.
Ray Kurzweil (1:34:57.820)
Ray, thank you for your work.
Lex Fridman (1:34:59.260)
Thank you for being who you are.
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:01.100)
Thank you for dreaming about a beautiful future
Lex Fridman (1:35:03.420)
and creating it along the way.
Lex Fridman (1:35:06.460)
And thank you so much for spending
Lex Fridman (1:35:09.340)
your really valuable time with me today.
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:10.900)
This was awesome.
Lex Fridman (1:35:12.260)
It was my pleasure, and you have some great insights,
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:16.300)
both into me and into humanity as well, so I appreciate that.
Lex Fridman (1:35:21.440)
Thanks for listening to this conversation
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:22.980)
with Ray Kurzweil.
Lex Fridman (1:35:24.340)
To support this podcast,
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:25.580)
please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman (1:35:28.380)
And now, let me leave you with some words
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:30.420)
from Isaac Asimov.
Lex Fridman (1:35:32.820)
It is change, continuous change, inevitable change
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:37.660)
that is the dominant factor in society today.
Lex Fridman (1:35:41.060)
No sensible decision can be made any longer
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:43.860)
without taking into account not only the world as it is,
Lex Fridman (1:35:47.320)
but the world as it will be.
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:49.560)
This, in turn, means that our statesmen,
Lex Fridman (1:35:52.540)
our businessmen, our everyman,
Ray Kurzweil (1:35:55.340)
must take on a science fictional way of thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:35:58.460)
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Ray Kurzweil (20:01.920)
until it got to that level.
Lex Fridman (20:04.400)
And we had large language models
Ray Kurzweil (20:06.400)
that were like 10 billion bytes, didn't work very well.
Lex Fridman (20:09.600)
They finally got to a hundred billion bytes
Lex Fridman (20:11.680)
and now they work fairly well.
Lex Fridman (20:13.440)
And now we're going to a trillion bytes.
Ray Kurzweil (20:16.280)
If you say lambda has a hundred billion bytes,
Lex Fridman (20:22.520)
what does that mean?
Ray Kurzweil (20:23.520)
Well, what if you had something that had one byte,
Lex Fridman (20:27.160)
one parameter, maybe you wanna tell
Ray Kurzweil (20:30.000)
whether or not something's an elephant or not.
Lex Fridman (20:33.960)
And so you put in something that would detect its trunk.
Ray Kurzweil (20:37.680)
If it has a trunk, it's an elephant.
Lex Fridman (20:39.160)
If it doesn't have a trunk, it's not an elephant.
Ray Kurzweil (20:41.680)
That would work fairly well.
Lex Fridman (20:44.400)
There's a few problems with it.
Lex Fridman (20:47.440)
And it really wouldn't be able to tell what a trunk is,
Lex Fridman (20:49.720)
but anyway.
Lex Fridman (20:50.640)
And maybe other things other than elephants have trunks,
Lex Fridman (20:54.120)
you might get really confused.
Ray Kurzweil (20:55.560)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (20:56.960)
I'm not sure which animals have trunks,
Lex Fridman (20:58.800)
but how do you define a trunk?
Lex Fridman (21:02.400)
But yeah, that's one parameter.
Ray Kurzweil (21:04.960)
You can do okay.
Lex Fridman (21:06.400)
So these things have a hundred billion parameters.
Lex Fridman (21:08.760)
So they're able to deal with very complex issues.
Lex Fridman (21:12.200)
All kinds of trunks.
Ray Kurzweil (21:14.000)
Human beings actually have a little bit more than that,
Lex Fridman (21:16.240)
but they're getting to the point
Ray Kurzweil (21:17.960)
where they can emulate humans.
Lex Fridman (21:22.400)
If we were able to connect this to our neocortex,
Ray Kurzweil (21:27.400)
we would basically add more of these abilities
Lex Fridman (21:33.400)
to make distinctions,
Lex Fridman (21:35.400)
and it could ultimately be much smarter
Lex Fridman (21:37.600)
and also be attached to information
Ray Kurzweil (21:39.680)
that we feel is reliable.
Lex Fridman (21:43.800)
So that's where we're headed.
Lex Fridman (21:45.240)
So you think that there will be a merger in the 30s,
Lex Fridman (21:49.120)
an increasing amount of merging
Lex Fridman (21:50.880)
between the human brain and the AI brain?
Lex Fridman (21:55.880)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (21:57.640)
And the AI brain is really an emulation of human beings.
Lex Fridman (22:02.280)
I mean, that's why we're creating them,
Ray Kurzweil (22:04.480)
because human beings act the same way,
Lex Fridman (22:07.200)
and this is basically to amplify them.
Ray Kurzweil (22:09.600)
I mean, this amplifies our brain.
Lex Fridman (22:13.800)
It's a little bit clumsy to interact with,
Lex Fridman (22:15.560)
but it definitely is way beyond what we had 15 years ago.
Lex Fridman (22:21.840)
But the implementation becomes different,
Ray Kurzweil (22:23.520)
just like a bird versus the airplane,
Lex Fridman (22:26.680)
even though the AI brain is an emulation,
Ray Kurzweil (22:30.600)
it starts adding features we might not otherwise have,
Lex Fridman (22:34.360)
like ability to consume a huge amount
Ray Kurzweil (22:36.280)
of information quickly,
Lex Fridman (22:38.520)
like look up thousands of Wikipedia articles in one take.
Ray Kurzweil (22:43.080)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (22:44.200)
I mean, we can get, for example,
Ray Kurzweil (22:46.320)
issues like simulated biology,
Lex Fridman (22:48.120)
where it can simulate many different things at once.
Ray Kurzweil (22:56.760)
We already had one example of simulated biology,
Lex Fridman (22:59.600)
which is the Moderna vaccine.
Lex Fridman (23:04.560)
And that's gonna be now
Lex Fridman (23:06.600)
the way in which we create medications.
Lex Fridman (23:11.160)
But they were able to simulate
Lex Fridman (23:13.000)
what each example of an mRNA would do to a human being,
Lex Fridman (23:17.760)
and they were able to simulate that quite reliably.
Lex Fridman (23:21.400)
And we actually simulated billions
Ray Kurzweil (23:23.960)
of different mRNA sequences,
Lex Fridman (23:27.040)
and they found the ones that were the best,
Lex Fridman (23:29.000)
and they created the vaccine.
Lex Fridman (23:31.040)
And they did, and talked about doing that quickly,
Ray Kurzweil (23:34.120)
they did that in two days.
Lex Fridman (23:36.280)
Now, how long would a human being take
Lex Fridman (23:37.880)
to simulate billions of different mRNA sequences?
Lex Fridman (23:41.000)
I don't know that we could do it at all,
Lex Fridman (23:42.840)
but it would take many years.
Lex Fridman (23:45.800)
They did it in two days, and one of the reasons
Ray Kurzweil (23:50.000)
that people didn't like vaccines
Lex Fridman (23:53.720)
is because it was done too quickly,
Ray Kurzweil (23:55.520)
it was done too fast.
Lex Fridman (23:58.200)
And they actually included the time it took to test it out,
Ray Kurzweil (24:01.280)
which was 10 months, so they figured,
Lex Fridman (24:03.600)
okay, it took 10 months to create this.
Ray Kurzweil (24:06.320)
Actually, it took us two days.
Lex Fridman (24:09.080)
And we also will be able to ultimately do the tests
Ray Kurzweil (24:11.880)
in a few days as well.
Lex Fridman (24:14.200)
Oh, because we can simulate how the body will respond to it.
Ray Kurzweil (24:16.600)
Yeah, that's a little bit more complicated
Lex Fridman (24:19.120)
because the body has a lot of different elements,
Lex Fridman (24:22.920)
and we have to simulate all of that,
Lex Fridman (24:25.400)
but that's coming as well.
Lex Fridman (24:27.520)
So ultimately, we could create it in a few days
Lex Fridman (24:30.240)
and then test it in a few days, and it would be done.
Lex Fridman (24:34.040)
And we can do that with every type
Lex Fridman (24:35.960)
of medical insufficiency that we have.
Lex Fridman (24:40.240)
So curing all diseases, improving certain functions
Lex Fridman (24:46.680)
of the body, supplements, drugs for recreation,
Ray Kurzweil (24:53.120)
for health, for performance, for productivity,
Lex Fridman (24:56.080)
all that kind of stuff.
Ray Kurzweil (24:56.920)
Well, that's where we're headed,
Lex Fridman (24:58.040)
because I mean, right now we have a very inefficient way
Ray Kurzweil (25:00.640)
of creating these new medications.
Lex Fridman (25:04.560)
But we've already shown it, and the Moderna vaccine
Ray Kurzweil (25:07.120)
is actually the best of the vaccines we've had,
Lex Fridman (25:12.520)
and it literally took two days to create.
Lex Fridman (25:16.280)
And we'll get to the point
Lex Fridman (25:17.200)
where we can test it out also quickly.
Ray Kurzweil (25:20.160)
Are you impressed by AlphaFold
Lex Fridman (25:22.280)
and the solution to the protein folding,
Ray Kurzweil (25:25.760)
which essentially is simulating, modeling
Lex Fridman (25:30.040)
this primitive building block of life,
Lex Fridman (25:33.080)
which is a protein, and its 3D shape?
Lex Fridman (25:36.080)
It's pretty remarkable that they can actually predict
Lex Fridman (25:39.040)
what the 3D shape of these things are,
Lex Fridman (25:42.000)
but they did it with the same type of neural net
Ray Kurzweil (25:45.920)
that won, for example, the Go test.
Lex Fridman (25:51.240)
So it's all the same.
Ray Kurzweil (25:52.720)
It's all the same.
Lex Fridman (25:53.560)
All the same approaches.
Ray Kurzweil (25:54.400)
They took that same thing and just changed the rules
Lex Fridman (25:57.080)
to chess, and within a couple of days,
Ray Kurzweil (26:01.640)
it now played a master level of chess
Lex Fridman (26:03.960)
greater than any human being.
Lex Fridman (26:09.160)
And the same thing then worked for AlphaFold,
Lex Fridman (26:13.480)
which no human had done.
Ray Kurzweil (26:14.800)
I mean, human beings could do,
Lex Fridman (26:16.800)
the best humans could maybe do 15, 20%
Ray Kurzweil (26:22.640)
of figuring out what the shape would be.
Lex Fridman (26:25.840)
And after a few takes, it ultimately did just about 100%.
Ray Kurzweil (26:30.840)
100%.
Lex Fridman (26:32.560)
Do you still think the singularity will happen in 2045?
Lex Fridman (26:37.560)
And what does that look like?
Lex Fridman (26:40.760)
Once we can amplify our brain with computers directly,
Ray Kurzweil (26:46.600)
which will happen in the 2030s,
Lex Fridman (26:48.080)
that's gonna keep growing.
Ray Kurzweil (26:49.800)
That's another whole theme,
Lex Fridman (26:51.040)
which is the exponential growth of computing power.
Ray Kurzweil (26:54.960)
Yeah, so looking at price performance of computation
Lex Fridman (26:57.520)
from 1939 to 2021.
Ray Kurzweil (26:59.800)
Right, so that starts with the very first computer
Lex Fridman (27:02.920)
actually created by a German during World War II.
Ray Kurzweil (27:06.560)
You might have thought that that might be significant,
Lex Fridman (27:09.440)
but actually the Germans didn't think computers
Ray Kurzweil (27:12.880)
were significant, and they completely rejected it.
Lex Fridman (27:16.640)
The second one is also the ZUSA 2.
Lex Fridman (27:20.360)
And by the way, we're looking at a plot
Lex Fridman (27:22.240)
with the X axis being the year from 1935 to 2025.
Lex Fridman (27:27.240)
And on the Y axis in log scale
Lex Fridman (27:30.920)
is computation per second per constant dollar.
Lex Fridman (27:34.680)
So dollar normalized inflation.
Lex Fridman (27:37.720)
And it's growing linearly on the log scale,
Ray Kurzweil (27:40.200)
which means it's growing exponentially.
Lex Fridman (27:41.880)
The third one was the British computer,
Ray Kurzweil (27:44.480)
which the Allies did take very seriously.
Lex Fridman (27:47.720)
And it cracked the German code
Lex Fridman (27:51.780)
and enables the British to win the Battle of Britain,
Lex Fridman (27:55.520)
which otherwise absolutely would not have happened
Ray Kurzweil (27:57.720)
if they hadn't cracked the code using that computer.
Lex Fridman (28:02.120)
But that's an exponential graph.
Lex Fridman (28:03.640)
So a straight line on that graph is exponential growth.
Lex Fridman (28:07.300)
And you see 80 years of exponential growth.
Lex Fridman (28:11.600)
And I would say about every five years,
Lex Fridman (28:15.200)
and this happened shortly before the pandemic,
Ray Kurzweil (28:18.280)
people saying, well, they call it Moore's law,
Lex Fridman (28:20.680)
which is not the correct, because that's not all intel.
Ray Kurzweil (28:25.480)
In fact, this started decades before intel was even created.
Lex Fridman (28:29.680)
It wasn't with transistors formed into a grid.
Lex Fridman (28:34.140)
So it's not just transistor count or transistor size.
Lex Fridman (28:37.280)
Right, it started with relays, then went to vacuum tubes,
Ray Kurzweil (28:43.200)
then went to individual transistors,
Lex Fridman (28:46.720)
and then to integrated circuits.
Lex Fridman (28:51.080)
And integrated circuits actually starts
Lex Fridman (28:54.000)
like in the middle of this graph.
Lex Fridman (28:56.520)
And it has nothing to do with intel.
Lex Fridman (28:58.760)
Intel actually was a key part of this.
Lex Fridman (29:02.880)
But a few years ago, they stopped making the fastest chips.
Lex Fridman (29:08.960)
But if you take the fastest chip of any technology
Ray Kurzweil (29:12.800)
in that year, you get this kind of graph.
Lex Fridman (29:16.640)
And it's definitely continuing for 80 years.
Lex Fridman (29:19.760)
So you don't think Moore's law, broadly defined, is dead.
Lex Fridman (29:24.840)
It's been declared dead multiple times throughout this process.
Ray Kurzweil (29:29.280)
I don't like the term Moore's law,
Lex Fridman (29:31.400)
because it has nothing to do with Moore or with intel.
Lex Fridman (29:34.740)
But yes, the exponential growth of computing is continuing.
Lex Fridman (29:41.600)
It has never stopped.
Ray Kurzweil (29:42.920)
From various sources.
Lex Fridman (29:43.960)
I mean, it went through World War II,
Ray Kurzweil (29:45.880)
it went through global recessions.
Lex Fridman (29:49.120)
It's just continuing.
Lex Fridman (29:53.480)
And if you continue that out, along with software gains,
Lex Fridman (29:58.100)
which is a whole nother issue,
Lex Fridman (30:01.560)
and they really multiply,
Lex Fridman (30:02.960)
whatever you get from software gains,
Ray Kurzweil (30:04.400)
you multiply by the computer gains,
Lex Fridman (30:07.920)
you get faster and faster speed.
Ray Kurzweil (30:10.940)
This is actually the fastest computer models
Lex Fridman (30:14.320)
that have been created.
Lex Fridman (30:15.840)
And that actually expands roughly twice a year.
Lex Fridman (30:19.480)
Like, every six months it expands by two.
Lex Fridman (30:22.840)
So we're looking at a plot from 2010 to 2022.
Lex Fridman (30:28.360)
On the x axis is the publication date of the model,
Lex Fridman (30:31.400)
and perhaps sometimes the actual paper associated with it.
Lex Fridman (30:34.240)
And on the y axis is training, compute, and flops.
Lex Fridman (30:40.240)
And so basically this is looking at the increase
Lex Fridman (30:43.880)
in the, not transistors,
Lex Fridman (30:46.360)
but the computational power of neural networks.
Lex Fridman (30:51.500)
Yes, the computational power that created these models.
Lex Fridman (30:55.120)
And that's doubled every six months.
Lex Fridman (30:57.560)
Which is even faster than transistor division.
Ray Kurzweil (31:00.360)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (31:02.120)
Now actually, since it goes faster than the amount of cost,
Ray Kurzweil (31:06.880)
this has actually become a greater investment
Lex Fridman (31:10.840)
to create these.
Lex Fridman (31:12.260)
But at any rate, by the time we get to 2045,
Lex Fridman (31:16.600)
we'll be able to multiply our intelligence
Ray Kurzweil (31:19.120)
many millions fold.
Lex Fridman (31:21.480)
And it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like.
Lex Fridman (31:25.040)
And that's the singularity where we can't even imagine.
Lex Fridman (31:28.400)
Right, that's why we call it the singularity.
Ray Kurzweil (31:30.480)
Because the singularity in physics,
Lex Fridman (31:32.760)
something gets sucked into its singularity
Lex Fridman (31:35.120)
and you can't tell what's going on in there
Lex Fridman (31:37.780)
because no information can get out of it.
Ray Kurzweil (31:40.440)
There's various problems with that,
Lex Fridman (31:42.120)
but that's the idea.
Ray Kurzweil (31:44.080)
It's too much beyond what we can imagine.
Lex Fridman (31:48.960)
Do you think it's possible we don't notice
Ray Kurzweil (31:52.120)
that what the singularity actually feels like
Lex Fridman (31:56.360)
is we just live through it
Ray Kurzweil (31:59.640)
with exponentially increasing cognitive capabilities
Lex Fridman (32:05.400)
and we almost, because everything's moving so quickly,
Ray Kurzweil (32:09.560)
aren't really able to introspect
Lex Fridman (32:11.800)
that our life has changed.
Ray Kurzweil (32:13.680)
Yeah, but I mean, we will have that much greater capacity
Lex Fridman (32:17.480)
to understand things, so we should be able to look back.
Ray Kurzweil (32:20.760)
Looking at history, understand history.
Lex Fridman (32:23.240)
But we will need people, basically like you and me,
Ray Kurzweil (32:26.880)
to actually think about these things.
Lex Fridman (32:29.240)
But we might be distracted
Ray Kurzweil (32:30.680)
by all the other sources of entertainment and fun
Lex Fridman (32:34.160)
because the exponential power of intellect is growing,
Lex Fridman (32:39.160)
but also there'll be a lot of fun.
Lex Fridman (32:41.640)
The amount of ways you can have, you know.
Ray Kurzweil (32:46.160)
I mean, we already have a lot of fun with computer games
Lex Fridman (32:48.440)
and so on that are really quite remarkable.
Lex Fridman (32:51.400)
What do you think about the digital world,
Lex Fridman (32:54.760)
the metaverse, virtual reality?
Ray Kurzweil (32:57.640)
Will that have a component in this
Lex Fridman (32:59.120)
or will most of our advancement be in physical reality?
Ray Kurzweil (33:01.840)
Well, that's a little bit like Second Life,
Lex Fridman (33:04.480)
although the Second Life actually didn't work very well
Ray Kurzweil (33:06.880)
because it couldn't actually handle too many people.
Lex Fridman (33:09.320)
And I don't think the metaverse has come to being.
Ray Kurzweil (33:14.200)
I think there will be something like that.
Lex Fridman (33:16.040)
It won't necessarily be from that one company.
Ray Kurzweil (33:21.040)
I mean, there's gonna be competitors.
Lex Fridman (33:23.480)
But yes, we're gonna live increasingly online,
Lex Fridman (33:26.480)
and particularly if our brains are online.
Lex Fridman (33:28.960)
I mean, how could we not be online?
Lex Fridman (33:31.320)
Do you think it's possible that given this merger with AI,
Lex Fridman (33:34.680)
most of our meaningful interactions
Lex Fridman (33:39.040)
will be in this virtual world most of our life?
Lex Fridman (33:43.880)
We fall in love, we make friends,
Ray Kurzweil (33:46.320)
we come up with ideas, we do collaborations, we have fun.
Lex Fridman (33:49.480)
I actually know somebody who's marrying somebody
Ray Kurzweil (33:51.720)
that they never met.
Lex Fridman (33:54.720)
I think they just met her briefly before the wedding,
Lex Fridman (33:57.760)
but she actually fell in love with this other person,
Lex Fridman (34:01.560)
never having met them.
Lex Fridman (34:06.280)
And I think the love is real, so.
Lex Fridman (34:10.360)
That's a beautiful story,
Lex Fridman (34:11.520)
but do you think that story is one that might be experienced
Lex Fridman (34:15.080)
as opposed to by hundreds of thousands of people,
Lex Fridman (34:18.480)
but instead by hundreds of millions of people?
Lex Fridman (34:22.280)
I mean, it really gives you appreciation
Ray Kurzweil (34:23.880)
for these virtual ways of communicating.
Lex Fridman (34:28.520)
And if anybody can do it,
Ray Kurzweil (34:30.080)
then it's really not such a freak story.
Lex Fridman (34:34.720)
So I think more and more people will do that.
Lex Fridman (34:37.440)
But that's turning our back
Lex Fridman (34:38.720)
on our entire history of evolution.
Ray Kurzweil (34:41.920)
The old days, we used to fall in love by holding hands
Lex Fridman (34:45.520)
and sitting by the fire, that kind of stuff.
Ray Kurzweil (34:49.360)
Here, you're playing.
Lex Fridman (34:50.720)
Actually, I have five patents on where you can hold hands,
Ray Kurzweil (34:54.640)
even if you're separated.
Lex Fridman (34:57.040)
Great.
Lex Fridman (34:58.640)
So the touch, the sense, it's all just senses.
Lex Fridman (35:01.960)
It's all just replicated.
Ray Kurzweil (35:03.040)
Yeah, I mean, touch is,
Lex Fridman (35:04.720)
it's not just that you're touching someone or not.
Ray Kurzweil (35:07.160)
There's a whole way of doing it, and it's very subtle.
Lex Fridman (35:11.520)
But ultimately, we can emulate all of that.
Lex Fridman (35:17.480)
Are you excited by that future?
Lex Fridman (35:19.800)
Do you worry about that future?
Ray Kurzweil (35:23.480)
I have certain worries about the future,
Lex Fridman (35:25.120)
but not virtual touch.
Ray Kurzweil (35:27.600)
Well, I agree with you.
Lex Fridman (35:31.520)
You described six stages
Ray Kurzweil (35:33.480)
in the evolution of information processing in the universe,
Lex Fridman (35:36.600)
as you started to describe.
Lex Fridman (35:39.440)
Can you maybe talk through some of those stages
Lex Fridman (35:42.760)
from the physics and chemistry to DNA and brains,
Lex Fridman (35:46.320)
and then to the very end,
Lex Fridman (35:48.800)
to the very beautiful end of this process?
Ray Kurzweil (35:52.000)
It actually gets more rapid.
Lex Fridman (35:54.120)
So physics and chemistry, that's how we started.
Lex Fridman (35:59.720)
So the very beginning of the universe.
Lex Fridman (36:02.120)
We had lots of electrons and various things traveling around.
Lex Fridman (36:07.240)
And that took actually many billions of years,
Lex Fridman (36:11.480)
kind of jumping ahead here to kind of
Ray Kurzweil (36:14.840)
some of the last stages where we have things
Lex Fridman (36:16.840)
like love and creativity.
Ray Kurzweil (36:19.240)
It's really quite remarkable that that happens.
Lex Fridman (36:21.760)
But finally, physics and chemistry created biology and DNA.
Lex Fridman (36:29.920)
And now you had actually one type of molecule
Lex Fridman (36:33.440)
that described the cutting edge of this process.
Lex Fridman (36:38.680)
And we go from physics and chemistry to biology.
Lex Fridman (36:44.440)
And finally, biology created brains.
Ray Kurzweil (36:48.120)
I mean, not everything that's created by biology
Lex Fridman (36:51.440)
has a brain, but eventually brains came along.
Lex Fridman (36:56.440)
And all of this is happening faster and faster.
Lex Fridman (36:58.840)
Yeah.
Ray Kurzweil (37:00.320)
It created increasingly complex organisms.
Lex Fridman (37:04.480)
Another key thing is actually not just brains,
Lex Fridman (37:08.400)
but our thumb.
Lex Fridman (37:12.880)
Because there's a lot of animals
Ray Kurzweil (37:15.880)
with brains even bigger than humans.
Lex Fridman (37:18.080)
I mean, elephants have a bigger brain.
Ray Kurzweil (37:21.480)
Whales have a bigger brain.
Lex Fridman (37:24.160)
But they've not created technology
Ray Kurzweil (37:27.080)
because they don't have a thumb.
Lex Fridman (37:29.800)
So that's one of the really key elements
Ray Kurzweil (37:32.280)
in the evolution of humans.
Lex Fridman (37:34.120)
This physical manipulator device
Ray Kurzweil (37:37.920)
that's useful for puzzle solving in the physical reality.
Lex Fridman (37:41.320)
So I could think, I could look at a tree and go,
Ray Kurzweil (37:43.600)
oh, I could actually trip that branch down
Lex Fridman (37:46.240)
and eliminate the leaves and carve a tip on it
Lex Fridman (37:49.920)
and I would create technology.
Lex Fridman (37:53.000)
And you can't do that if you don't have a thumb.
Ray Kurzweil (37:56.640)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (37:59.160)
So thumbs then created technology
Lex Fridman (38:04.480)
and technology also had a memory.
Lex Fridman (38:08.040)
And now those memories are competing
Ray Kurzweil (38:10.000)
with the scale and scope of human beings.
Lex Fridman (38:15.000)
And ultimately we'll go beyond it.
Lex Fridman (38:18.160)
And then we're gonna merge human technology
Lex Fridman (38:22.440)
with human intelligence
Lex Fridman (38:27.520)
and understand how human intelligence works,
Lex Fridman (38:30.960)
which I think we already do.
Lex Fridman (38:33.280)
And we're putting that into our human technology.
Lex Fridman (38:39.360)
So create the technology inspired by our own intelligence
Lex Fridman (38:43.120)
and then that technology supersedes us
Lex Fridman (38:45.360)
in terms of its capabilities.
Lex Fridman (38:47.200)
And we ride along.
Lex Fridman (38:48.640)
Or do you ultimately see it as...
Lex Fridman (38:50.400)
And we ride along, but a lot of people don't see that.
Lex Fridman (38:52.720)
They say, well, you've got humans and you've got machines
Lex Fridman (38:56.200)
and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans.
Lex Fridman (39:00.280)
And you can already see that.
Ray Kurzweil (39:02.200)
Lee Soudal, who's like the best Go player in the world,
Lex Fridman (39:07.000)
says he's not gonna play Go anymore.
Ray Kurzweil (39:10.000)
Because playing Go for a human,
Lex Fridman (39:12.880)
that was like the ultimate in intelligence
Ray Kurzweil (39:14.920)
because no one else could do that.
Lex Fridman (39:18.200)
But now a machine can actually go way beyond him.
Lex Fridman (39:22.400)
And so he says, well, there's no point playing it anymore.
Lex Fridman (39:25.080)
That may be more true for games than it is for life.
Ray Kurzweil (39:30.080)
I think there's a lot of benefit
Lex Fridman (39:31.360)
to working together with AI in regular life.
Lex Fridman (39:34.440)
So if you were to put a probability on it,
Lex Fridman (39:37.920)
is it more likely that we merge with AI
Lex Fridman (39:41.240)
or AI replaces us?
Lex Fridman (39:43.560)
A lot of people just think computers come along
Lex Fridman (39:47.400)
and they compete with them.
Lex Fridman (39:48.320)
We can't really compete and that's the end of it.
Ray Kurzweil (39:52.320)
As opposed to them increasing our abilities.
Lex Fridman (39:57.200)
And if you look at most technology,
Ray Kurzweil (39:59.760)
it increases our abilities.
Lex Fridman (40:04.480)
I mean, look at the history of work.
Ray Kurzweil (40:07.920)
Look at what people did 100 years ago.
Lex Fridman (40:11.120)
Does any of that exist anymore?
Ray Kurzweil (40:13.000)
People, I mean, if you were to predict
Lex Fridman (40:16.560)
that all of these jobs would go away
Lex Fridman (40:19.440)
and would be done by machines,
Lex Fridman (40:21.000)
people would say, well, there's gonna be,
Ray Kurzweil (40:22.760)
no one's gonna have jobs
Lex Fridman (40:24.040)
and it's gonna be massive unemployment.
Lex Fridman (40:29.480)
But I show in this book that's coming out
Lex Fridman (40:34.120)
the amount of people that are working,
Ray Kurzweil (40:36.760)
even as a percentage of the population has gone way up.
Lex Fridman (40:41.640)
We're looking at the x axis year from 1774 to 2024
Lex Fridman (40:46.160)
and on the y axis, personal income per capita
Lex Fridman (40:49.520)
in constant dollars and it's growing super linearly.
Ray Kurzweil (40:52.720)
I mean, it's 2021 constant dollars and it's gone way up.
Lex Fridman (40:58.040)
That's not what you would predict
Ray Kurzweil (41:00.760)
given that we would predict
Lex Fridman (41:01.920)
that all these jobs would go away.
Lex Fridman (41:03.760)
But the reason it's gone up is because
Lex Fridman (41:07.000)
we've basically enhanced our own capabilities
Ray Kurzweil (41:09.880)
by using these machines
Lex Fridman (41:11.280)
as opposed to them just competing with us.
Ray Kurzweil (41:14.280)
That's a key way in which we're gonna be able
Lex Fridman (41:16.280)
to become far smarter than we are now
Ray Kurzweil (41:18.680)
by increasing the number of different parameters
Lex Fridman (41:23.200)
we can consider in making a decision.
Ray Kurzweil (41:26.480)
I was very fortunate, I am very fortunate
Lex Fridman (41:28.640)
to be able to get a glimpse preview
Ray Kurzweil (41:31.480)
of your upcoming book, Singularity is Nearer.
Lex Fridman (41:37.320)
And one of the themes outside of just discussing
Ray Kurzweil (41:41.920)
the increasing exponential growth of technology,
Lex Fridman (41:44.760)
one of the themes is that things are getting better
Ray Kurzweil (41:48.480)
in all aspects of life.
Lex Fridman (41:50.800)
And you talked just about this.
Lex Fridman (41:53.720)
So one of the things you're saying is with jobs.
Lex Fridman (41:55.640)
So let me just ask about that.
Ray Kurzweil (41:57.840)
There is a big concern that automation,
Lex Fridman (42:01.040)
especially powerful AI, will get rid of jobs.
Ray Kurzweil (42:06.400)
There are people who lose jobs.
Lex Fridman (42:07.880)
And as you were saying, the sense is
Ray Kurzweil (42:10.960)
throughout the history of the 20th century,
Lex Fridman (42:14.000)
automation did not do that ultimately.
Lex Fridman (42:16.640)
And so the question is, will this time be different?
Lex Fridman (42:20.600)
Right, that is the question.
Lex Fridman (42:22.560)
Will this time be different?
Lex Fridman (42:24.480)
And it really has to do with how quickly
Ray Kurzweil (42:26.360)
we can merge with this type of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (42:29.120)
Whether Lambda or GPT3 is out there,
Lex Fridman (42:34.920)
and maybe it's overcome some of its key problems,
Lex Fridman (42:40.200)
and we really haven't enhanced human intelligence,
Ray Kurzweil (42:43.480)
that might be a negative scenario.
Lex Fridman (42:49.600)
But I mean, that's why we create technologies,
Ray Kurzweil (42:53.160)
to enhance ourselves.
Lex Fridman (42:56.280)
And I believe we will be enhanced
Ray Kurzweil (42:58.800)
when I'm just going to sit here with
Lex Fridman (43:03.000)
300 million modules in our neocortex.
Ray Kurzweil (43:09.040)
We're going to be able to go beyond that.
Lex Fridman (43:14.000)
Because that's useful, but we can multiply that by 10,
Ray Kurzweil (43:19.640)
100, 1,000, a million.
Lex Fridman (43:22.240)
And you might think, well, what's the point of doing that?
Ray Kurzweil (43:30.240)
It's like asking somebody that's never heard music,
Lex Fridman (43:33.920)
well, what's the value of music?
Ray Kurzweil (43:36.600)
I mean, you can't appreciate it until you've created it.
Lex Fridman (43:41.360)
There's some worry that there'll be a wealth disparity.
Ray Kurzweil (43:46.880)
Class or wealth disparity, only the rich people
Lex Fridman (43:50.240)
will be, basically, the rich people
Ray Kurzweil (43:53.120)
will first have access to this kind of thing,
Lex Fridman (43:55.520)
and then because of this kind of thing,
Ray Kurzweil (43:58.000)
because the ability to merge
Lex Fridman (43:59.480)
will get richer exponentially faster.
Lex Fridman (44:02.680)
And I say that's just like cell phones.
Lex Fridman (44:06.280)
I mean, there's like four billion cell phones
Ray Kurzweil (44:08.080)
in the world today.
Lex Fridman (44:10.320)
In fact, when cell phones first came out,
Ray Kurzweil (44:13.320)
you had to be fairly wealthy.
Lex Fridman (44:14.840)
They weren't very inexpensive.
Lex Fridman (44:17.520)
So you had to have some wealth in order to afford them.
Lex Fridman (44:20.160)
Yeah, there were these big, sexy phones.
Lex Fridman (44:22.760)
And they didn't work very well.
Lex Fridman (44:24.080)
They did almost nothing.
Lex Fridman (44:26.480)
So you can only afford these things if you're wealthy
Lex Fridman (44:31.240)
at a point where they really don't work very well.
Lex Fridman (44:35.760)
So achieving scale and making it inexpensive
Lex Fridman (44:39.880)
is part of making the thing work well.
Ray Kurzweil (44:42.240)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (44:43.560)
So these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty cheap.
Ray Kurzweil (44:46.980)
I mean, you can get them for a few hundred dollars.
Lex Fridman (44:52.140)
Especially given the kind of things it provides for you.
Ray Kurzweil (44:55.400)
There's a lot of people in the third world
Lex Fridman (44:57.100)
that have very little, but they have a smartphone.
Ray Kurzweil (45:00.380)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman (45:01.980)
And the same will be true with AI.
Ray Kurzweil (45:03.820)
I mean, I see homeless people have their own cell phones.
Lex Fridman (45:07.640)
Yeah, so your sense is any kind of advanced technology
Ray Kurzweil (45:12.120)
will take the same trajectory.
Lex Fridman (45:13.740)
Right, it ultimately becomes cheap and will be affordable.
Ray Kurzweil (45:19.180)
I probably would not be the first person
Lex Fridman (45:21.060)
to put something in my brain to connect to computers
Ray Kurzweil (45:28.220)
because I think it will have limitations.
Lex Fridman (45:30.240)
But once it's really perfected,
Lex Fridman (45:34.140)
and at that point it'll be pretty inexpensive,
Lex Fridman (45:36.420)
I think it'll be pretty affordable.
Lex Fridman (45:39.660)
So in which other ways, as you outline your book,
Lex Fridman (45:43.080)
is life getting better?
Ray Kurzweil (45:44.460)
Because I think...
Lex Fridman (45:45.340)
Well, I mean, I have 50 charts in there
Ray Kurzweil (45:49.220)
where everything is getting better.
Lex Fridman (45:51.780)
I think there's a kind of cynicism about,
Ray Kurzweil (45:55.500)
like even if you look at extreme poverty, for example.
Lex Fridman (45:58.020)
For example, this is actually a poll
Ray Kurzweil (46:00.860)
taken on extreme poverty, and people were asked,
Lex Fridman (46:05.500)
has poverty gotten better or worse?
Lex Fridman (46:08.320)
And the options are increased by 50%,
Lex Fridman (46:11.180)
increased by 25%, remain the same,
Ray Kurzweil (46:13.940)
decreased by 25%, decreased by 50%.
Lex Fridman (46:16.740)
If you're watching this or listening to this,
Ray Kurzweil (46:18.780)
try to vote for yourself.
Lex Fridman (46:21.500)
70% thought it had gotten worse,
Lex Fridman (46:24.200)
and that's the general impression.
Lex Fridman (46:27.100)
88% thought it had gotten worse or remained the same.
Ray Kurzweil (46:32.500)
Only 1% thought it decreased by 50%,
Lex Fridman (46:35.700)
and that is the answer.
Ray Kurzweil (46:37.620)
It actually decreased by 50%.
Lex Fridman (46:39.540)
So only 1% of people got the right optimistic estimate
Ray Kurzweil (46:43.660)
of how poverty is.
Lex Fridman (46:45.260)
Right, and this is the reality,
Lex Fridman (46:47.520)
and it's true of almost everything you look at.
Lex Fridman (46:51.140)
You don't wanna go back 100 years or 50 years.
Ray Kurzweil (46:54.780)
Things were quite miserable then,
Lex Fridman (46:56.980)
but we tend not to remember that.
Lex Fridman (47:01.020)
So literacy rate increasing over the past few centuries
Lex Fridman (47:05.340)
across all the different nations,
Ray Kurzweil (47:07.940)
nearly to 100% across many of the nations in the world.
Lex Fridman (47:11.880)
It's gone way up.
Ray Kurzweil (47:12.820)
Average years of education have gone way up.
Lex Fridman (47:15.620)
Life expectancy is also increasing.
Ray Kurzweil (47:18.560)
Life expectancy was 48 in 1900.
Lex Fridman (47:24.380)
And it's over 80 now.
Lex Fridman (47:26.400)
And it's gonna continue to go up,
Lex Fridman (47:28.140)
particularly as we get into more advanced stages
Ray Kurzweil (47:30.940)
of simulated biology.
Lex Fridman (47:33.380)
For life expectancy, these trends are the same
Ray Kurzweil (47:35.580)
for at birth, age one, age five, age 10,
Lex Fridman (47:37.940)
so it's not just the infant mortality.
Lex Fridman (47:40.340)
And I have 50 more graphs in the book
Lex Fridman (47:42.620)
about all kinds of things.
Ray Kurzweil (47:46.120)
Even spread of democracy,
Lex Fridman (47:48.340)
which might bring up some sort of controversial issues,
Ray Kurzweil (47:52.740)
it still has gone way up.
Lex Fridman (47:55.140)
Well, that one has gone way up,
Lex Fridman (47:57.260)
but that one is a bumpy road, right?
Lex Fridman (47:59.500)
Exactly, and somebody might represent democracy
Lex Fridman (48:03.220)
and go backwards, but we basically had no democracies
Lex Fridman (48:08.460)
before the creation of the United States,
Ray Kurzweil (48:10.980)
which was a little over two centuries ago,
Lex Fridman (48:13.860)
which in the scale of human history isn't that long.
Lex Fridman (48:17.460)
Do you think superintelligence systems will help
Lex Fridman (48:21.460)
with democracy?
Lex Fridman (48:23.620)
So what is democracy?
Lex Fridman (48:25.020)
Democracy is giving a voice to the populace
Lex Fridman (48:29.660)
and having their ideas, having their beliefs,
Lex Fridman (48:33.700)
having their views represented.
Ray Kurzweil (48:38.180)
Well, I hope so.
Lex Fridman (48:41.260)
I mean, we've seen social networks
Ray Kurzweil (48:44.060)
can spread conspiracy theories,
Lex Fridman (48:49.180)
which have been quite negative,
Ray Kurzweil (48:51.340)
being, for example, being against any kind of stuff
Lex Fridman (48:55.500)
that would help your health.
Lex Fridman (48:58.340)
So those kinds of ideas have,
Lex Fridman (49:03.100)
on social media, what you notice is they increase
Ray Kurzweil (49:06.540)
engagement, so dramatic division increases engagement.
Lex Fridman (49:10.340)
Do you worry about AI systems that will learn
Lex Fridman (49:13.460)
to maximize that division?
Lex Fridman (49:17.020)
I mean, I do have some concerns about this,
Lex Fridman (49:22.040)
and I have a chapter in the book about the perils
Lex Fridman (49:25.740)
of advanced AI, spreading misinformation
Ray Kurzweil (49:32.380)
on social networks is one of them,
Lex Fridman (49:34.080)
but there are many others.
Ray Kurzweil (49:36.780)
What's the one that worries you the most
Lex Fridman (49:40.640)
that we should think about to try to avoid?
Ray Kurzweil (49:47.260)
Well, it's hard to choose.
Lex Fridman (49:50.820)
We do have the nuclear power that evolved
Ray Kurzweil (49:55.340)
when I was a child, I remember,
Lex Fridman (49:57.660)
and we would actually do these drills against a nuclear war.
Ray Kurzweil (50:03.580)
We'd get under our desks and put our hands behind our heads
Lex Fridman (50:07.620)
to protect us from a nuclear war.
Ray Kurzweil (50:11.140)
Seems to work, we're still around, so.
Lex Fridman (50:15.540)
You're protected.
Lex Fridman (50:17.060)
But that's still a concern.
Lex Fridman (50:20.080)
And there are key dangerous situations
Ray Kurzweil (50:22.860)
that can take place in biology.
Lex Fridman (50:27.140)
Someone could create a virus that's very,
Ray Kurzweil (50:33.340)
I mean, we have viruses that are hard to spread,
Lex Fridman (50:40.560)
and they can be very dangerous,
Lex Fridman (50:42.800)
and we have viruses that are easy to spread,
Lex Fridman (50:46.160)
but they're not so dangerous.
Ray Kurzweil (50:47.800)
Somebody could create something
Lex Fridman (50:51.600)
that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous,
Lex Fridman (50:55.580)
and be very hard to stop.
Lex Fridman (50:58.960)
It could be something that would spread
Ray Kurzweil (51:02.040)
without people noticing, because people could get it,
Lex Fridman (51:04.640)
they'd have no symptoms, and then everybody would get it,
Lex Fridman (51:08.320)
and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later.
Lex Fridman (51:11.800)
So I mean, and that actually doesn't occur normally,
Ray Kurzweil (51:18.760)
because if we were to have a problem with that,
Lex Fridman (51:24.680)
we wouldn't exist.
Lex Fridman (51:26.920)
So the fact that humans exist means that we don't have
Lex Fridman (51:30.720)
viruses that can spread easily and kill us,
Ray Kurzweil (51:35.040)
because otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Lex Fridman (51:37.540)
Yeah, viruses don't wanna do that.
Ray Kurzweil (51:39.080)
They want to spread and keep the host alive somewhat.
Lex Fridman (51:44.080)
So you can describe various dangers with biology.
Ray Kurzweil (51:48.620)
Also nanotechnology, which we actually haven't experienced
Lex Fridman (51:53.520)
yet, but there are people that are creating nanotechnology,
Lex Fridman (51:56.040)
and I describe that in the book.
Lex Fridman (51:57.960)
Now you're excited by the possibilities of nanotechnology,
Ray Kurzweil (52:00.880)
of nanobots, of being able to do things inside our body,
Lex Fridman (52:04.920)
inside our mind, that's going to help.
Lex Fridman (52:07.520)
What's exciting, what's terrifying about nanobots?
Lex Fridman (52:10.880)
What's exciting is that that's a way to communicate
Ray Kurzweil (52:13.920)
with our neocortex, because each neocortex is pretty small
Lex Fridman (52:19.000)
and you need a small entity that can actually get in there
Lex Fridman (52:22.360)
and establish a communication channel.
Lex Fridman (52:25.440)
And that's gonna really be necessary to connect our brains
Ray Kurzweil (52:30.320)
to AI within ourselves, because otherwise it would be hard
Lex Fridman (52:35.320)
for us to compete with it.
Ray Kurzweil (52:38.720)
In a high bandwidth way.
Lex Fridman (52:40.240)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (52:41.760)
And that's key, actually, because a lot of the things
Lex Fridman (52:45.720)
like Neuralink are really not high bandwidth yet.
Lex Fridman (52:49.880)
So nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth.
Lex Fridman (52:52.680)
How much intelligence would those nanobots have?
Ray Kurzweil (52:55.880)
Yeah, they don't need a lot, just enough to basically
Lex Fridman (53:00.320)
establish a communication channel to one nanobot.
Lex Fridman (53:04.400)
So it's primarily about communication.
Lex Fridman (53:06.720)
Yeah.
Ray Kurzweil (53:07.560)
Between external computing devices
Lex Fridman (53:09.880)
and our biological thinking machine.
Lex Fridman (53:15.020)
What worries you about nanobots?
Lex Fridman (53:17.040)
Is it similar to with the viruses?
Ray Kurzweil (53:19.840)
Well, I mean, it's the great goo challenge.
Lex Fridman (53:22.720)
Yes.
Ray Kurzweil (53:24.920)
If you had a nanobot that wanted to create
Lex Fridman (53:29.920)
any kind of entity and repeat itself,
Lex Fridman (53:37.520)
and was able to operate in a natural environment,
Lex Fridman (53:41.520)
it could turn everything into that entity
Lex Fridman (53:45.240)
and basically destroy all biological life.
Lex Fridman (53:52.000)
So you mentioned nuclear weapons.
Ray Kurzweil (53:54.600)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (53:55.440)
I'd love to hear your opinion about the 21st century
Lex Fridman (54:01.840)
and whether you think we might destroy ourselves.
Lex Fridman (54:05.320)
And maybe your opinion, if it has changed
Ray Kurzweil (54:08.840)
by looking at what's going on in Ukraine,
Lex Fridman (54:11.760)
that we could have a hot war with nuclear powers involved
Lex Fridman (54:18.980)
and the tensions building and the seeming forgetting
Lex Fridman (54:23.320)
of how terrifying and destructive nuclear weapons are.
Lex Fridman (54:29.340)
Do you think humans might destroy ourselves
Lex Fridman (54:32.940)
in the 21st century, and if we do, how?
Lex Fridman (54:36.220)
And how do we avoid it?
Lex Fridman (54:38.540)
I don't think that's gonna happen
Ray Kurzweil (54:41.100)
despite the terrors of that war.
Lex Fridman (54:45.180)
It is a possibility, but I mean, I don't.
Ray Kurzweil (54:50.420)
It's unlikely in your mind.
Lex Fridman (54:52.700)
Yeah, even with the tensions we've had
Ray Kurzweil (54:55.380)
with this one nuclear power plant that's been taken over,
Lex Fridman (55:02.340)
it's very tense, but I don't actually see a lot of people
Ray Kurzweil (55:07.580)
worrying that that's gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (55:10.220)
I think we'll avoid that.
Ray Kurzweil (55:11.900)
We had two nuclear bombs go off in 45,
Lex Fridman (55:15.940)
so now we're 77 years later.
Ray Kurzweil (55:20.860)
Yeah, we're doing pretty good.
Lex Fridman (55:22.400)
We've never had another one go off through anger.
Ray Kurzweil (55:27.100)
People forget the lessons of history.
Lex Fridman (55:31.020)
Well, yeah, I mean, I am worried about it.
Ray Kurzweil (55:33.540)
I mean, that is definitely a challenge.
Lex Fridman (55:37.460)
But you believe that we'll make it out
Lex Fridman (55:40.620)
and ultimately superintelligent AI will help us make it out
Lex Fridman (55:44.600)
as opposed to destroy us.
Ray Kurzweil (55:47.680)
I think so, but we do have to be mindful of these dangers.
Lex Fridman (55:52.420)
And there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons, so.
Lex Fridman (55:56.340)
So to get back to merging with AI,
Lex Fridman (56:01.060)
will we be able to upload our mind in a computer
Ray Kurzweil (56:06.020)
in a way where we might even transcend
Lex Fridman (56:09.380)
the constraints of our bodies?
Lex Fridman (56:11.620)
So copy our mind into a computer and leave the body behind?
Lex Fridman (56:15.300)
Let me describe one thing I've already done with my father.
Ray Kurzweil (56:21.060)
That's a great story.
Lex Fridman (56:23.700)
So we created a technology, this is public,
Ray Kurzweil (56:26.660)
came out, I think, six years ago,
Lex Fridman (56:30.140)
where you could ask any question
Lex Fridman (56:33.740)
and the release product,
Lex Fridman (56:35.220)
which I think is still on the market,
Ray Kurzweil (56:37.620)
it would read 200,000 books.
Lex Fridman (56:40.900)
And then find the one sentence in 200,000 books
Ray Kurzweil (56:46.140)
that best answered your question.
Lex Fridman (56:49.860)
And it's actually quite interesting.
Ray Kurzweil (56:51.180)
You can ask all kinds of questions
Lex Fridman (56:52.740)
and you get the best answer in 200,000 books.
Lex Fridman (56:57.580)
But I was also able to take it
Lex Fridman (56:59.940)
and not go through 200,000 books,
Lex Fridman (57:03.180)
but go through a book that I put together,
Lex Fridman (57:07.060)
which is basically everything my father had written.
Lex Fridman (57:10.980)
So everything he had written, I had gathered,
Lex Fridman (57:14.660)
and we created a book,
Ray Kurzweil (57:17.100)
everything that Frederick Herzog had written.
Lex Fridman (57:20.220)
Now, I didn't think this actually would work that well
Ray Kurzweil (57:23.380)
because stuff he had written was stuff about how to lay out.
Lex Fridman (57:30.900)
I mean, he directed choral groups
Lex Fridman (57:35.900)
and music groups,
Lex Fridman (57:39.220)
and he would be laying out how the people should,
Ray Kurzweil (57:44.180)
where they should sit and how to fund this
Lex Fridman (57:49.660)
and all kinds of things
Ray Kurzweil (57:52.220)
that really didn't seem that interesting.
Lex Fridman (57:57.620)
And yet, when you ask a question,
Ray Kurzweil (57:59.900)
it would go through it
Lex Fridman (58:00.820)
and it would actually give you a very good answer.
Lex Fridman (58:04.760)
So I said, well, who's the most interesting composer?
Lex Fridman (58:07.860)
And he said, well, definitely Brahms.
Lex Fridman (58:09.500)
And he would go on about how Brahms was fabulous
Lex Fridman (58:13.220)
and talk about the importance of music education.
Lex Fridman (58:18.020)
So you could have essentially a question and answer,
Lex Fridman (58:21.140)
a conversation with him.
Ray Kurzweil (58:21.980)
You could have a conversation with him,
Lex Fridman (58:23.020)
which was actually more interesting than talking to him
Ray Kurzweil (58:25.940)
because if you talked to him,
Lex Fridman (58:27.020)
he'd be concerned about how they're gonna lay out
Ray Kurzweil (58:30.080)
this property to give a choral group.
Lex Fridman (58:34.220)
He'd be concerned about the day to day
Ray Kurzweil (58:36.060)
versus the big questions.
Lex Fridman (58:37.300)
Exactly, yeah.
Lex Fridman (58:39.060)
And you did ask about the meaning of life
Lex Fridman (58:41.620)
and he answered, love.
Ray Kurzweil (58:43.260)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (58:46.460)
Do you miss him?
Ray Kurzweil (58:49.180)
Yes, I do.
Lex Fridman (58:52.940)
Yeah, you get used to missing somebody after 52 years,
Lex Fridman (58:58.540)
and I didn't really have intelligent conversations with him
Lex Fridman (59:02.700)
until later in life.
Ray Kurzweil (59:06.940)
In the last few years, he was sick,
Lex Fridman (59:08.780)
which meant he was home a lot
Lex Fridman (59:10.140)
and I was actually able to talk to him
Lex Fridman (59:11.900)
about different things like music and other things.
Lex Fridman (59:15.780)
And so I miss that very much.
Lex Fridman (59:19.820)
What did you learn about life from your father?
Lex Fridman (59:25.180)
What part of him is with you now?
Lex Fridman (59:29.020)
He was devoted to music.
Lex Fridman (59:31.580)
And when he would create something to music,
Lex Fridman (59:33.860)
it put him in a different world.
Ray Kurzweil (59:37.540)
Otherwise, he was very shy.
Lex Fridman (59:42.520)
And if people got together,
Ray Kurzweil (59:43.780)
he tended not to interact with people
Lex Fridman (59:47.020)
just because of his shyness.
Lex Fridman (59:49.780)
But when he created music, he was like a different person.
Lex Fridman (59:55.340)
Do you have that in you?
Lex Fridman (59:56.540)
That kind of light that shines?
Lex Fridman (59:59.840)
I mean, I got involved with technology at like age five.
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