← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
The Singularity Countdown: AGI by 2029, Humans Merge with AI, and Intelligence Multiplies 1000x | Ray Kurzweil | 223
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- [00:01]
A
It feels like we're in the midst of the singularity. Do you agree that we're actually in the midst of it right now, or are we going to have to wait for some other point to get there?
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B
One difference of my own perspective versus everybody else's.
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C
Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist who's been working in the field of artificial intelligence.
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B
Ray Kurzweil author, INVENTOR and FUTURIST I've been now in AI for 61 years, which is actually a record.
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C
If you look at your 120 odd predictions from 30 odd years ago that were wrong.
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A
Your first prediction as you said that you released in 1989, was that we're going to reach human level AI by.
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B
2029, the next 10 years, against my definition of singularity, which is we'll be at least a thousand times more intelligent.
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D
What is most exciting to you and what are you anticipating most? Excitedly in the next year or two.
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B
We'Ll have supercomputers, but we'll also be merging with them. So we're going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are today. When that's going to happen at the same time for everybody.
- [01:09]
A
Now that's a moonshot.
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C
Ladies and gentlemen.
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A
Everybody, welcome to Moonshot. The conversation gets you ready for the future and prepares you for the supersonic tsunami coming our way. I'm here with DB2AWG and Salim, gentleman, 2026 is off to an extraordinary year. Alex, you're not in your regular haunt. Where are you today?
- [01:32]
C
Yeah, where are you?
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E
I'm in the first R D small of Paris today. Slowly making my way to Davos for World Economic Forum 2026.
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C
Taking like a horse and buggy or something, you know, you can fly directly.
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E
To Zurich, taking the slow route, scenic route.
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A
Amazing.
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C
And Celine Paris in January you served.
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D
Your normal recording spot. So this is your background and your mic and everything. So.
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A
So Saleem is here in Santa Monica. We have an X Prize board meeting today. Dave, you're going to be joining the board meeting by Zoom or you're not here.
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C
I'm with Ray here in Boston actually. We're in the happening spot, but I'm going to be flying straight from here to Davos on Sunday where Alex and I will be hanging out with Dennis Hassabas and the whole gang.
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A
Amazing. I just got back from Singapore. I had an extraordinary visit there. I was the guest of incredible bank DBS Sushan, who's the CEO. A big shout out to Sushan. Thank you for an incredible visit to Singapore. She's a Singularity University alum and a fan of our pod. So I just think the world of Singapore can't wait to get back there. DBS is doing extraordinary work so a big shout out to the team there. Gentlemen, we have an extraordinary guest today. Someone who all of us count as our mentors. He's been a mentor for me for the last 20 years. We're here with the incredible Ray Kurzweil. One of the world's leading thinkers and futurists. He's been called the relentless genius, the ultimate thinking machine. He's got a 30 year track record of accurate predictions regarding the evolution of technology in the future. If you go to Wikipedia you, you can check it out. An 86% accuracy rate on his predictions. He's a inventor of the CCD Flatbeck scanner, the first OmniFont Optical character recognition. The first print to speech reading machine, the Kurzweil synthesizer. The author of the Law of Accelerating Returns. We'll be talking about that. The author of two books that have set the foundation for all the conversations we have here in Moonshots. The Singularity is near in 2005. More recently the singularity is nearer in 2024. He's the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and innovation. He has 21 honorary doctorates. He's been honored by three US presidents and really the gentleman who has popularized and driven the term singularity which he famously predicts will happen in the year 2045. Ray, it is an honor and a pleasure to have you here, buddy.
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C
And a bucket list item.
- [04:16]
B
Absolutely great to be here. Always great to talk with you Peter Saleem.
- [04:21]
A
So yeah, no, and gotta love those suspenders, buddy. You are fashionable on the exponential world.
- [04:29]
C
I do have to say I read.
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B
Them, they're all, they're all hand painted so.
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A
Really?
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C
Really?
- [04:35]
B
Yeah.
- [04:36]
C
I do have to say when I read the Singularity as near in 2005 when it came out, I thought it was the most important book I had read in my entire life up until that point. So definitely, definitely a life changing book. Worth buying again and rereading.
- [04:50]
B
Yeah, well it was quite controversial when it came out, which is about 20 years ago. Stanford had a. Basically a meeting of about several hundred AI experts to examine its predictions. It was considered very controversial. People agreed with me that it would happen, but not within 30 years. They thought it would happen within 100 years. I'm actually running to people who were there. There were several hundred AI experts who came to that conference and they agreed that if anything 30 years is 2029. Right now that seems overly conservative. People are predicting a little bit sooner than that, like 2027 and so on. But at the time, people thought it would be 100 years off.
- [05:49]
C
Well, I think it's important for people to go read the book. It's so non controversial today, given how things have unfolded. And put yourself in the mindset of this being completely controversial at the time, because a lot of things that we predict on the podcast that Alex says, they also have that same flavor. Trying to look forward 10 years from today is very, very hard. And they have that same feeling of, well, that's impossible, that could never happen. But if you rewind the tape, these impossible things routinely happen. And then because of hindsight bias, everyone's like, oh, I would have seen that coming. I think it's a good exercise.
- [06:27]
B
Things are happening so quickly now that looking one year out is like a long term prediction. Yeah, I didn't like to predict things one or two years away, like 10 years ago. But now one or two years away is really kind of a long term prediction.
- [06:45]
A
So, Ray, you made two predictions. I think it's important. Your first prediction, as you said that you released in 1989, was that we're going to reach human level AI by, by 2029. And people laughed at that, as you said. But the other prediction you've made is that we're going to reach the singularity by 2045. And there's a lot of confusion about, okay, well, if we're reaching human level AI by 2029 and it's growing exponentially, why are we waiting till 2045 for the singularity? Could you sort of explain the difference between those two things?
- [07:17]
B
How do we multiply our intelligence a thousand fold? I mean, one difference of my own perspective versus everybody else's. It's not like we have our own intelligence, biological intelligence, and then we have AI that's over here, and we somehow relate to AI versus human intelligence. We're going to merge with it. It's going to be the same thing. We're not going to be able to tell whether or not an idea is coming to us from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence. It's going to seem the same. I mean, if I asked you to think of some actress and you think of it, you don't know where that came from. It just somehow appeared in your mind. And it's going to be the same way whether it's coming from your computational intelligence or your biological intelligence. And we're not going to be able to tell the difference. Today, you can tell the difference. If you actually go to your favorite LLM, you can tell that it's coming from the LLM, not from your biological intelligence. In the future, though, it's gonna. You're not gonna be able to tell the difference, and we're gonna become a thousand times smarter by 2045.
- [08:35]
A
Everybody. You may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team. And every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic bio. And these metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrenD it feels like we're in the midst of the singularity, and it's a smooth function. It's hard to note that. Do you. Do you agree that we're actually in the midst of it right now, or are we gonna have to wait for some other point to get there?
- [09:16]
B
I mean, a lot of things have already amplified dramatically. For example, we can take our models of biological paradigms and predict what will happen if we can actually simulate biology, and we're actually doing that now with biological tests, so we can actually simulate millions or even billions of different possibilities and do that in like, one weekend.
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D
And Ray, how do you define the singularity currently? Because in the past, you've put it as a moment in time, then we talked about it as a process. What's your current framing of it?
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B
Well, the framing is when we're 1000 times more intelligent. But in some ways we'll be able to, for example, simulate biology for medical tests even faster than that. And we can do that actually today, although we don't have all of the paradigms of what biological intelligence will do. So I've talked to people who are actually modeling this, and the most conservative views is that it will take about five years from now. We'll be able to have all of the conversions that are done to biological intelligence predicting what different chemicals will do. So we can actually try out a million tests in one weekend and be able to predict that very quickly. We can do that now in some cases, but not in every case.
- [11:16]
C
I'd love to rewind the tape just a little bit and talk about how you landed the plane so accurately in predictions going back to 1999 are coming down to Basically within a year or two of what you predicted, which is so different from when I was at the MIT AI Lab. People were predicting all kinds of different things, and then they would never happen. And then we get into these AI winters. And so if you go back and read your books from 2005, you have to put yourself in the context of nobody believes AI will ever happen because it's been predicted, like, 12 times in a row and whiffed every single time. Every prediction has absolutely whiffed. Meanwhile, you're drawing a timeline that's much longer than other people's timelines, and it's going to land. You know, the date of AI having human level intelligence is going to land within three years of something you predicted 20 years ago.
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E
30.
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A
30 years ago.
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C
30. Is it 30 years ago?
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F
Yeah.
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A
1999 to today.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And then, you know, the date where it crosses all combined human intelligence, which I guess is 2045. In your. In your prediction will. Will likely happen or. Or be sooner.
- [12:28]
B
It has to do with thinking exponentially, and people are not used to that. They're thinking linearly. Think, if it took 10 years in the past, it'll take 10 years in the future. And. And that's really. That's what people think about the. The future is the same as the past. So to really think exponentially requires a certain practice. And that's how I got to this kind of view.
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A
Alex, do you want to jump in?
- [13:06]
E
Yeah, maybe to pull on this thread. Ray, first of all, it's wonderful to be chatting with you again. Always enjoy our conversations. The Turing Test. I've argued on this podcast in past that the Turing Test went by with. With a whimper, not a bang. It flew by. The Loebner Prize was canceled before the Turing Test was arguably passed. And yet it was passed, and there was no celebration.
- [13:32]
B
The Loebner Test was not a really good test. He had various practices that were really not in accord with the Turing Test. And Turing Test is really matching an ordinary person that's talking not really an expert in the field. AGI, I think, is actually a better view because we're actually matching the best person in each field. And we have maybe several thousand. Maybe several hundred thousand fields that you could be expert in. And AGI means that you can match a human being in any of the fields and then combine the insight into many different fields together, which no human being can do. I mean, Einstein was very good at physics, but he. And he actually was interested in playing a violin, but he was not an expert in playing a Violin. He was only an expert in physics. People maybe can master two fields at the most, but there's actually thousands of fields. And if you could actually be an expert in all of them and then combine all those insights, that's something that's quite unique. So that's what AGI represents. Whereas Turing Test is really matching an ordinary person with a lot of mischaracterizations of different things.
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E
I agree that AGI and passing the Turing Test are for most common definitions, different standards. The question I was going to ask though is arguably if you agree with the premise that the Turing Test as reasonably defined, not the original gender presentation based Turing Test, but the subsequent definition was passed without very much hoopla at all. Do you think the same is going to happen with the singularity? There's in particular one of my favorite scenes in Charlie Strauss's novel Accelerando. You have a bunch of characters who've been all uploaded to a star wisp traveling to another star system who are all arguing with each other. They're post human uploads arguing with each other as to whether the singularity has even happened. Do you think that's what's actually going to happen here where we'll just singularity will zoom by and we'll all be arguing with each other decades later? Did the singularity even happen? Has it happened yet?
- [16:01]
B
I mean these standards are not very clear. Not everybody agrees that we've passed the Turing Test. And when we pass AGI, there'll be disagreements. It's disagreements now as to what that means. People say it's basically as good as somebody who's a little bit above average intelligence. I define it as being an expert in every area when there's many different areas that you can be expert in. So that's actually quite impressive level and I think we'll get there by 2029. The thing that's then you can combine your insights into every possible field.
- [16:43]
G
Really.
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B
I mean, have that large language models can answer questions in lots of different fields. No person can do what a large language model can do today, let alone what will happen by 2029.
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C
By the way, we have a moonshots test where you have to fool your spouse for three minutes on a zoom call. We haven't defined what we're going to give to the listener.
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A
We should do that. That would be hilarious.
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C
I think that's a better benchmark. So that's our moonshots that much more closely matches the original Turing test. Sorry, Alex, what were you going to say?
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E
I was just going to say, or rather to ask Ray, are you at all concerned about goalposts getting moved yet again, as we see happening over and over again with definitions of AGI and otherwise, that we will pass your definition of the singularity. But nonetheless, most commentators will be arguing with each other for a long time after that whether the singularity has actually happened.
- [17:43]
B
Well, mine is actually pretty strict. I mean, to pass my definition of AGI you have to be an expert in thousands of different areas, which is actually more strict than most definitions of AGI. So I think I have a suitably strict definition of it.
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C
What about the definition of singularity? Because one of the things that really inspired me in both of your singularity titled books is the fact that there's a moment in time where AI is working on itself and self improving. And that moment in time is where you get this incredible acceleration. It feels like that's either right now or within the last year, or within the next year. It's imminent. And we're predicting on this podcast a 100x step up in the efficiency of the existing algorithms that's completely independent of the underlying curve that you're.
- [18:41]
B
We've started to see AI improving itself a little bit, but it really has not gone. It's not really very dramatic. I mean, these definitions are not beyond debate. And it's not like everyone will agree. Take AGI. I mean, you could predict that certain number of people will predict that it's actually there today, but it's actually, it's a small group and it will accelerate and finally when everybody more or less agrees with it. But that's a band of maybe three or four years. And I think it will end in 2029. It's already beginning. People feel we have AGI already, but most people will believe that, I think by 2029.
- [19:39]
C
Well, that means your prediction has to be exact. If you say that we'll be debating it for the rest of time, and it was sometime between today and 2029, that means you are irrefutably right in your prediction from 30 years ago. So that's kind of cool, right? Memorialize that right now.
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A
Salim, you're going to jump in.
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D
So I remember Ray, when we were in a car with Peter, you and me, going to the CNN studios to launch Singularity University and announce it. I was a young fresh faced fellow and I said, Ray, they're going to ask you about exponentials as part of the briefing. And they said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that may be a problem. And I said, what do you Mean, I was all kind of freaked out and you said, I'd better bone up on the subject. And it took me like 10 seconds to realize that you were joking. I think one of my favorite things about you is the unbelievable sense of humor, dry humor that you bring to the table. Here's my question for you know, you've been kind of saying this very steadily for 30 years. Right at the beginning, it must have been very hard saying this to people who are just like, he is out of his mind. What is he talking about? Is it easier for you now? Do you feel a sense of accomplishment that many more people are talking about it and saying, yep, he was right, et cetera, et cetera? Do you feel some sense of that?
- [20:59]
B
Well, yes and no. The basic debate about whether or not this will happen, is it going to be exactly 20, 29 or something, has gone away. People actually accept that. I run into very few people that say, oh no, it's going to be 500 years from now. On the other hand, the issue has changed from is it going to happen? To is it good for humanity? And that's a big debate. Yes, it's going to happen, but we're all going to be screwed as a result of it. And we've got books that come out saying it's going to eliminate humanity. And that's really the big debate now, whether or not it's going to be beneficial for humanity or not.
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D
I believe. I mean, you've said publicly that technology is a major driver of progress and it might be the only major driver of progress. I assume you're very clearly on that, on the beneficial process side.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's some chance that things will go wrong. I wouldn't say that that's has no chance of happening, but I think what we're seeing is going to be beneficial, although it's going to change things very rapidly. And that will lead to some foreboding as well.
- [22:26]
A
Yeah, and we'll get into that in a minute. There's a question that we've debated on this show and curious about your point of view, which is are we going to actually achieve consciousness and sentience with AIs and will they begin petitioning for personhood? And do you think society will approve that, that we're going to actually start to feel our AIs are conscious and sentient and we shouldn't, we shouldn't shut them down and they're going to have rights like humans have. What's your feeling on all that?
- [23:00]
B
Well, first of all, consciousness is A subjective point of view. There's nothing we can do scientifically to prove that an entity is conscious. We can't have a machine and you slide something in and a light goes on. Oh, this is conscious. No, this isn't conscious. There's no scientific test for it. So some people, like, for example, Marvin Minsky, who was my mentor for 50 years, said, well, there's no scientific test for it, therefore it's not scientific. Therefore we shouldn't deal with consciousness. It's a meaningless debate. On the other hand, you could say it's the most important thing. Am I conscious of? Are you conscious? I mean, that's something we really need to deal with. I need to be able to relate to you as if you are conscious. I consider myself to be conscious, and yet it's not scientific.
- [24:05]
D
My scientific test is I think I'm conscious, but my wife disagrees. So when she thinks I am, then I think I'll be there.
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A
Alex, you've been thinking a lot about this idea of personhood and in consciousness.
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E
I'm a proponent, broadly speaking, of AI personhood. And I guess I'll play the contrarian role that I'm painted as of respectfully disagreeing with my friend Ray that there aren't benchmarks. I think there has been over the past two years marked progress toward developing quantitative benchmarks for, call it self awareness rather than consciousness. Maybe slightly less mushy as, as a term, including, as I've pointed out in the past, tests for whether certain models can detect overlaid activations in their residual streams. If they're transformers. I see progress toward developing real benchmarks for self awareness in models.
- [25:02]
B
Yes. But I'll give you something else that's even more perplexing. There's lots of conscious people. Now, I can't prove that you're conscious, but I believe that you are. Believe that a human being that acts conscious is probably conscious. But why do I have the consciousness I have? There's all these conscious beings, but there's one person that I relate to that if something happens to it, I care about it in a different way than I care about other people, my own consciousness. So why. Why am I conscious? Why was I born in 1948? Why am I a male in on Earth? And why am I not another animal? And so, I mean, why am I the person that I am? You could think the same thing about yourself, but it's a subjective view of consciousness. Well, why am I the person that I am? And that's really hard to explain. Why am I have all the earmarks of this particular person, of course.
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E
Ray, it's such an ironic question that in my mind that you're asking an anthropic question. What you just posed, why am I myself? Is the most fundamental anthropic lowercase a, not capital a question that one can ask, and why does the universe appear the way it does? And the usual answer is, if the universe or your own identity had sufficiently different properties, you wouldn't be around to ask the question, why do I?
- [26:53]
B
It's very hard to even ask the question, and people don't actually quite understand it.
- [26:58]
D
Maybe the most favorite comment you've ever made for me was we were at a group of singularity folks. We've had a couple of glasses of wine and somebody asked about consciousness, and you said, language is a very thin pipe to discuss concepts that are this complex. And it just blew everybody's mind.
- [27:14]
B
AIs will be indistinguishable from a conscious being, and that will just keep going. And finally we will accept it when.
- [27:26]
A
Ray.
- [27:29]
B
Might say that it's conscious and you. But people aren't really sure. But eventually it keeps having all the earmarks of a conscious being. And you will accept it because it'd be useless not to have it. And again, you can't say that's going to happen at the same time for everybody. But I think when we're a few years into. AI entities acting conscious, we will accept it. And so I don't think it's going to be a very long delay.
- [28:09]
C
Well, let's walk through that, because the outer bound of the day, when AIs are acting conscious, you can't even tell outer bound of that is 2029, I think. And so you think a year or two later, just because they're so convincing and so human like that everyone will accept it because they have weird behavior, too. They don't just act, you know, they. Sometimes they merge their brains together and they have combined personalities, you know, and so normal beings don't kind of do that. So I could see a world where people are like, this is just, yeah, it's acting very human, but it's just too weird. Or I could see a world where everybody just accepts it.
- [28:46]
B
I mean, today people have AI therapists, and some times they don't really believe it, but in other times people really believe it. And the AI therapists, if you read the transcripts, they sound very convincing. And that's going to keep going. And people will really accept that they have a therapist that's conscious and that's already beginning to happen, so.
- [29:15]
C
Well, one thing I love about today's AIs, you know, use them all day long, every day, but they have no intent of their own. They just do what you ask them to do and they try and be as helpful as they can in getting you to whatever destination, but they're not trying to get to any destination of their own. When, when you start saying, well, they're going to act conscious, that implies to me anyway that, yeah, I'm trying to get somewhere on my own. I don't have time to help you right now. I'm busy with my own personal agenda here.
- [29:39]
A
Dave, good point. I'm still waiting for the AI to call me up one day and say, hey, Peter, listen, I'm working on this thing over here. You can join me if you want, but this is my objective for the day.
- [29:50]
C
Yeah, that's. Yeah. Different world.
- [29:53]
A
Different world. Ray, something you said on the abundance stage, it was yourself, myself, Saleem. We're talking about this and you made a statement that really rocked a lot of people. And it's to contextualize the speed. You said in the next 10 years. Originally said 2025 to 2035. Right. This decade going forward, that we're going to see as much change as we saw in the last hundred years. 1925 to 2025, back when the highest level of technology was the Ford Model T and 30% of homes had electricity and telephony. Do you still hold to that level or is it faster, slower? 100 years of progress in the next decade, are you still holding to that?
- [30:36]
B
That sounds about right. Think about the difference between 2025 and 2035. 2035 will be way past AGI. We'll have supercomputers, but we'll also be merging with them. So we're going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are today. That's a huge amount of progress compared with what we've done 100 years before that.
- [31:02]
D
How do you see society dealing with this? Because right now the limiting factor in a lot of areas is regul social structures, norms, market capture. What do you think is the weakest point that we should focus on solving to allow this progress to implement into the world?
- [31:17]
B
I mean, it's going to be a major thing. Employment's not. I mean, right now employment is considered equivalent to being able to deal with your own financial needs. That's going to change a lot. We'll be able to produce enough things that everybody will be wealthy compared to what we now consider Wealthy and yet we won't necessarily have jobs as such. And how we're going to deal with that, it's really unclear, but people are actually not that concerned about it. You would think that.
- [32:03]
C
Well, it's because they're in denial. Yeah, no, they're just not. I can't tell you how many people I interact with who are running companies, you know, hundreds and 90 plus percent are just like, yeah, I. It's not happening. Or things always take longer than people say. Or it's just pure denial.
- [32:20]
B
Yes, but I think we'll deal with it. Okay. But it's going to be a major change in the way we organize society.
- [32:34]
D
There are folks like Mo Gadat and a few others that think this. And Peter, you've said this, the next 10 years is going to be the most volatile while we kind of try and absorb all of this. Do you agree with that rough time period, Ray, or do you think it's longer or shorter?
- [32:46]
B
I agree with it, but it's not like it's going to end in 10 years. They will have this flux of great change in the next 10 years, and the next 10 years after that will be smooth.
- [32:58]
D
No, it'll be much, much crazier.
- [33:00]
B
I mean, the next 10 years will get us to my definition of singularity, which is we'll be at least a thousand times more intelligent.
- [33:09]
E
I'll maybe pose hopefully a less obvious question for you, Ray. You've been very public about keeping maintaining lots of documents, lots of artifacts from your father, who I gather was tremendous influence on your life with the premise that AI is going to enable you to basically computationally reconstruct your father someday. If I'm not misconstruing. There is a related notion that has been called variously quantum archaeology or humanity's final task. Coulski has written or had written extensively about this in the context of Russian cosmism. Question for you. When do we get the ability to computationally resurrect dead human beings with AI?
- [34:01]
B
Well, I mean, prior to that, we're trying to create avatars of ourselves. We did create one of my father, and I'm creating now an avatar of myself. I have actually a lot more material that we can put into text. I have 11 books, I've got several hundred articles that I've written articles about me. All of this to go into a large language model. We'll create something that can talk like me and it will look like me. And like I get probably 5 to 10 requests for interviews and podcasts a day. And I can't do most of them, so I'll actually offer them. You can interview the avatar. The Avatar is actually better than me because it will remember everything. I don't remember everything that I've said. So the Avatar would actually be better. And you can interview the avatar as.
- [35:13]
D
Long as you want in whatever language.
- [35:16]
B
You can do it in another language. Right. And that'll be this year. So.
- [35:27]
C
What age are you going to make yourself in your avatar? Kind of an arbitrary choice you have to make.
- [35:33]
B
Yeah. Now that's not actually creating everything about me or my father, which we have actually less material of his, although we have enough to create an avatar that's also lively. Being able to relate everything that a person has and the state of their bodies and so on. That will have happened eventually, but that's probably another 10 or 15 years away.
- [36:14]
E
Do you view that as the killer app of the Singularity? The so called great task of resurrecting computationally with AI every human who has ever existed?
- [36:28]
B
That's one of them. Yeah. There's so many to me that I'm very interested in is being able to. Longevity escape velocity, where a year goes by, you age a year, but you get back that year from advances in medicine that keep you going for another year or more than a year so that you don't actually age during that year, you lose a year, but you'll actually get it back from advances in medicine and so on.
- [37:09]
D
What's your current prediction when we hit escape velocity?
- [37:13]
B
2032.
- [37:14]
A
2032.
- [37:16]
D
Yeah.
- [37:16]
A
Let's jump into that subject of common interest, I think, to all of us. And Ray, you and I have had so many conversations about this concept of longevity, which was a, you know, a very controversial subject a decade ago. And now, you know, AI is impacting biology and making it happen. When we've talked about reaching longevity escape velocity in the past, the technology that I believe you said is required to really get us there is nanotechnology. Do you think that we're going to reach Levi without nanotechnology just based upon drug discovery, using AI?
- [37:56]
B
It really has nothing to do with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a way for us to take advantage of AI without it being obvious, so that I can be thinking about something. I'll get an idea. And I won't know if it's coming from a biological brain or the computational brain that has to do with nanotechnology. But longevity escape velocity has to do with advances in medicine. It has to do with being able to simulate what happens in medicine and it does. It really has nothing to do with nanotechnology. We have to be able to create biological models of what happens in biology very quickly so that in one weekend you can simulate, you know, millions or billions of different possibilities and try them out, test them, and be. And then be able to go forward with a cure based on that type of analysis. And talking to people who are working on this, five years is like an outside limit. So if we actually do it in five years, then another couple years to basically go through most of the medical problems we have.
- [39:22]
A
So your advice, your advice to people is stay healthy until we get to the early2030s.
- [39:29]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [39:31]
C
Just curious to drill in one level deeper since, Peter, you're also a top expert on this topic. If you had a perfect simulation, you know exactly what's going on in the body, you've got it all nailed through computation, and that's, you know, about three, four, five years from now. Then what's the intervention if not nanotechnology? Like, is it just more and more targeted chemicals in your bloodstream? Or like, how do you act on that simulation?
- [39:56]
B
I mean, you're coming up with new cures, new treatments to both ward off as well as avoid getting these types of treatments, like cancer, for example. And you can see it already happening. I mean, right now, I've seen this many times. Somebody gets some problem today, and so we'll just wait a few months and there'll be some new cure for it. And sure enough, that happens in most cases. I can think of four or five cases where it's been really vital and it's happened, so it's happening much more quickly.
- [40:42]
C
I think that applies to cancer, heart disease, hip replacements, knee replacements. All those things fit that mold. But then you've got this just general aging because stretching out your life reversal, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [40:57]
B
Take heart disease. So Repatha is a new type of drug that dramatically reduces your LDL. So I've reduced my LDL to like 10, which is a very low number. And I've actually examined my arteries, and I have no plaque. Now, that wasn't true like four or five years ago or even three or four years ago. So in various areas, I'm developing things that are avoiding, getting problems that didn't exist just a short while ago.
- [41:34]
C
That's a good example, though, of chemical in your bloodstream. You know, the traditional. It's a new drug, a new chemical, it's in your bloodstream. And so there is a version of the world where that's all you need to Reverse aging. And then there's a version of the world where you need something much more targeted.
- [41:50]
A
Yeah, that's the work, David, of David Sinclair, right, who's currently doing gene therapy for age reversal, for epigenetic reprogramming, but then heading towards actually three molecules. So it's a very cheap oral supplement that you take to reset your epigenetic age. Ray, do you have a target age you're shooting for to hit Lev, do you expect you're going to.
- [42:20]
B
I would very much like to be alive tomorrow and take advantage of all the friends I have, like the friends in, in this virtual room. And I, I think that tomorrow I'll also be interested in being alive the next day. I can't imagine I'm going to get to a point where I wouldn't want to be alive. The only time really that people take their lives generally is if they're in insufferable pain, physical pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, and they can't continue otherwise. People want to remain alive. So and so I would want to stay healthy and be able to take advantage of that. So I'm not going to get to a point where not interested in being alive. As time goes on, we're going to get more and more of AI is going to be more and more intelligent, it's going to be able to keep our body going. I can describe today a way which we can replace every one of our organs and we can actually imagine that and it wouldn't take that long. Certainly within a decade or two we can replace all of our organs with something that's really, would last forever, more or less. So as time goes on, we have more and more capability of, of being able to replace things that are going wrong with our body and we'll get more and more into longevity, escape velocity as time goes on.
- [44:09]
C
Are you anticipating a world where everybody agrees? Like if you said, hey, I'm alive today, I want to be alive tomorrow, and tomorrow I'll bet I want to be alive to the next day. Are you anticipating a world where everybody gets on board with that within 10 years and everyone has those options? Or a world where a subset of people have had five organs replaced, they've had stem cells in their brain, they're extending their thinking ability, another subset are violently opposed. They're ranting in the streets, they're trying to prevent it. They want natural death.
- [44:43]
B
I mean you can get natural death today. You can go to Switzerland and get natural death. I was debating with Kahneman, who was a Nobel Prize winning economist and he was 90. He was actually very healthy. I would meet with him in New York. I had like four or five lunches with him, and he would actually walk like five blocks to get to where our lunch was and walk back. So he was actually pretty healthy. But he was mindful of what happens to you in your 90s. He's saying, well, it's bad things happen and he'd rather that not happen with them. And he took his life. He went to Switzerland and ended his life even though he was healthy. And I wasn't aware that he had this plan, although his family was aware of it. And I tried to talk him out of it and talk about how we're making exponential progress on overcoming diseases and so on. He was concerned about his kidneys, but related some things that I'm involved in that relate to the kidney and, and he understood what I was saying and it was actually an economic issue, but he ended up taking his life anyway. But that's because he really didn't. Was not convinced that this would happen.
- [46:17]
A
Yeah.
- [46:18]
D
Ray, My father passed away a year ago at 97 and also had an assisted death in Canada. They've now approved it. And I have never seen anyone as happy in my life as my father in the last week. And I asked the doctor after he passed away, I'm trying to feel loss or pain or suffering, but I can't. I've never seen him so happy. Have you seen this? And she said, you know, 20,000 people in Canada have had this procedure this past year. Most of them go out in this state, and we think it's because they have agency. And he lived with dignity. He wanted to pass away with dignity and he got his wish and he was happy as a clam. A very philosophical, thought provoking outcome.
- [46:58]
B
Yeah, I don't think that would be.
- [47:02]
A
Me, but I hope not. Alex, you were gonna. You had a great question about cryonics.
- [47:08]
E
Yeah, no, I, I don't like the very much the, the direction of what we're discussing here. I don't think, Ray, this at all aligns with the way you see the world either. I think you and I probably see the world quite similarly. Rather than having hand wringing discussions about death with dignity and going to Canada, I would argue we should be talking about cryonics as recognizing that approximately 150,000 people are dying every day in our world. And not everyone statistically. If we get to longevity escape velocity by the early 2000 and 30s, as you predict, that's many, many millions of people who are going to Die between now and Lev. Why do you think more people aren't obtaining cryonics plans for themselves? And what can you say here? We have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of viewers, to encourage viewers to consider getting cryonics plans for themselves so they don't have to move to Canada to die with dignity if they're in that position.
- [48:09]
B
Well, my point on cryonics is that that is plan D. Plan D. I love that. Plan A, B and C remain alive one way or another, and cryonics is plan D. I mean, I have enough trouble keeping track of my ideas when I'm able to give arguments for them and, and keep track of them. Be hard to imagine keeping track of them while I'm basically dead. Coming back, it's, I mean, I've concerns about them. You may come back and you may not be happy with the way you come back. And I mean, this, cryonics is better than not doing cryonics because at least you have some chance of coming back. But there's risks with it. I do it. Very few people do it. I mean, the number of people who die who elect cryonics is very, very small. I have done it. I hope it works.
- [49:34]
A
You've signed up for cryonics, right?
- [49:36]
B
Yeah, but I hope that I won't have that opportunity.
- [49:42]
A
For our viewers and listeners who don't know what this is, there are companies like Alcor where you can sign up. And near the moment of your death, they will effectively put antifreeze or some equivalent thereof into your bloodstream and you will be frozen with the notion that eventually technologies like nanotechnology will to reconstruct your, your full neural cortex.
- [50:03]
B
It's is under cryonics right now, I.
- [50:08]
E
Would say, Ray, it's unconscionable to me that I think you have the, the statistics. I, I think probably a few thousand people order of magnitude have cryonics plans. Why do you think it's not hundreds of millions? And again, is there anything that you would care to do? You're speaking to hundreds of thousands of people who take the future of technology very seriously. To maybe persuade them, if you think this is a righteous act, that they should be perhaps considering cryonics plans for themselves.
- [50:38]
B
Perhaps. But given that I have limited persuasion on people, listen to me. I would tell people they, they should do everything they can to stay alive. That's it. Because that's the best way of being alive in the future, is to stay alive right now. And there's a lot you can do to remain alive.
- [51:04]
A
And Ray, are you saying you not just stay alive, but stay in reasonable health?
- [51:09]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [51:10]
A
And that the technologies will unveil themselves to you in the next five to eight years?
- [51:16]
B
Yes. And it's happening very quickly, so this is actually a vital time that you can remain.
- [51:24]
D
I'm still chuckling at your comment where you said it's harder to keep track of your ideas when you're dead.
- [51:31]
A
But you're going to, whether you're keeping yourself alive and you enter longevity, escape velocity, or you're chronically frozen. The other thing going on is you probably have a hundred or a thousand or a million avatar versions of you that are up and operating in the universe in parallel with your with your meat body, right?
- [51:52]
B
Yeah. Whether or not those will have consciousness or not, we get back to the same thing we discussed earlier. Actually, they'll be probably better at remembering everything I've said because if it has a computer behind it, it won't forget anything. Unlike myself.
- [52:19]
F
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- [53:24]
A
We should definitely do a podcast with where it's Ray K Avatar and Alex Avatar and Dave and Salim Avatar having a conversation amongst ourselves. We should put that on the docket for sometime this year. Ray, I want to take just a second to say thank you for supporting my book launch with Steven Kotler. Ray has graciously said he'll do a live event. We're going to do it Dave at Lingq Studios in Cambridge in May and we had an amazing Stephen and I had an amazing AMA at the end of December. And if folks, if you're interested in joining another AMA with Stephen and I about the new book We Are as Gods A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, we'll pop the COVID up here. Nick I'll ask you to pop it up, but you can go to diamandis.com book and if you pre order a book at the end of January this month we're going to be doing another ama and yeah, it's part of our book launch effort, so check it out. Diamandis.com book Ray, can we jump in?
- [54:30]
B
Just one thing. I did a conference with Martin Rothblatt. This was at UCLA to represent their progress over the last, I think 30 years. And it had me, Martine, two professors there, and Martine's avatar. So you had both Martine and Martine's avatar. Martine's avatar looks realistic. It's like doing a zoom with her. And the avatar is actually very good. It remembers everything that Martina said and you could ask it anything. And it actually is very convincing and actually knew when to come in. Because if you're in the conference, you can't just like suddenly say something if someone else is speaking. You have to wait till there's a silence and you can say something and say something. Maybe that's relevant to what was said before. And it worked very well. So this was a conference with the avatar and Martine herself at the same time.
- [55:37]
D
Hey, can I clear that?
- [55:41]
C
Well, directly related question to that. You know, I stumbled a couple years ago on your how my Predictions have Fared essay, which a great essay by the way, and you know, 86% outright correct. And then. That, you know, you worked on speech recognition years and years ago and by now the interface to your computer you would think is voice, not a keyboard. And I feel like that is something we're so used to now that we're under predicting how this interface is going to change for the first time since the GUI. So maybe 1980s, but it's got to be imminent now. And I don't know if you agree with that or not, but when you look at these avatars that you're just describing, they're so good and so convincing and so much better of a way to interact with technology.
- [56:38]
B
Another one I got wrong was that we would have self driving cars. Yep. Which we do now.
- [56:45]
C
Yeah.
- [56:46]
B
But it didn't quite make the time frame. So that was wrong.
- [56:51]
C
Well, that one was wrong because of regulatory issues. Right. The technology, your timeline on the technology I think was, was incredibly close. But you know, regulatory is very hard to predict. I think you made that point in the essay. But the one on the, the interface to a computer is not held up by regulatory. It's something else. Momentum or barriers or Apple not doing AI or something. But that one, to me, feels like this is going to happen very, very soon. And people, because when you talk to an avatar, like you said, you're at a conference. Why am I not talking to my computer that way? It's crazy that I'm typing on this keyboard.
- [57:28]
A
Well, I think part of that, Dave, is having to not be verbal in the middle of an airplane flight or sitting at your desk sometimes.
- [57:37]
C
I'll tell you, before we kicked off the pod, Peter, you were saying, why? Why? Where's our AI? That's our av, basically. And, you know, pulling in images. Pulling. Like when we, you know, talk about Ray's books, why is it not popping up as a picture in real time that we're all looking at? That's got to be imminent, too, because.
- [57:53]
A
Dude, let's start that company. Let's start that company.
- [57:56]
C
I'm in.
- [57:57]
A
Fantastic. Saleem, you were getting jumping.
- [58:01]
D
Ray, if you look over the last six months, what breakthrough or development has surprised you the most?
- [58:06]
B
I'm getting much more credence to people accepting this, which didn't accept it a year ago. I mean, think of the difference between 2024 and 2025, or January 2026 and January 2025. Most people a year ago that I would speak to would say, yeah, AI is pretty interesting, but it's not really very good. And people don't really accept it. And they've completely changed their views in the last year where they're really accepting it now. There was just an article by people who advocate therapy who is saying that online therapists are actually doing a very meaningful job, and that never would have happened a year ago. So I'd say the change in people's attitudes is pretty phenomenal.
- [59:13]
D
And is the pace of change currently faster than you predicted? Because it feels faster. This is, to Dave's point earlier, it feels like we're moving faster than you predicted. Do you agree or not agree?
- [59:26]
B
I mean, in 1999, I predicted 2029 for AGI, and I still predict 2029. I think Elon Musk says 2026. I think we'll have a lot of things that remind us of AGI, but it really won't be. We really won't be convinced in 2026. Maybe it'll happen sooner. 2027, 2028. I mean, you get varying degrees of confidence, but by 2029, I think everyone will accept that.
- [60:03]
A
Amazing. Amazing. Alex, I want to turn it back to you, pal.
- [60:08]
E
Yeah, maybe to shift gears a bit. Ray, obviously, if this isn't Obvious from some of my questions and comments. I'm an enormous fan of both you and your writings and your courageous extrapolation of following the law of straight lines of progress in experience curves, progress in Moore's law type experience curves, your law of accelerating returns, your countdown to the singularity, all arguably variants on various forms of experience curves from economics. Question for you. So if we follow to its logical conclusion, law of accelerating returns and your countdown to the singularity, this idea that we're almost in a technologically deterministic way, we emerge from a primordial soup and everything follows some very nice elegant law of straight lines exponential calendar. Do you think that this implies that our universe is abundant with intelligent civilizations? And if so, in other words, abundant not just human intelligence, but non human intelligence as well? And if so, do you think that would then imply that there are non human intelligent civilizations on or near Earth?
- [61:28]
B
The fact that we can emerge as a far more intelligent version of ourselves in a short period of time doesn't imply that there are intelligences that go beyond humans. We haven't really seen evidence of that. I mean there's a lot of interest in trying to find signals in the universe that would indicate that there's some intelligent source of them. We haven't actually found that yet and we have more and more ability to look. So it, it may exist, but we, we don't know that there's any intelligence besides coming from Earth. And the more and more ability for us to actually evaluate different types of intelligent sources that are not coming from Earth and yet we still don't see any evidence of that kind of indicates that they aren't there. But we, but there's no way of actually determining that because we can only look at a very small fraction of what's out there.
- [63:05]
A
Switching side. Go on Alex, you want to do a follow up?
- [63:09]
E
Maybe just a quick follow up question. So Ray, you've made many, many predictions of technologies that you think either the singularity itself or, or progress toward the singularity would unlock. Do you think that progress toward the singularity would answer the question that I think many people most want existentially an answer to which is, is humanity alone?
- [63:34]
B
Yeah, I mean so far if we're not alone, we're still pretty lonely because we haven't come into contact with any intelligent source aside from ourselves. There's fantastic things happening in the universe and the universe goes on seemingly forever. So it's certainly possible that we'll find something. It's impossible to rule that out, but so far we haven't actually done that. So we certainly feel alone because there's nobody else we can point to. We can't point to some other sources and saying, well, there's a source coming from that, it's clearly intelligent and we'd like to contact them. We can't even identify a thing like that so far.
- [64:28]
A
I want to jump into the conversation a little bit about bci, brain computer interface and our ability to up level our capabilities. I think when we talk about longevity, escape velocity and potentially living well in past 100 or hundreds of years, what most people fear is getting there without having the cognitive clarity, without having the ability to maintain their memories. And of course, one of the technologies that would assist us on that that you've spoken about is the idea of high bandwidth bci, not the low thin pipe that we currently do input output through. And I encourage everybody to go onto your favorite LLM and ask it to give you a list of all of Ray Kurzweil's predictions that he's accurately hit. It's a very impressive list. And one of those predictions is that we'll hit high bandwidth BCI in the middle 2000 and 30s. Is that still your prediction? And I want to say what's it going to feel like? I raise my hand and volunteer for one of the early BCI interfaces. What's that going to feel like and how do you think we're going to achieve that?
- [65:47]
B
It's very hard to know how we're going to react to things that haven't happened yet. You could imagine this being something that we're welcoming or something that we would be alarmed by. So. The future hasn't been written yet and it can be the future could be terrible or it could be fantastic. It's really hard to give a prediction about that.
- [66:34]
A
Ray, you described it. If I could. Once we have high bandwidth BCI that you'll have concepts emerge in your mind that are driven by, if you would, the cloud. Can you speak to that a little bit?
- [66:52]
B
Well, that would be useful. I'm actually writing my autobiography and trying to remember things that happened when I was like 3 years old and 4 years old and actually have a pretty good memory of that. But it could be better and it would actually be helpful if I had AI to help me along with that.
- [67:12]
C
Actually. Wait, not just that, but are you using AI to go interview people that you interacted with when you're 3, 4, 10 years old and get their sides of the story?
- [67:20]
B
Well, it would have to have a lot of capability that it doesn't have now to be able to generate a view of something that we don't have now. So I'm using, I'm using large language models a little bit to try to. But actually my, my memory is actually not, not bad of things that happened a long time ago.
- [67:50]
C
All right, when's the biography coming out? I can't wait.
- [67:54]
B
It's about ready. It should be out within a year.
- [67:59]
A
Yeah, I had a chance to read it. Yeah, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing.
- [68:03]
C
Well, the thing I'm really eager to, to read in that biography is that the role of the futurist, you know, you made all these really bold predictions and I'm sure at the time everyone's like, you're a crackpot. You're a crackpot. I suspect by now everyone's like, wow, what an incredible foresight. And so I assume you're at an all time high now, but maybe not. But the role of being a futurist is fraught with this hindsight bias where you get three things wrong. You know, the self driving car is not yet our, Our clothes are not made by nanotechnology. And computing isn't done on biological systems. You know, we don't have DNA computers.
- [68:43]
B
I mean, I'm getting less of that now. I mean before if I would make a whole bunch of predictions and one of them was wrong, everybody would focus on that. But now people are more generous on their views of.
- [69:00]
C
To me, to me, the most amazing. Like when you read at the time, everyone's going to have a computer in their pocket in their clothes, and it's going to be almost like an extension of their life. And at the time it sounded like nuts. And now everyone's like, oh, that's just an iPhone. Like, well, no, it's not just an iPhone. It's a total cultural phenomenon that's changed our, you know, it just changes much more now.
- [69:23]
B
And if you, you go to a conference and it's like several hundred people, every single person has a cell phone in their pocket and it's. Yes. And it's actually an extension of your mind.
- [69:34]
D
It is.
- [69:35]
B
If you don't have your cell phone, you've left, you know, three quarters of your mind.
- [69:39]
C
And I'll tell you what else. The headmaster of the school that my kids went to took all of the kids, I think in seventh grade or sixth grade to an island without their phones for three days and said, you have to learn to live without your phone. The new headmaster came in and said, that's Inhumane. We can't do this anymore. This is. This is not.
- [69:56]
D
I think there's a book called Lord of the Flies that was written about that.
- [70:00]
C
Lord of the Flies. It's funny, but I mean, it's so innate and we're talking about seventh graders here, but it's so attached to their mentality, their mind, their body, whatever, that they can't.
- [70:10]
B
For three days we're going to replace this. I mean, carrying around a physical object like this is difficult. I mean, where do you put it? How do you not lose it?
- [70:26]
D
What do you think replaces the phone?
- [70:27]
B
We'll have something. I'm not kidding. Besides this. It'll be.
- [70:31]
A
Yeah, that's a good question, Celine.
- [70:33]
B
Yeah, it'll be something like virtual reality. So you basically, you look out and you can see basically a screen and it will be interfacing with the computer, but it'll be on all the time. You'll be able to interact with it and you won't be carrying something around and you won't leave it at your apartment. Yeah, beyond that, it'll actually go inside our nervous system, interact with your biological neurons.
- [71:07]
C
I've got this thing now. We're starting to record everything. Basically, you know, Peter's got the wearable and now we've got these omnidirectional mic. It's the size of a credit card and you just throw it on the table and everything that happens is not only recorded, but it's assigned to whoever said it with these omnidirectional mics. But they're starting to get everywhere this.
- [71:27]
A
Year, David, at the Abundance Summit, we're giving everybody two devices. One is a ring format that we talked about on one of the WTF episodes that pebble is putting out where you can just quickly record a message goes LLM and then we're giving everybody something called applaud. Yeah, I guess I'm spoiling the secret for our Abundance members. Ray, can we talk about one of the concerns you raised earlier that people have, which is people's attachment to their employment? So, thoughts on the future of work? You've spoken eloquently about the need for universal basic income and even universal high income that Elon's spoken about. So what's your thoughts on the future of work and when do we start having UBI and should people be worried about their future income?
- [72:21]
B
Well, I mean, we relate having an income to having the means to deal with our financial system. But if we separate that and you're going to be able to deal with your financial needs without having a conventional job that's actually liberating. And I mean, why do people retire now? To me, retirement doesn't make sense because what I'm doing, I joy doing. But if you look at most jobs, people don't like them so much that they want to be able to do them forever. And it's actually liberation to. To not have to do that and find something within their means that gives them gratification without having to work in a way that's unpleasant. And we're basically overcoming that.
- [73:39]
D
You know, 79% of corporate employees do not find meaning in their work. So this might be an easier transition than most people think.
- [73:47]
A
Do you think we're going to develop UBI soon?
- [73:50]
B
We're going to have to do something that's equivalent to it. Because if people don't have enough money, that's the economic system won't work for anybody. And so I think, I mean I made a prediction at TED that we would develop UBI by the 2000-30s and I think that's still true.
- [74:21]
A
Salim.
- [74:24]
D
I'm going to do a quick separate thing. Imagine you're in a Luddite courtroom, right? The prosecutor is saying to you, you have made absurdly accurate predictions for 30 years. We don't believe you're human. How would you defend that? Because you actually feel to me like a time traveler from somewhere that's popped in to deliver inject into humanity all of these insights. It blows my mind that 60 times I've heard you speak. I've never not learned anything. So if I was the Luddite, I'd go, you must be a time traveling something. How would you defend against that?
- [75:00]
B
I mean, hopefully I would appear enough like a human to convince people now maybe that won't be true in the future. You can't really tell if someone's a human or not a human because they'll still act human and then I wouldn't have a defense. So.
- [75:18]
A
Alec, Alex, over to you, buddy.
- [75:20]
E
Yeah, I could say something mildly snarky about looking at Rey's immunome to see if he's been exposed to future diseases as a way of determining whether he's a time traveler.
- [75:32]
A
I'm gonna face plant on that one.
- [75:34]
E
But instead I'd like to shift gears, Ray, and maybe talk about the past and future of the nature of the mind. One of the most many, but one of the many striking performances and I think just incredible accomplishments of yours going all the way back, this is more than 60 years back now to your appearance On I've Got a Secret on television with Steve Allen in February of 1965. It's incredible to think that that was 60 plus years ago you demonstrated an AI based music generator on television. I thought that was such.
- [76:13]
B
Yeah, that was actually the first music composition by AI anywhere.
- [76:22]
A
We should show that clip.
- [76:25]
E
We should absolutely show that clip. It's such an incredible accomplishment. Right, so where I was going.
- [76:30]
A
In fact. Let's pause, let's pause one second on this, on this recording and we'll inject the clip right here and then come back.
- [76:50]
G
Very nicely played. And now your performance of course leads into your secret. So if you'll whisper it to me, we'll let everybody at home know what's up. Let's. That certainly deserves applause, but. Oh, the subway's leaving. I'm sorry, that deserves applause, but what has it got to do with the music? I don't understand that. Ah, I see. Panel. Raymond Secret concerned something that he did. And we'll start the game this time with Bess Myerson. Raymond, that's a very unlikely sounding piece of music. Am I being super critical? No. Did you compose it? No, I didn't.
- [77:40]
D
Oh.
- [77:43]
G
Did you however use. Were there some kind of formulas or letters or something unusual used to compose to make up the notes of this piece? You could say that. Well, for example, would the notes spell out a name or would they be a mathematical formula, anything like that?
- [78:02]
B
Not spell out a name, Nothing like.
- [78:03]
G
That, man, but they're very. $20 down, 60 to go. Henry, was that thing written by a computer? Is there writing music at this moment? I have a feeling that as a non scientist, I'm not going to understand this too well, but perhaps you can explain how it works. First of all, I want the folks to see sort of some of this, this nest of spaghetti like liar here is united to a bunch of little watts. What are these black things over here, Raymond? Well, those are relays. That's what does it. That's the writes of music. I see. The relays write the music. They feed it into this white cheese box here, whatever that is. And there are three little. Are these wires or just pieces of string? Pieces of string or wires. I mean, does a message go through there? Oh, no, that's just recording what music? What the computer says. I see. And then the typewriter does the final part of the process.
- [79:02]
E
Right. So 60 years ago you demonstrated what I understand to be the. The first, at least on television. AI music generator. I'd like to ask you now, 60 years plus from now, so we're now in 2026, so we're talking 2086. What form do you think most intelligence in our solar system will take? And I'll offer you a few options and I'll deny you one option. The option that I'll deny you is you're not allowed to say it's past the singularity, so I have no idea. You have to. I'm going to condition on you having a real opinion on this topic. I'll offer you a few options and an escape valve for maybe something that I haven't thought of.
- [79:50]
A
Say the question again, Alex.
- [79:52]
E
Yes. So the question is again, 60 years from now, in the year 2086, what form will most intelligence in our solar system take? A few options meat bodies substantially similar to the way human intelligence is embodied. Now that's option one, cyborgs, which is some sort of human machine hybrid inclusive of nanorobots in the human bloodstream. Uploads. That's option three. So human minds have been uploaded to the cloud foundation models or pure AI's not dissimilar to GPT type models that we have right now. Some sort of unrecognizable life form, maybe an unrecognizable arrangement of matter or energy that's far more efficient. In the past on the podcast we've talked about Royal, we. I have talked on the podcast about how black holes for example, are amazing computers in principle. So maybe something like that or something totally different, maybe uploads to the gravitational field or something else entirely. So I'm laying out a few options plus an escape valve.
- [81:05]
G
What do you think?
- [81:07]
B
I mean we're going to have things like Computronium by certainly by 2045, if not sooner. And I know people that are working on this.
- [81:27]
A
You want to define computronium, Ray?
- [81:29]
D
Yeah.
- [81:30]
B
It's basically taking what we know is feasible and creating something out of, out of matter that can perform the maximum computation that we can conceive of. So one analysis has a basically 1 liter cube would be more intelligent than all. All people. Be like 10 billion people combined in one setting. So that's going to be happening by 2045. So you talk about 2085. It's going to be beyond what we can imagine, but it'll be even more so. So we'll be able to create something that's very exciting. If I listen to, let's say in I've got some things on the web that go with the book my father playing the 5th Brandenburg Concerto, which is done like several hundred Years ago by Bach. And it's actually quite amazing to listen to that. So it'll be something like that, only more fantastic. That will generate fantastic emotions and will be as intelligent as all people combined or more so we can't, we, we really can't imagine what that'd be like, but we can state it mathematically by comparing it to what we can do today.
- [83:28]
E
If I may ask a follow up question on this. So it sounds, Ray, unless I'm misunderstanding, as if you do in fact have a prediction for what most intelligence would look like. Namely, if I heard correctly, you think in 60 years most intelligence in the solar system will be basically software running on Computronium. I think you referenced some work by Seth Lloyd with the reference to a liter of volume and Seth Lloyd's work back now, 25 years ago on the ultimate computer and the physics of what the physical limit of the maximum amount of.
- [84:03]
B
I mean since that's going to be feasible well before 2086, any kind of intelligent being is going to contain that.
- [84:12]
E
Yes.
- [84:13]
B
And so it will be even beyond that. But certainly that would be the, the capability that it will have then.
- [84:26]
E
I have to ask you, I guess the obvious question. If you think 60 years from now most intelligence in our solar system is going to be software running on comput, what happens to our solar system? Do we disassemble the planets? Do we starlift our sun? Do we convert our solar system to computronium to run the software?
- [84:43]
A
Alex, you're back to, you're back to dismantling Saturn had it coming. Saturn.
- [84:50]
E
Actually I think Ray is back to it in the Sten.
- [84:54]
B
I don't know. We'll have to think about that.
- [84:57]
A
So, but it, but the point, Alex and Ray, that you're both making is humanity as we know it today as biological forms are in either the vast minority or absolutely displaced by a digital or quantum version of intelligence. So will some people choose to maintain an enhanced meat body or is the overwhelming benefits of going digital so much that it will wash away all previous versions?
- [85:34]
B
Well, I didn't say the meat bodies would go away, but certainly it will have the capability of Computronium running the ultimate software, certainly by 2086. So.
- [85:55]
C
Since you're inside Google for so long and it's really. Google is kind of like the AT and T o Bell Labs or University Times a thousand. But this Computronium shift. In your early books you made the point that Moore's Law isn't really Moore's Law. It goes back to you Go all the way back to switches, telecom switches, then vacuum tubes, then transistors, then integrated circuits. And so there's been a shift in the compute platform that keeps this curve going. But now we're at this stage where we're just pushing the silicon to its limit and scaling horizontally with half a trillion dollars we're going to put into Nvidia chips. So we're kind of at this flat spot waiting for that next breakthrough in how do we compute. Is there anything imminent, anything that's going to fill that gap? And I know AI will help us innovate very quickly here.
- [86:47]
B
Well, it's a different issue, but I think will actually generate slower computational bodies. If you look at the brain, it uses about 2 watts of power, and that's because it's very, very slow. Our neurons compute between one calculation per second and about 200 calculations per second. But both of those are extremely slow compared to the millions or billions of, or actually trillions of computations per second that are capable of. What I wrote about actually a couple decades ago was it would make sense to slow it down and introduce parallel processing because the brain, every single neuron, is computing at the same time. Twenty years ago we had basically a computer would do one thing at a time. So we actually have done that. We now have millions or actually billions of computations that occur at the same time. But we actually haven't slowed down the speed of the circuits. If we slow them down a little bit, we'd use much less power. And I think that would actually solve the power problem.
- [88:15]
C
Well, also it solved the chip fab bottleneck problem. I think there's imminent innovation in exactly that vein you're talking about. So that buys you another few years, but it doesn't switch you to a new computronium kind of, kind of paradigm. I don't know. I know you were kind of like, quantum isn't really going to change the curve here. And I don't know if you still feel that way on quantum computing, but is there anything else on the horizon that you know of from, from either inside Google or elsewhere?
- [88:41]
B
Well, I think going towards circuits that use a completely different paradigm that are actually done at the molecular level and can be done in three dimensions. Right now we're using third dimension. Very limited, in a very limited way. And so we, we can actually create three dimensional circuits at the atomic level that will actually match where, you know, one liter of computing will match 10 billion human beings.
- [89:18]
A
Salim, do you want to jump in, Ray?
- [89:20]
D
When you look at what's Coming over the next, say year, is there anything that you're incredibly excited about? Because one of the things I've heard you talk about is the intersection between these. Right. You intersect synthetic biology or neuroscience with AI and computing and all sorts of new fields get instigated at that. What are, what is most exciting to you and, and what's, what are you anticipating most excitedly in the next a year or two?
- [89:44]
B
Well, robotics is actually has not really been something that has affected us very much. I think that's going to begin to take place in 2026, 2027. But you look at robots, I mean they can do certain things like do a very fast dance, but they really have not been practical. Like if you actually eat a meal and leave your dishes, there's no robot that can actually pick it up and actually do clean that up the way a human being can do that. That's going to happen over the next couple of years. So that's one area that's been behind and I think there's going to be a lot of debate on that. Large language models are pretty fantastic, but we've got to bring that to the real world of actually being able to handle physical things using robots.
- [90:58]
A
Salim, you had some questions I think on society that were important.
- [91:02]
D
Yeah. You know, if you were advising a 25 year old today, how would you set about giving them a sense of how to manage their life in this radical uncertainty? How would you kind of train give, tell them to what mindset should they have, et cetera? What advice would you give to a 25 year old today?
- [91:21]
B
My son Ethan is involved with venture capital and most of, well, all of his investments are in AI and actually bringing the practice of AI to all kinds of things that haven't been done yet. And this tremendous number of opportunities of applying AI to all kinds of things that we do and creating businesses that would be effective. So I, I think the opportunities to create a new business and do things that have not been done before is actually at is higher than it's ever been before and you can do it very quickly.
- [92:04]
D
Talk a lot about entrepreneurship being really the biggest modality you could go after. I think that you're. There's a great comment by Kevin Kelly that's said where he said the next 10,000 business plans will be take a domain and add AI to it.
- [92:18]
C
Yeah. Ray, you ever feel like you were just born in the wrong era? Like if you think about what you did early on with the keyboard, the company around it, then the omnifont character recognition the same person today would probably be looking at a billion dollar valuation within a year, year and a half of founding.
- [92:38]
B
Well, I enjoyed bringing some of the concepts that we use today in decades past.
- [92:47]
A
So let's do a quick speed round to close out this session with Ray. Alex, you want to kick it off?
- [92:52]
E
All right, Ray, here's a really fast question. So it, the, the cliche is that every American male thinks about ancient Rome at least once per day. So, so here's my cliche question for you.
- [93:04]
A
Really?
- [93:04]
E
Have you really. We're going to go there. The question, Ray, is why didn't ancient Rome have an industrial revolution? And what does the answer to that question teach us about technical revolutions that we could be having today but otherwise aren't?
- [93:21]
B
Well, they did have a technical revolution. Given the capabilities of that time, we can only create things that are feasible. So. And in keeping with the rate of progress which was feasible at that time. So I think they did.
- [93:52]
A
Okay, Dave, over to you, pal.
- [93:56]
C
I feel like I'm seeing the passing of the torch of the futurist here from, from Ray to Peter to Alex. But I really curious if you are happy with your life as a great futurist, because you were already a great entrepreneur before that and there were many, many years in the middle there where everyone I talked to around MIT or elsewhere is like, yeah, I think Ray's wrong. I think Ray's wrong. I think Ray's wrong now. Now, obviously you're on top of the world again, but there's a lot of years of just the pain and suffering that goes along with anyone who tries to predict the future. So any regrets, any. Any advice for future futurists?
- [94:32]
B
I mean, I got used to it and there was certain people that were able to think in the future, like for example, Singularity University, which Peter and I started, could think about how to go beyond what conventional people were thinking. But it didn't really bother me that people were not able to think in an exponential manner at the time.
- [95:09]
C
Really thick skin.
- [95:10]
D
Okay, Salim, the fact that it didn't bother you is why I think you're a trime traveling avatar from the future. Rick, here's my question. If, if right now you've said that intelligence and energy are the two things that will become abundant in the future, it seems right now that energy is the limiting factor. Are you excited about what's coming with nuclear and fusion, etc. Or are there other forms of energy generation that you're looking at? And when do you think we'll have a major breakthrough? Around some of that.
- [95:39]
B
I mean, I'm not that enthusiastic about nuclear. I still think it's dangerous. The two things we can do about energy, we can use reversible energy, which most of the.
- [96:02]
D
Computation.
- [96:05]
B
Would be using reversible energy, which in theory uses no energy at all because it reverses itself and gives back the energy that it's taken. We haven't actually experimented with that, but that seems feasible. And I also mentioned the other thing where we could reduce the speed dramatically, reduce the amount of energy it requires, and therefore overcome the excessive use of energy. Right now we're running things at the very maximum speed and it uses a great deal of energy. We could reduce that a little and really overcome the energy at that point. But ultimately we will go to reversible energy using atomic levels of computation, which don't require any energy, at least in theory.
- [97:09]
A
Ray, I want to take a second and say thank you for the extraordinary partnership we've had over these last number of decades. I remember our first lunch together where we kicked around the idea of Singularity University. And I think you waited a nanosecond before saying yes. And just the great joy and a shout out to all the Singularity alumni out there who are listening who've been part of this journey. The Singularity is now has sort of been our mantra and our war cry here. On a 10 scale, how optimistic are you about the future of humanity?
- [97:44]
B
I'd say I'm a 10, so.
- [97:46]
A
All right, well that's a good place to wrap it up. Ray, on behalf of the moonshot mates, thank you for all of your wisdom. Thank you for charting the path for us.
- [97:58]
B
Yeah, well this was a great discussion. Appreciate it very much.
- [98:02]
A
Appreciate you.
- [98:02]
C
Thank you for that biography too. Everybody keep an eye out for that.
- [98:05]
A
And look forward to seeing you in May for our follow on book launch event. Dave, safe travels to the World Economic Forum. Salim, I'll come and pick you up and see you in an hour. Head to the X Prize board meeting. Alex, enjoy Paris and Switzerland.
- [98:24]
F
Thank you.
- [98:25]
A
Amazing. Thank you guys. See you all. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrenDS thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together. Every week. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your new Year's goals with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock. Com Podcast terms apply.