A Conversation with Ray Kurzweil

Gaze into the future when Neil Tyson interviews noted futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil about artificial intelligence, the human brain, nanotechnology, life extension and biotechnology. Recorded live at the 92nd Street Y “7 Days of Genius” series.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bienvenidos a StarTalk. Tu lugar en el universo donde la ciencia y la cultura pop collide. StarTalk comienza ahora.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Hola, buenas tardes. Soy Susan Engel y tengo el privilegio de ser la directora de 92nd Street Y Talks. El evento de esta noche es parte de nuestro tercer anual Festival de 7 Días de Genio, que invita a los thinkers principales a explorar todos los aspectos del genio: cómo lo definimos, cómo emerge en comunidades y culturas, por qué importa, y cómo se ve el futuro del genio. Neil deGrasse Tyson es astrofísico en el Museo de la Historia Natural de Estados Unidos

• 0:59Speaker 01

  y el director de la Planetaria Hayden en el Museo de la Historia Natural. Por favor, me acompañen en la invitación a la escena, el Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gracias a todos por venir. Ven aquí a ver la conversación que estoy a punto de tener con el único y muy solo Ray Kurzweil. Ray, tengo su bio aquí y leeré su bio y es simplemente sorprendente que camine entre nosotros. Y que alguien como él esté allí salvándonos de nosotros mismos y guiándonos hacia el futuro con la luz guía de la sabiduría, la ciencia y la tecnología. Él es uno de los líderes de la humanidad, inventores, thinkers y, quizás lo más importante, futuristas.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Y tiene un historial de 30 años de predicciones precisas. Verificaremos eso dos veces esta noche. Quiero saber qué predicciones ha llevado bajo la madera que no escuchamos más. Y ha sido llamado el genio sin parar por Wall Street Journal. Por cierto, el mejor tipo. Y la máquina de pensamiento ultimate por Forbes Magazine. Y fue seleccionado como uno de los mejores emprendedores por Inc. Magazine.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a separate one for pen lovers called INK. That's not the one. Which described him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. One of the most famous of the restful geniuses in our history books. PBS selected him as one of the sixteen revolutionaries who made America. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat... Just listen to this list. The first CCD flatbed scanner. The first Omni Font optical character recognition. The first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. The first text-to-speech synthesizer. The first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano and other orchestral instruments.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speak recognition. All this is software. Somebody's gotta do it. He did it. Somebody's gotta do it first. He did it first. Among his many honors, he's received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Music. And he's the recipient of the National Medal of Technology. This is a medal granted to you in a ceremony at the White House, which is undercover by the press, by the way. Because I think somewhere deep down, they think it's somehow political. But I was on one of these committees to tell the president who should get such a medal for the National Medal of Science. And we're just sitting there advising the president on what this is. And the president just basically does what we tell him at that level.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so it's basically the country's Nobel Prize, if you will, for the country honoring its own citizens for their contributions in science. And in this case, the National Medal of Technology. And he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Why wouldn't he be? I'd be disappointed if this weren't here. Holds twenty honorary doctorates and honors from three US presidents. He's written five national bestselling books, including the New York Times bestseller, "The Singularity is Near."

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think he was gonna start a cult back then, we'll find out. We'll get to the bottom of that one. And also, "How to Create a Mind" in 2012. And he is Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding. Now, help me give a very warm 92nd Street welcome to Ray Kurzweil. Oh, very good.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ray, alright, here's what I wanna know. Are you some superheroes nemesis that will show up and bring Superman down when he shows up?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Well, I mean Superman-

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, he has gotta think, he's wondering if that's- See, he's taking that, that's a serious question to him.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're supposed to say, "Aw, stop joking." No, you're thinking, "Okay, go on."

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I have thought about that, cuz I wrote a novel with a superheroine. But she doesn't melt steel with her eyes. She melts problems with her intellect. And, so I think actually, intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good answer.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Even stronger than gravity, say?

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  But this is physics versus computer science, so.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, good. So, one of the things that have been on everyone's mind, especially lately, there've been movies on this, and there's always been some attempt to portray it, but it seems to be more so lately. And that's the buzz about artificial intelligence. There seems to be fear factors coupled with euphoria about what role that could play in our lives. And so, do you have any insight into why it's become all the buzz?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Well, I've been following this for 50 years. In the 60s, some scientist at Carnegie Mellon said that "Within 10 years, computers will be able to do anything that a man can do." Now, maybe that was a positive- intended to be a positive comment on what women could do, but it did lend embarrassment to the field, and we entered what was called the AI winter, where people were very pessimistic. And those of us in the AI field were sort of embarrassed that, "Oh, this will never work." Now, people suddenly are saying, "Oh my god, it's gonna work." And-

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything they thought would've happened in 10 years back in the 1960s, we are saying now is gonna happen in 10 years.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying actually, computers will reach human intelligence by 2029. I've been saying that consistently. So that's a little more than 10 years, but not that much more. So, just a few years ago, the accusation was, "Well, AI can't even tell the difference between a dog and a cat." Now it can do that in 10,000 other categories, and you can give this Google program a picture, and it'll say, "Oh, that's a cat and a dog playing with a ball of yarn on a TV set." And it can accurately describe pictures. It can actually create things that are funny. It can paint a picture in the style of Van Gogh.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why does anyone fear this? This sounds quite primitive. Compared with what scares people?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  But they've been watching too many AI dystopian futurist movies, where it's usually the AI versus the humans for control of the world, or two groups of humans for control of the AI. We don't have one or two AIs in the world. We have one or two billion AIs. You know, each of these things we carry around with us is an AI. We can access all of human knowledge with a few keystrokes. And that, I think, will keep it safe, because it's very deeply integrated with humanity. But that's not how it's been portrayed in these dystopian movies.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, of course, as early as, was it 1985, the film Terminator? The net, you know, achieves consciousness and then takes on its own identity. So to say, "There's a billion AIs, and we all share it on our pocket." Once the cloud was introduced, this smacks of a centralization of all of our knowledge and all of our decision-making.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  But it's actually not centralized, is it? I mean, we each have our own cloud, we have our own information.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they want us to believe.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Well, interestingly, you know, AI-

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You tell me all walking around with our own cloud over our head. That's what you're telling me.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, we're already expanded in the cloud. We're gonna do that quite literally in the 2030s. We'll have nano-robots that go inside our brain and connect our neocortex to the cloud. So just the way that this can multiply itself a million-fold, like, you know, this is actually a billion times more powerful than the computer I used when I was a student at MIT, per dollar. But it can multiply itself thousands of millions-fold in the cloud, whenever it needs to. So we can't yet do that with our brains. If you remember, 2 million years ago, we got these big foreheads-

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember, yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  And we, so we got additional-

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The frontal lobe became developed. Making human birth catastrophic for the woman.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Right, but there was a benefit to it also.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ever see cats being born? They just pop right out. Because cats have these little heads, they're nothing complicated in the birth canal.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  But it was worth it.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got these mondo-scraniums.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  But it was worth it, because we got this additional neocortex.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says the man, "It was worth it," right?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Well, women got the additional neocortex also.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  And what we did with that is we put it at, the neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, is organized in a hierarchy. We put that additional neocortex at the top of the hierarchy. And as you go up the hierarchy, we get more intelligent, things get more abstract. So at the top of the hierarchy, we say, "Oh, that's funny, that's ironic, she's pretty." The bottom of the hierarchy, I can tell that the edge of this stage is straight, very simple things. But at the top, we can do humor and music. And in fact, that additional neocortex was the enabling factor for us to invent language and art and science and physics and StarTalk programs. And no other species does any of those things. We're gonna add to our neocortex again-

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Two million years ago, that was a one-shot deal. You know, no other primate has this big forehead, they have slanted brows. But it was, you know, it didn't continue to expand, otherwise it really would have been a problem with birth. But, um, so we're gonna...

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, it's been suggested that that was the limiting factor to how much more intelligent we would ever get. Because there's, once you start killing 100% of your mothers, that's the end of the species, right there. Right? So, so, there's a trade-off between how many mothers die and how many children are born with the big head.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Till we go to a whole new paradigm, which is basically to connect wirelessly our neocortex to the cloud. Just, and that's not...

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or just birth everyone with a C-section. Then they can have huge heads coming out in the future.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but still, how big could it be? I mean, it'd be very hard to carry them around.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The heads will just be...

• 11:46Speaker 02

  You know, this multiplies itself a million-fold, but if it were physically a million times heavier, you know, we couldn't carry it around.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Uh, we will connect wirelessly our neocortex to the cloud.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is with nanobots that, that enter your, your neocortex.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Right. So, we have 300 million modules in our neocortex, each of which can recognize a pattern. They're organized in this hierarchy. We create that hierarchy with our own thinking. But it's 300 million, so is that a big number or a little? Well, it was big enough for us to invent language and physics and... But, uh, it's also limited when you realize how long it takes to read a book or learn a language. We will be able to expand that, and that expansion will not be a one-shot deal. It'll be connected to the cloud. The cloud is pure information technology. One of my themes is that information technology grows exponentially. It roughly doubles in power every year. That's what the cloud is doing. The cloud is twice as powerful every year.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And when we can connect and expand our neocortex in the cloud, it will expand without limit. And so we'll be funnier and we'll be sexier and.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so just to clarify what I think you just said. That in 20 years, plus or minus, until the mid 2030s, we will have nanobots that we can feed into our brain that directly connect to the cloud rather than through anything we carry in our pocket. And in that way, wirelessly, we can basically download entire books, entire languages, and we will then know these things just by the act of downloading them.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Well, that's one implication.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into our brains.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  But we'll have more neocortex. So we won't be limited to a mere 300 million pattern modules. We'll have billions or 10 billion.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Biologically or just simply because we have these nanobots?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  We'll have this extension that's non-biological.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Non-biological, right. So, so.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  I mean, this would be pretty useless if it didn't have an extension. I mean, you know, when you access all of Google.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it would just be a gaming device otherwise, right.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  You know, you can access all of knowledge and.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got that. So, so isn't this like the scene in The Matrix? Where they got, they sit in the chair and they upload. My favorite, one of my favorite lines of the film is Keanu Reeves. You know, they, they, they teach him martial arts. And he says, I know Kung Fu? And you mean, I'm gonna know, you know, or Jiu-Jitsu, whatever. So in, in, in 20 seconds, he's now an expert. Are you telling me that's what's gonna happen?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  The non-biological portion of our thinking will be able to download skills, right?

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Alright, so, so this is, this is intellectual psychological dimension that you're describing. But another fear that people have of AI is that it might take over all of our jobs that previously used our intellect. That kinda happened 200 years ago and 100 years ago when machines took over human physical labor. And people thought that'd be the end of all employment. But of course, that wasn't the case. It was, it was a naive fear.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  It's happened many times. I mean, if I were a freshen futurist in 1900, I'd say, okay, a third of you work on farms and a third of you work in factories. But I predict in 100 years, by the year 2000, it'll be 3%, 3%. That is what happened. Today, it's 2%, 2%. And everyone go, oh, my God.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were way off.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, alright, but the fear factor is, what jobs do the rest of that 60%?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So what happened? 65% of jobs today in the United States are information jobs. It didn't exist 25 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so in 20 years, what's the profile? Of the workforce?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  We're gonna be smarter, as I said, because we're gonna enhance our intelligence. As we already have, even though this isn't connected in my brain, it may as well be. And it does make us smart.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick insert there. Because it's not physically connected, but it's at your fingertips, isn't that good enough? I would kinda rather carry this around than let someone inject nanobots into my frontal lobe.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Okay, well, speak for yourself.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Although I am-

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How quickly do you wanna access the data?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Although I am nervous if you could not grab my phone.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can wait 20 seconds for this. I'm cool with that.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  No, I mean, your fingers are very slow, right? I mean...

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Uh, it'll be much faster to-

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so tell me, what is the-

• 16:25Speaker 02

  And it's not so futuristic. I mean, Parkinson's patients already have, actually, many computers connected into their brain. There are places, the part of their brain that was destroyed by that disease. That actually communicates wirelessly. They can download new software to the computers connecting their brain from outside the patient. That's today. They're not microsc- they're not blood cell size yet. They're actually the size of a tiny pea. They can be inserted with minimally invasive surgery. Uh, once they're the size of blood cells, you know, we can just swallow them. Uh, but-

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Swallow the nanobots.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Right. But miniaturization is another exponential trend. We're shrinking technology at a rate of 103D volume per decade. So, these computers will be the size of blood cells in the 2030s.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, isn't there, I've gotta get geeky on you now, isn't there a limit if we're communicating via via microwaves, basically, which is the communication technology here? A microwave wavelength is sort of a millimeter up to a few centimeters, and the receiving device has to be at least as large as the wavelength in order to receive it and extract information from it. If you have something the size of a cell, that is much, much smaller than a millimeter.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Okay, you're bringing up an engineering issue that not all gonna communicate outside the body. They're gonna be on a local area network, sending information to each other.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now your body has a local area network inside of it? A very local area network.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And that's already exists. We have, uh, there are computerized technologies being put in the body where there are local area networks inside the body.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're basically creating your own neuro-net, basically, within you?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you already thought this through, okay? Forgive me. Thought I could stump him on that one, but apparently not.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me again, what is the distribution of jobs in 20 years? What percent of people are doing what, up and down the line?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Well, if you were to describe the jobs that exist today, creating websites and mobile apps and chip designs and computers, and if you described that to people a century ago, they wouldn't know what you're talking about. So, we're gonna have new types of jobs, creating new types of knowledge that don't exist yet, and that's been the trend.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Ray, that's a cop-out. No, no, I'm not gonna accept that. You can't tell me that with some confidence that in 20 years there'll be nanobots running around our frontal lobe, yet you don't know what the job market will be.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Well, we'll be...

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're predicting the future, don't tell me now, I have no idea what jobs we're gonna have, but you'll have nanobots in your brain? That's no. Give me, put something on the table. So that in 20 years, we'll put your ass back on the stage and find out whether it happened.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Well, we're doing...

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse my language there, I'm just...

• 19:27Speaker 02

  ...radio podcast with comedians.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  You know, well, it won't just be one or two of us that can do that. We'll all be able to do that. We'll be funnier, we'll be creating more profound music, literature, science, technology. I mean, look at how many fields are of science and technology. There's thousands of them. They didn't even exist 20 years ago, let alone 100. 100 years ago, there was physics and chemistry, and that's why the Nobel Prize is. Physics, chemistry, biology. I mean, most of the fields didn't exist then. And now we have thousands of these fields. It's gonna, we're gonna continue this exponential explosion of knowledge. And we're gonna continue going up Maslow's hierarchy. Where we don't have to do, you know, people are very eager to retire because they basically

• 20:22Speaker 02

  don't like their work. The goal of life is, I think, actually to love what you do. I like to say I retired when I was five because I decided I would do what I wanted. And I think that is really the goal, to be able to have a passion for what.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How old were you when you wrote your first computer program?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Well, 12, but there were only 12 computers in all of New York City.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the time. So why did they, what crazy stupid person allowed a 12-year-old to touch one of the 12 computers of New York City? So, can we distinguish, just to get our lexicon on the same page? When I think of biotech, I don't think of nanobots. I think of just the future of possibly manipulating the genome, this sort of thing. So, where are you with regard to advances we might make in our biological form versus the connection between technology and our biological form?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Right, so there are three overlapping revolutions. They all have to do with information. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. And they're in that order. So biotechnology's here now. And it basically consists of the observation that we are software. Our biology is software. It's made up of genes. There's actual sequences of data. They evolved a long time ago when conditions were very different. For example, one of our little 23,000 little software programs is called the fat insulin receptor gene. Says basically, "Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well." That was a good idea a thousand years ago. You worked all day to get a few calories and there were no refrigerators. So you stored them in the fat cells of your body.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  I would like to tell my fat insulin receptor gene, "You don't need to do that anymore." I'm confident the next hunting season will be good.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, three hours from now when you're served your next meal.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  At the supermarket, so.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  So, that's actually...

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, supermarkets, like, food is spilling off the shelves of supermarkets.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  So that was done. We have means now of turning off genes. So they turned off this gene in animals and these animals ate ravenously and remained slim. And they lived 20% longer and they got the benefits of caloric restriction while doing the opposite. And the Johnson Diabetes Center is working with a drug company to bring that to the human market. That's just 23... This is one of the 23,000 genes we'd like to tinker with. Biology is very limited in capability. It can only last so long and wears out. And so ultimately, we can go beyond the limitations of biology. So there's this overlapping revolutions. The ultimate health revolution with nanobots is basically a little programmable nanobot.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  That's just like the T-cells in your body. It can go after pathogens, but it's not limited by the limitations of our immune system. Our immune system evolves...

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we just do better than, better than what you're born with, basically?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Right. For example, our immune system doesn't go after cancer. It says, "Oh, that's me," and it doesn't consider it an enemy. It doesn't work on retroviruses like HIV.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stupid immune system.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  It is stupid. I mean, life expectancy was 19 a thousand years ago. It was not in the interest of biology for people to live very long because it was very limited food and... Now, there's some value for, you know, older folks like you and me to share our experience, accumulated knowledge, so we'd like to live longer and go beyond these natural limits. So, just perfecting biology is not ultimately as good as going beyond the limitations.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the pure technology will enable that and empower that.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Right, so that's another application of these nanobots.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wrote a book in 1999 called "The Age of Spiritual Machines." Everybody's got their own private definition of how they use the word "spiritual." And it's the latest thing, when you want to say you're religious, you say, "But I'm spiritual." So, how are you using that word in the title of that book?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Well, what is the ultimate spiritual value? It's consciousness. We feel that a conscious entity is sacred, like a person, or like an animal that has feelings. But not everybody actually agrees on which animals or if animals are conscious.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyone who owns a dog or a cat is certain they have consciousness.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Well, that underlies the debate about animal rights. I mean, I feel my cat is conscious. Not everybody agrees with that. Those people probably haven't met my cat.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  But...

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you create this cat?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Well, my cat is robotic, actually. As it turns out. But, we will have that debate about machines. Now, we don't worry today about causing pain and suffering to our computer software. We're more concerned about the pain and suffering it causes us. But, that is actually, when I talk about computers reaching human levels of intelligence, I'm not talking about logical intelligence. If you say, "Ah, well, emotions, spirituality, consciousness," those are all side shows. The essence of intelligence is, you know, ability to think logically. Well, then, computers are already smarter than we are. It is being funny and expressing a loving sentiment,

• 25:45Speaker 02

  where humans have an edge today. That is the cutting edge of human intelligence. But that's where I think computers will match human intelligence by 2020.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me ask, just to get a little philosophical on you. As a scientist, and I grew up... Basically, in the geekosphere. And I'm curious, when we think of who is smart in the class, it's who knows the most, who can solve a problem the most. It's not the person who's most emotional. Generally, we don't use the word "smart" for that person. Yet you are grouping that feature of what it is to be human as something that computers have yet, a place where computers have yet to tread. And when they do, they'll then be truly smarter than us. But if your emotions, for example, interfere with your ability to make a, the correct decision, given the outcome you seek,

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how can we call that, possibly call that intelligence?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you go around with a comedian for some of your presentations, recognizing that humor is in fact a high form of intelligence. Takes a lot of intelligence to think of...

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What he's referring to is that the StarTalk radio show, my co-host is always a professional stand-up comedian, bringing a level of levity to the conversation.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  And insight. I mean, humor is a high form of intelligence. And creating poetic language is a form of intelligence. Expressing a loving sentiment, music, either recreating it or creating in the first place. These are, these are really the highest forms of intelligence. Computers are beginning to encroach on that.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying, not to put words in your mouth, but that's exactly what I'm gonna do. All right, what you're saying is, right now, the computer can wipe our floor in a game of chess that we invented. The computer can beat us at Jeopardy! A game that we invented, and it's based, basically, on pop culture. So the computer can beat us at all of these things. It still can't beat us in our capacity to write a brilliant novel, or to compose a beautiful poem, or to paint a transcendent...

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. Although Jeopardy, Jeopardy is a step in that direction.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got you. So what I'm asking you is, are you saying the day will come where the computer will write the Nobel Prize-winning novel? And the poem that generations will study thereafter. And supplant even that aspect of what it is to be human.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Right, but I put it differently, in that we're going to combine with our intelligence, we're going to become a merger of biological and non-biological intelligence. We are already...

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there'll still be humans who do this.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  We create...

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's enhanced.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  We create these tools to, you know, extend our reach. This allows us to remember all of human knowledge. We can build great structures like this building here, which we couldn't do with our bare muscles. So we extend our reach, and we're going to do that intellectually, and we're doing that already, but it's going to become more profound.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're, you're ready to erase the difference between a machine that has this power and a human that has been enhanced by that which ever gave the machine power in the first place?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  But I mean, you know, what is a human but a, it's a collection of physical stuff which follows the laws of physics. It's not, you know, a mystical property. We can study a neuron and it is a machine. So we are perhaps the most complex machine that we know about in the universe, but...

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then the individuality will go away because we will all have exactly the same access?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  On the contrary, we'll become more different. We're actually more the same now. We all have the same architecture, 300 million neocortical modules.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but we both eat the same set of nanobots and it goes to our frontal lobe. So aren't we, aren't we still the same now with nanobots running around our head?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  No, we can become more different because right now we have the same architecture brain. Now, we may fill it with different thoughts and, uh, Marvin Minsky, who died recently, was my mentor and he wrote a book called The Society of Mind, basically describing our neocortex as a society of different factions that fight each other and, uh... So some of those societies are more effective because they're harmonious and working together and some of our societies of mind are at war with each other and therefore we're ineffective. But we have basically the same architecture.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is with this new architecture, there are more places to go emotionally and intellectually?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that if I have leanings, whatever is causing that, towards poetry rather than physics, I can then be a great poet, enhanced by all of the nanobots that allow it?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  You can profoundly study and master poetry or music in a deeper way than we can today because we'll have more brain power to apply to it. We'll become more different.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a question for you, alright? As an astrophysicist, we think about aliens a lot. I'm not authorized to divulge any more about that than that. And what I think about often is how much on Earth, in human civilization, we invest in ways that titillate, or stimulate, or serve our five senses. So there's a sense of taste. So there's fine dining, and wine, and restaurants. And there's a sense of touch. So we pay good money for a massage. There's a sense of sight. So we like looking at art. And there's a sense of hearing. So we make music.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An alien might have 12 senses instead of five. And so you go visit their society, they might have whole tracts of their economy in the service of titillating their other senses that are completely oblivious to us. Can you imagine a future where we actually give ourselves more senses?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we might, when they get addicted to them being served?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  So you ask what kind of work we'll do. We'll be creating art, and experiences, and virtual environments for these additional senses, or enhanced senses. In a sense, we're already doing that. The kind of virtual reality, you know, environments and experiences that are now emerging would be even hard to describe a couple of decades ago. So yes, I think we can... All this sensory information, you know, as a physicist, a lot of it we don't capture.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most of it, it just goes right by.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Right, so we could capture that and create enhancements, you know, like culinary, and musical, and artistic experiences with these enhanced senses. So that's another way in which we can create a kind of work that we can't even describe today.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's another, another topic that makes the news every now and then, and it's the possibility that we might be on the brink of a, a medical advance that would have humans live forever. So, is that, is that a good thing?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna need another planet. Because if people don't die, I did the math on this, okay? In, at the rate that we are now growing our population, uh, in, in the same number of years in our future as has elapsed since Columbus, we will have a population so large on Earth that everyone will have to stand up straight in order to fit in the available landmass.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Well, that's...

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need another planet. That's with people dying, by the way. That's with regular people dying at age 80, 85. Now, you want people to live forever?

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I dispute that math, but before we get... Before we get to that, let's talk about how we will actually achieve, uh...

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a 2% growth with a doubling time of 37 years. Yeah, whatever.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  I mean, right, right now, if you, you know, if you take a train across America or any part of the world, 99% of the land is not used. And you could actually build the luxury, uh, housing for everybody in the world and fit them in a small part of Texas. So, we actually have plenty of, of landmass, and we have plenty of resources. Uh, for example, energy. "Oh, we're running, peak oil, running out of energy." We have 10,000...

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, peak oil is a, is almost jargon, actually. And it refers to the point in time, whether or not, I don't think we've hit it yet, where thereafter, we will only be drawing less oil out of the ground than what had been drawn previously, which means the oil economy must shrink thereafter. And so, it's, it's been all the talk in economic circles. Go on.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, even with an oil, shale oil, we have like 5,000 times more oil than we need to meet all of our energy needs. But, uh, we have 10,000 times more energy than we need coming from the sun for free. And solar energy is growing exponentially, that's one of my themes, it's doubling every two years.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our technology that enables us to harness solar energy is doubling every two years.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And there's only six doublings now from 100%, so within 12 years, we could meet all of our energy needs ultimately at very low cost. And at that point, we'll be using one part in 10,000 of the sunlight. So we have 10,000 times more energy than we need inside the Earth with geothermal, there's tides and wind and, I mean, we're a wash in energy. We're also a wash in water, it's just most of it can't be used because it's salinated or polluted, but if we have clean energy, we know how to clean up.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's actually a joke, we're a wash in water, yeah, just kind of if you caught that. Alright, so you're not worried that Earth can support a quadrillion people? You're not worried about this? You're not worried?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Not about that issue, no.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are you worried about? So if I were to ask, what is Ray's worry list? Give me your like top three or four things.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, there's been a lot of concern now about the downsides of these technologies and...

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, such as?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Such as AI run amok, à la the kinds of future dystopian movies that we've seen, like Terminator. So Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been sounding the alarm that, oh my God, you know, AI is really going to work and maybe it's going to be dangerous. So I mean, I wrote about this going back to the Age of Spiritual Machines in 1999 and that led Bill Joy, who was then the Chief Technology Officer of Digital Equipment Corporation, at that time he was a leading technologist and he wrote a... A cover story in Wired magazine, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, about the grave dangers of G N R, Genetics, Nanotechnology, Robotics, which was artificial intelligence.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And basically described these downsides, which I described in my book. So, technology's been a double-edged sword ever since...

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sword.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and fire, I mean, which kept us warm and cooked our food, but burned down our houses. These new technologies are very powerful, and they can be used for good or ill. So I do take comfort from the experience we've had with one of these technologies, which is already working, which is biotechnology. So the same technology which we can use to reprogram ourselves away from disease and away from cancer could also be used by a bioterrorist to reprogram a benign virus, like a cold or flu virus, to be deadly, communicable, and stealthy.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Basically weaponize a virus, essentially.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  So that was recognized more than 25 years ago, and they held a conference called the Asilomar Conference, and came up with a set of guidelines to keep biotechnology safe. It's called the Asilomar Guidelines. And they've been reinvented every few years as the technology gets more sophisticated.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is our attempt to have a morality, to keep track with the...

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Ethical standards, and this has actually worked. We're now getting benefits. You can now, for example, fix a broken heart. Not yet from romance, that'll take some more advances in virtual reality, but from a heart attack...

• 38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I won't even take that another step. We'll let that one go.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Half of all heart attack survivors have a damaged heart. My father had that in the 60s, we didn't know anything about stem cells then, but I've talked to people who could hardly walk after a heart attack, and now they've been rejuvenated by reprogramming adult stem cells. So we're getting, I could go on, we could talk for hours about the benefits. And there've been no, the number of negative incidents have been zero. Now, that doesn't mean we can cross it off our worry list. Okay, we took care of that one. Because the technology gets more sophisticated, and there are new dangers emerging all the time. But it's a good model for how we can keep these technologies safe.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's number one, is you have a second concern.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Well, that's... there are existential risks, like biotech run'em up. There are subtle risks, like losing privacy, for example, is very much on people's minds.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as a computer guy, fundamentally, in spite of that you have these inventions and patents, you're a computer guy in your soul of souls, is the... does the lack of privacy concern you?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  I'm actually not...

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, and I say that, not... the obvious answer should be yes. However, anyone younger than 25 puts everything they ever could possibly know about them on their Facebook page. So they have no commensurate concept of privacy relative to the Cold War generation, where there were spies and you had to keep secrets.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  I'm actually less concerned about that. I think we're doing a pretty good job on privacy. I mean, how often do you hear about major breaches with Apple's email or Google's email? I mean, these companies know how to keep this information secure, and...

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about the Apple versus FBI.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  There's many layers to that dispute. Now, the FBI could crack that phone easily. I mean, it's very simple to do. There's some code in there which detects...

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Ray Kurzweil saying something is simple is not the same thing as the FBI saying something is simple.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Well, they can absolutely crack that phone.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. If someone was good enough to crack the phone, they wouldn't be working for the FBI. They'd be working for Apple, getting five times the salary, wouldn't they?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Well, there's software in the phone that detects if you're trying different combinations of passwords, of pass numbers, and if it detects that, it then stops you and actually erases the information.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It self-destructs.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without the Mission Impossible smoke coming out of it.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  So you could take the software, which is not... which is an object code, and disassemble it, and a competent programmer could find where that code is and bypass it. And the FBI can do that.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they would bypass the code, and therefore, they'd be able to run through the 9...

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The 10,000 possible codes.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  So why is it that they're pressing this case? Both Apple and the government are really concerned about the precedent. The FBI wants a precedent set, so they can come with other requests in the future, and Apple doesn't want the precedent set. Now...

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, so this one phone is really, uh, it's a, it's a federal case, more because it's a precedent than because they need phone numbers...

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Because of the, you know, underlying issue. Now, you know, it's not an easy issue. I mean, suppose there was a phone that had information that could lead you to stop a terrorist attack using WMD. I mean, most people would support, "Oh, we gotta get that information and stop, uh, this kind of attack." I mean, there, there could be attacks that, uh, make San Bernardino and Paris seem trivial, so...

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta interject a story. Uh, now, twenty years ago, we were exploring what technologies we might use for the new planetarium that we were building, what, what became the Rose Center for Earth and Space. And one of our trips was to East Germany. Uh, now, this is seven years after the wall came down, but I still call it East Germany because it was very different from West Germany. People's clothing was not very colorful, people hardly smiled, the culture, the mood was completely different from anything we had grown up and experienced in the West. And I finally had a long conversation with someone that I just never had a conver-- you know, I grew up in the West, in, in the Bronx, right?

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I had a conversation, and I said, "What was going on behind these walls?" "Oh, our government told us that all of these protections were necessary to keep us safe. We need the wall. We have to prevent you from watching these TV shows. We have to prevent you from traveling to these places or reading these newspapers." And so, when I heard that, I said, "Wow, so you can basically subjugate an entire population on the grounds that you are doing something in their best interest." So for you to say that surely you would want to break a code of privacy if it could prevent

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  a weapon of mass destruction, that makes a good headline, but the total picture that that paints scares me.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think...

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the other forty percent on that side, right? Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  I think we have, you know, a basic conflict between privacy and security. But I think privacy is gonna win. There are now encryption codes that are unbreakable. And, you know, regardless of what companies like Apple do, uh, people are gonna use a layer of encryption that is, cannot be broken. Uh, and that already exists, and it's already being used. Uh, so ultimately, privacy is actually gonna win. Uh, which is good from that perspective. We'll have to find other ways to stop criminals and terrorists. Um, and I'll, you know, I don't work for the intelligence agencies, so I'll leave it to them.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is, uh, is Ed Snowden a hero of yours, or a traitor, or a treasonist? What is he to you?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  We learned a lot that I think the American people had needed to know from, from his revelations. Uh, so in that regard, it's, uh, was a good thing. The authorities claim that he compromised information which put people's lives at risk. I have no way of evaluating that, but, uh, we do know a lot of things that the government is doing that we didn't know before, and I think that's a positive thing. It's pretty amazing that this low-level contractor had access to so much information, isn't it?

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was really smart. In fact, we interviewed him for StarTalk.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Uh, he sent a bot, a motorized bot, not a nanobot, it didn't get in my head. And came in, and I said, "How I know you're really controlling it?" So he said, "You wanna see me turn left?" And then he like, turned left, and then turned right. But he wouldn't tell me where he was hiding. Uh, but we have the whole, it's all on StarTalk, it's been posted. Uh, so the, these are other challenges. I worry that if nanobots are coursing through my brain, that someone one day might be able to control that. I kind of would rather stay biological, as I...

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Well, your thoughts are already in your emails and your texts, and you worry about that being, uh...

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 'cause I did that on purpose. I'm cool with stuff I do on purpose. It's when someone has access because my frontal lobe nanobots are connected somewhere in some cloud. I don't know who's coming back into my head.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  We do express ourselves pretty intimately in all of our communications and all of that's electronic. And I travel around the world, I don't talk to very many people at all who say, "Oh, my life was ruined because of my privacy was infringed on." So I think we're doing a pretty good job on privacy. And it's just a technical reality that the technology of privacy, which is encryption, is outpacing decryption. So if you're on the side of privacy, I think...

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that phrase, "In encryption is outpacing decryption." That's really good. That gives me hope. More hope than I had when you first sat down.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Well, actually, it has to do with physics because, you know, the big worry was quantum computers would break any possible encryption code. And so that would be the end of privacy. I was always dubious that quantum computers would ever work, and they don't work. And I don't think they will, so privacy, I think, is alive and well.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just ask, just because I love pop culture and I love going to movies, is there a film that, in your judgment, most accurately portrays the future of AI?

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Well, I thought a pretty good movie was Her, because there wasn't one AI out there. Like, everybody had their operating system, so Theodore had Samantha, and his human love interest also had her operating system that she fell in love with. And they were your administrative assistants, but also it was Theodore's therapist and Theodore's lover. And it expanded Theodore's capabilities and experiences. So I think something like that will take place. I thought it didn't make sense that Samantha didn't have a body.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  You know, but it would be easier to provide a human-level body in virtual and augmented reality than...

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would open up a whole other industry.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Well, that's always the case with all of these communication technologies.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  You know, the first book printed was a Bible, but then came a whole century of more pre-orient titles.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, o- okay. So, ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking Ray Kurzweil.