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

Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get 14-day free trial – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: Ray’s Website: https://kurzweilai.net Ray’s Books: The Singularity Is Nearer (pre-order): https://amzn.to/3BNXmGR How To Create A Mind: https://amzn.to/3qqlkBw The Singularity Is Near: https://amzn.to/3DfXP5z The Age of Spiritual Machines: https://amzn.to/3RSjtAX Danielle: https://amzn.to/3Bww2N7 Transcend: https://amzn.to/3RAEYGV PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:06) – Turing test (20:52) – Brain–computer interfaces (32:32) – Singularity (38:51) – Virtual reality (41:31) – Evolution of information processing (47:57) – Automation (57:58) – Nanotechnology (59:52) – Nuclear war (1:01:57) – Uploading minds (1:09:39) – How to think (1:16:09) – Digital afterlife (1:25:29) – Intelligent alien life (1:28:19) – Simulation hypothesis (1:32:31) – Mortality (1:40:11) – Meaning of life

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, and futurist, who has an optimistic view of our future as a human civilization, predicting that exponentially improving technologies will take us to a point of a singularity beyond which superintelligent artificial intelligence will transform our world in nearly unimaginable ways. Eighteen years ago, in the book Singularity is Near, he predicted that the onset of the singularity will happen in the year 2045. He still holds to this prediction and estimate. In fact, he's working on a new book on this topic that will hopefully be out next year.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick two-second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management software, Linode for Linux systems, MasterClass for online learning, and indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store that brings your idea to life and tools to manage day-to-day operation.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  I am so long overdue on merch. As a fan of a lot of people and podcasts and shows and stuff like that, I love getting their merch. It's a cool way to just celebrate the thing you love. Shopify is an exemplary company in this whole space. It seems like a fun thing to do. Merch is fun. And so, anyway, Shopify is a platform that enables that kind of thing, super easy, very easy to set up, very easy to buy from. That's why, what is it? 1.7 million entrepreneurs use it. That's wild. Get a free trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase, Shopify.com/lex.

• 2:17Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It manages financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, and many business-related details. I talk to a lot of people that run large and medium-sized and small companies. A lot of them are becoming good friends of mine. And it's just clear to me that running a company at every stage of it, from startup, when it's just you, one founder or co-founder, to when it's many thousands of people, it's just so complicated. There's so many things involved, so many more things than just the kind of engineering or the brainstorming or the idea development or product development, that kind of stuff. And that's the stuff I love, of course,

• 3:02Lex Fridman?

  but you have to get everything else right, too. Like, from the human resource, from the hiring process. The hiring process alone is just so fascinating. So whatever sort of machinery of running a business you need to get right, you should use the best tool for the job. That's what NetSuite is. You can go to netsuite.com/lex to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. This episode is also brought to you by Linode, Linux virtual machines. I mean, the best operating system. The best interface in terms of cloud compute I've ever used is Linode. The best operating system is Linux. What else do you want from life, friends?

• 3:46Lex Fridman?

  The best operating system and the best cloud service that makes it super easy. You can create as many machines as you want. You can get your computer infrastructure for a small project, for a huge project. You can develop, you can deploy, any scale, it works. There's also really good customer service, 24/7, all days of the year. It's a lower cost than AWS, but I mean, so many things I just love, including the interface, just the little things. The little things about the online interface, managing the compute instance, creating new ones, monitoring them, just everything, the whole thing. Super intuitive, I love it. Visit linode.com/lex for free credit.

• 4:32Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by MasterClass. $180 a year gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. The list here, friends, is ridiculous. I can mention a few. A few of the ones I've listened to, and there's actually a few I'm not going to mention that I've listened to that are amazing as well. But Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Blue Right on gaming, Carlos Santana, probably my favorite guitar player, Garry Kasparov on chess, Daniel Negranu. Daniel Negranu on poker. And Daniel Negranu is soon going to be a guest. Martin Scorsese, if there's a person that's a dream guest on this podcast, is probably Martin Scorsese.

• 5:16Lex Fridman?

  He's definitely up there. If you want to learn about a thing, learn it from the best people in the world, period. Not the best educators of a thing, but the best doers of a thing. Anyway, I highly recommend you check it out. Get unlimited access to every MasterClass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lex. This show is brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them many times for many hiring efforts I've done in the past. By the way, I'm currently using them for a large number of hiring I'm doing, and you should visit lexfridman.com/hiring. I have a bunch of job posts there. Or you can go through Indeed. I have the posts up there as well. Anyway, doesn't matter.

• 6:01Lex Fridman?

  The point is, this is the best tool for the job of hiring. It does the first step really well, which is getting you the first batch of quality candidates. I think they call it Indeed Instant Match. They sort of basically match the resumes to the job description, give you a really nice initial pool, and then help you filter that pool down. I mean, the whole process. From the beginning pool to the end, perfect candidate that will make your life a beautiful, flourishing experience. They help you out with that. Indeed has a special offer only available for a limited time. Check it out at indeed.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

• 6:46Lex Fridman?

  And now, dear friends, here's Ray Kurzweil.

• 7:06Lex Fridman?

  In your 2005 book titled The Singularity is Near, you predicted that the singularity will happen in 2045. So now, 18 years later, do you still estimate that the singularity will happen on 2045? And maybe first, what is the singularity? The technological singularity? And when will it happen?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Singularity is where computers really change our view of what's important and change who we are. But we're getting close to some salient things that will change who we are. A key thing is 2029, when computers will pass the Turing test. And there's also some controversy whether the Turing test is valid. I believe it is. Most people do believe that, but there's some controversy about that. But Stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029. I made this in 1999 in my book.

• 8:10Lex Fridman?

  The Age of Spiritual Machines.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:12Lex Fridman?

  And then you repeated the prediction in 2005.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  In 2005.

• 8:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  So they held an international conference, you might have been aware of it, of AI experts in 1999 to assess this view. So people gave different predictions and they took a poll. It was really the first time that AI experts worldwide were polled on this prediction. And the average poll was 100 years. 20% believed it would never happen. And that was the view in 1999. 80% believed it would happen, but not within their lifetimes. There's been so many advances in AI that the poll of AI experts has come down over the years.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So a year ago, something called Meticulous, which you may be aware of, assesses different types of experts on the future. They again assessed what AI experts then felt, and they were saying 2042.

• 9:19Lex Fridman?

  For the Turing test?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  For the Turing test. So it's coming down. And I was still saying 2029. A few weeks ago, they again did another poll and it was 2030. So AI experts now basically agree with me. I haven't changed at all. I've stayed with 2029.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  And AI experts now agree with me, but they didn't agree at first. So Alan Turing formulated the Turing test and. Right now, what he said was very little about it. I mean, the 1950 paper where he had articulated the Turing test. He, there's like a few lines that talk about the Turing test.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  And it really wasn't very clear how to administer it. And he said, if they did it in like 15 minutes, that would be sufficient, which I don't really think is the case. These large language models now, some people are convinced by it already. I mean, you can talk to it and have a conversation with it. And you can actually talk to it for hours.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  So it requires a little more depth. There's some problems with large language models, which we can talk about.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  But some people are convinced by the Turing test. Now, if somebody passes the Turing test, what are the implications of that? Does that mean that they're sentient, that they're conscious or not? It's not necessarily clear what the implications are. Anyway, I believe 2029, that's six, seven years from now.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  We'll have something that passes the Turing test and a valid Turing test, meaning it goes for hours, not just a few minutes. Can you speak to that a little bit? What is your?

• 11:19Lex Fridman?

  Formulation of the Turing test. You've proposed a very difficult version of the Turing test. So what does that look like?

• 11:25Speaker 01

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

• 11:52Lex Fridman?

  So you really want the human to challenge the system?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 11:57Lex Fridman?

  On its ability to do things like common sense reasoning, perhaps?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  That's actually a key problem with large language models. They don't do these kinds of tests that would involve assessing chains of reasoning. But you can lose track of that. If you talk to them, they actually can talk to you pretty well, and you can be convinced by it. But it's somebody that would really convince you that it's a human. Whatever that takes. Maybe it would take days or weeks, but it would really convince you that it's human. Large language models can appear that way.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You can read conversations and they appear pretty good. There are some problems with it. It doesn't do math very well. You can ask, how many legs did 10 elephants have? And they'll tell you, well, okay, each elephant has four legs and it's 10 elephants. So it's 40 legs. And you go, okay, that's pretty good. How many legs do 11 elephants have? And they don't seem to understand the question.

• 13:12Lex Fridman?

  Do all humans understand that question?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  No, that's the key thing. I mean, how advanced a human do you want it to be? But we do, we do expect a human to be able to do multi-chain reasoning, to be able to take a few facts and put them together. Not perfectly. And we see, we see that, you know, in a lot of polls that people don't do that perfectly at all. But.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So it's not, it's not very well defined, but it's something where it really would convince you that it's a human.

• 13:46Lex Fridman?

  Is your intuition that large language models will not be solely the kind of system that passes the Turing test in 2029? Do we need something else?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  No, I think it will be a large language model, but they have to go beyond what they're doing now.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I think we're getting there.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  And another key issue is if somebody actually passes the Turing test validly, I would believe they're conscious. And not everybody would say that. It's okay, we can pass the Turing test, but we don't really believe that it's conscious. That's a whole nother issue.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  But if it really passes the Turing test, I would believe that it's conscious.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  But I don't believe that of large language models today.

• 14:33Lex Fridman?

  If it appears to be conscious, that's as good as being conscious, at least for you, in some, in some sense.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I mean, consciousness is not something that's scientific.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I believe you're conscious, but it's really just a belief, and we believe that about other humans that at least appear to be conscious.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  When you go outside of shared human assumption, like are animals conscious? Some people believe they're not conscious, some people believe they are conscious. And would a machine that acts just like a human be conscious? I mean, I believe it would be, but, but that's really a philosophical belief. It's not, you can't prove it. I can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious. There's nothing that you can do that would be, that would indicate that.

• 15:30Lex Fridman?

  It's like saying a piece of art is beautiful. You can say it, multiple people can experience a piece of art is beautiful, but you can't prove it.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  But it's also an extremely important issue.

• 15:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I mean, imagine if you had something where nobody's conscious, the, the world may as well not exist.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  And so some people like, say, Marvin Rinsky,

• 16:03Speaker 01

  said, well, consciousness is not logical, it's not scientific, and therefore we should dismiss it, and any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed. But when he actually engaged with somebody who was conscious, he actually acted as if they were conscious. He didn't ignore that.

• 16:24Lex Fridman?

  He acted as if consciousness does matter.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. Whereas he said it didn't matter.

• 16:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's Marvin Rinsky.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:32Lex Fridman?

  He's full of contradictions.

• 16:34Speaker 01

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

• 16:38Lex Fridman?

  But to you, consciousness matters.

• 16:40Speaker 01

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

• 17:20Lex Fridman?

  So if a system passes the Turing test,

• 17:25Lex Fridman?

  it's not scientific, but in issues of philosophy, things like ethics start to enter the picture. Do you think there would be, we would start contending as a human species about the ethics of turning off such a machine?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's definitely come up. Hasn't come up in reality yet.

• 17:50Lex Fridman?

  Yet.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  But I'm talking about 2029, it's not that many years from now.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  So what are our obligations to it? It has a different, I mean, a computer that's conscious has a little bit different connotations than a human. We have a continuous consciousness. We're in an entity that does not last forever. Now, actually, a significant portion of humans still exist and are therefore still conscious. But anybody who is over a certain age doesn't exist anymore. That wouldn't be true of a computer program.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  You could completely turn it off and a copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it. And so it has a different type of validity. You could actually take it back in time. You could eliminate its memory and have it go over again. I mean, it has a different kind of connotation than humans do.

• 19:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, perhaps you can do the same thing with humans. It's just that we don't know how to do that yet.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:07Lex Fridman?

  It's possible that we figure out all of these things on the machine first. But that doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious.

• 19:14Speaker 01

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

• 19:37Lex Fridman?

  So 2029 is going to be the first year when a major thing happens.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:44Lex Fridman?

  And that will shake our civilization to start to consider the role of AI in this world.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I mean, this one guy at Google claimed that the machine was conscious.

• 19:58Lex Fridman?

  That's just one person.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:01Lex Fridman?

  When it starts to happen to scale.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly right because most people have not taken that position. I don't take that position. I mean, I've used different things.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Like this, and they don't appear to me to be conscious. As we eliminate various problems of these large language models, more and more people will accept that they're conscious. So when we get to 2029, more, I think a large fraction of people will believe that they're conscious. So it's not going to happen all at once. I believe that it would actually happen gradually, and it's already started to happen.

• 20:47Lex Fridman?

  And so that takes us one step closer to the singularity.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Another step then is in the 2030s, when we can actually connect our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, to computers. And I mean, just as this actually gains a lot to being connected to computers that will amplify its abilities. I mean, if this did not have any connection, it would be pretty stupid. It could not answer any of your questions.

• 21:22Lex Fridman?

  If you're just listening to this, by the way, Ray's holding up the all-powerful smartphone.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  So we're going to do that directly from our brains. I mean, these are pretty good. These already have amplified our intelligence. I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be if I didn't have this. Because I remember my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines. There was no way to get information from computers. I actually would go to a library, find a book, find the page that had an information I wanted, and I'd go to the copier. And my most significant information tool was a roll of quarters where I could feed the copier. So we're already greatly advanced that we have these things. There's a few problems with it.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  First of all, I constantly put it down, and I don't remember where I put it. I've actually never lost it, but you have to find it, and then you have to turn it on. So there's a certain amount of steps. It would actually be quite useful if someone would just listen to your conversation and say,

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, you know, so and so actress and tell you what you're talking about.

• 22:41Lex Fridman?

  So going from active to passive, where it just permeates your whole life.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:47Lex Fridman?

  The way your brain does when you're awake. Your brain is always there.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right. Now, that's something that could actually just, just about be done today, where we'd listen to your conversation, understand what you're saying, understand what you're not missing and give you that information. But another step is to actually go inside your brain.

• 23:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And there are some prototypes where you can connect your brain. They actually don't have the amount of bandwidth that we need. They can work, but they work fairly slowly. So if, if it actually would connect to your neocortex, and the neocortex, which I describe in How to Create a Mind, the neocortex is actually, it has different levels. And as you go up the levels, it's kind of like a pyramid. The top level is fairly small. And that's the level where you want to connect these brain extenders.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So I believe that will happen in the 2030s. We will actually, so just the way this is greatly amplified by being connected to the cloud, we can connect our own brain to the cloud and just do what we can do by using this machine.

• 24:14Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it would look like the brain-computer interface of like Neuralink? So would it be?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Well, Neuralink's an attempt to do that. It doesn't have the bandwidth that we need.

• 24:26Lex Fridman?

  Yet, right?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Right. But I think, I mean, they're going to get permission for this because there are a lot of people who absolutely need it because they can't communicate. I know a couple of people like that who have ideas and they cannot, they don't, they cannot move their muscles and so on. They can't communicate. So for them, this would be very valuable. But we could all use it. Basically, it'd be...

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Turn us into something that would be like we have a phone, but it would be in our minds. It would be kind of instantaneous.

• 25:07Lex Fridman?

  And maybe communication between two people would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:14Lex Fridman?

  Of spoken word.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. We don't know what that would be, although we do know that computers can share information like language instantly. They can share many, many books in a second, so we could do that as well. If you look at what our brain does, it actually can manipulate different parameters. So we talk about these large language models.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I had written that

• 25:52Speaker 01

  it requires a certain amount of information in order to be effective.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And that we would not see AI really being effective until it got to that level. And we had large language models that were like 10 billion bytes, didn't work very well. They finally got to 100 billion bytes, and now they work fairly well, and now we're going to a trillion bytes. If you say Lambda has 100 billion bytes, what does that mean? Well, what if you had something that had one byte, one parameter? Maybe you want to tell whether or not something's an elephant or not. And so you put in something that would detect its trunk. If it has a trunk, it's an elephant. If it doesn't have a trunk, it's not an elephant.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  That would work fairly well. There's a few problems with it.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Really wouldn't be able to tell what a trunk is, but anyway.

• 26:51Lex Fridman?

  And maybe other things other than elephants have trunks. You might get really confused.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:57Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure which animals have trunks, but you know.

• 27:01Lex Fridman?

  How do you define a trunk? But yeah, that's one parameter. You can do okay.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So these things have a hundred billion parameters, so they're able to deal with very complex issues.

• 27:12Lex Fridman?

  All kinds of trunks.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Human beings actually have a little bit more than that, but they're getting to the point where they can emulate humans.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  If we were able to connect this to our neocortex, we would basically add

• 27:31Speaker 01

  more of these abilities to make distinctions. And it could ultimately be much smarter and also be attached to information that we feel is reliable.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  So that's where we're headed.

• 27:45Lex Fridman?

  So you think that there will be a merger in the 30s? An increasing amount of merging between the human brain and the AI brain?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the AI brain is really an emulation of human beings. I mean, that's why we're creating them. Because human beings act the same way. And this is basically to amplify them. I mean, this amplifies our brain.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  It's a little bit clumsy to interact with, but it definitely is, you know, way beyond what we had 15 years ago.

• 28:22Lex Fridman?

  But the implementation becomes different, just like a bird versus the airplane. The, even though the AI brain is an emulation, it starts adding features we might not otherwise have, like ability to consume a huge amount of information quickly. Like look up thousands of Wikipedia articles in one take.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. And we can get, for example, to issues like simulated biology, where it can simulate many different things at once.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I mean, we already had one example of simulated biology, which is the Moderna vaccine.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And that's going to be now the way in which we create medications. But they were able to simulate what each example of an mRNA would do to a human being. And they were able to simulate that quite reliably. And we actually simulated billions of different mRNA sequences. And they found the ones that they were the best and they created the vaccine. And they did and talked about doing it quickly. They did that in two days. Now, how long would a human being take to simulate billions of different mRNA sequences? I don't know that we could do it at all, but it would take many years. They did it in two days.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And one of the reasons that people didn't like vaccines is because it was done too quickly. It was done too fast. And they actually included the time it took to test it out, which was 10 months. So they figured, okay, it took 10 months to create this. Actually, it took us two days. And we also will be able to ultimately do the tests in a few days as well.

• 30:14Lex Fridman?

  Oh, because we can simulate how the body will respond to it.

• 30:17Speaker 01

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

• 30:40Lex Fridman?

  So curing all diseases.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Lex Fridman?

  Improving certain functions of the body. Supplements, drugs for recreation, for health, for performance, for productivity, all that.

• 30:56Speaker 01

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

• 31:20Lex Fridman?

  Are you impressed by AlphaFold and the solution to the protein folding, which essentially is simulating, modeling this primitive building block of life, which is a protein, and its 3D shape?

• 31:36Speaker 01

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

• 31:51Lex Fridman?

  So it's all the same?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  It's all the same.

• 31:53Lex Fridman?

  All the same approaches.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  They took that same thing and just changed the rules to chess. And within a couple of days, it now played a mastered level of chess greater than any human being.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And the same thing then worked for AlphaFold, which no human had done. I mean, human beings could do, the best humans could maybe do 15, 20%

• 32:23Speaker 01

  of figuring out what the shape would be. And after a few takes, it ultimately did just about 100%.

• 32:33Lex Fridman?

  Do you still think the singularity will happen in 2045?

• 32:38Lex Fridman?

  And what does that look like?

• 32:40Speaker 01

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

• 32:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so looking at price performance of computation from 1939 to 2021?

• 33:00Speaker 01

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

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, we're looking at a plot with the x-axis being the year from 1935 to 2025. And on the y-axis in log scale is computation per second per constant dollar. So dollar normalized to inflation.

• 33:38Lex Fridman?

  And it's growing linearly on the log scale, which means it's grown exponentially.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  The third one was the British computer, which the Allies did take very seriously. And it cracked the German code and enabled the British to win the Battle of Britain, which otherwise absolutely would not have happened if they hadn't cracked the code using that computer. But that's an exponential graph, so a straight line on that graph is exponential growth. And you see 80 years of exponential growth. And I would say about every five years, and this happened shortly before the pandemic, people saying, well, they call it Moore's law, which is not the correct, because that's not all Intel.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  In fact, this started decades before Intel was even created. It wasn't with transistors formed into a grid.

• 34:34Lex Fridman?

  So it's not just transistor count or transistor size.

• 34:37Speaker 01

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

• 35:20Lex Fridman?

  So you don't think Moore's law broadly defined is dead? It's been declared dead multiple times throughout this process?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I don't like the term Moore's law, because it has nothing to do with Moore or with Intel. But yes, the exponential growth of computing is continuing. It has never stopped.

• 35:43Lex Fridman?

  From various sources.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I mean, it went through World War II. It went through global recessions. It's just continuing.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And if you continue that out along with software gains, which is all another issue. Um, and they really multiply whatever you get from software gains, you multiply by the computer gains, you get fast and faster speed. Uh, this is actually the fastest computer models that have been created and that actually expands roughly twice a year, like every six months it expands by two.

• 36:22Lex Fridman?

  So we're looking at a plot from 2010 to 2022 on the X axis is the publication date of the model and the perhaps sometimes the actual paper associated with it and on the Y axis is training compute and flops. And so basically this is looking at the increase in the not transistors, but the computational power of neural networks.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yes, the computational power that created these models and that's doubled every six months.

• 36:58Lex Fridman?

  Which is even faster than transistor division.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, actually, since it goes faster than the amount of cost, this has actually become a greater investment to create these. But at any rate, by the time we get to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold. And it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like.

• 37:24Lex Fridman?

  And that's the singularity where we can't even imagine.

• 37:28Speaker 01

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

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible we don't notice that what the singularity actually feels like is we just live through it?

• 38:00Lex Fridman?

  With exponentially increasing cognitive capabilities. And we almost, because everything's moving so quickly, don't, aren't really able to introspect that our life has changed.

• 38:14Speaker 01

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

• 38:21Lex Fridman?

  Looking at history, understand history.

• 38:23Speaker 01

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

• 38:28Lex Fridman?

  Think about it. But we might be distracted by all the other sources of entertainment and fun. Because the exponential power of intellect is growing, but also the.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  That'll be a lot of fun.

• 38:44Lex Fridman?

  The, the amount of ways you can have, you know.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  I mean, we already have a lot of fun with computer games and so on. They're really quite remarkable.

• 38:52Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the digital world, the metaverse, virtual reality? Will that have a component in this or will most of our advancement be in physical reality?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's a little bit like Second Life, although the Second Life actually didn't work very well because it couldn't actually handle too many people. And I don't think the metaverse has come to being. I think there will be something like that. It won't necessarily be from that one company. I mean, there's going to be competitors, but yes, we're going to live increasingly online, particularly when, if our brains are online. I mean, how could we not be online?

• 39:32Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible that, given this merger with AI, most of our meaningful interactions will be in this virtual world? Most of our life, we fall in love, we make friends, we come up with ideas, we do collaborations, we have fun.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I actually know somebody who's marrying somebody that they never met.

• 39:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Speaker 01

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

• 40:05Speaker 01

  And I think it's, I think the love is real, so.

• 40:10Lex Fridman?

  That's a beautiful story, but do you think that story is one that might be experienced as opposed to by hundreds of thousands of people, but instead by hundreds of millions of people?

• 40:22Speaker 01

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

• 40:37Lex Fridman?

  But that's turning our back on our entire history of evolution. Well, the old days, we used to fall in love by holding hands and, and sitting by the fire, that kind of stuff. Here, you're.

• 40:50Speaker 01

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

• 40:57Lex Fridman?

  Great.

• 40:59Lex Fridman?

  So the touch, the sense, it's all just senses. It's all just.

• 41:03Speaker 01

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

• 41:17Lex Fridman?

  Are you excited by that future? Do you worry about that future?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  I have certain worries about the future, but not.

• 41:26Lex Fridman?

  Not that.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Virtual touch.

• 41:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, I agree with you. You described six stages in the evolution of information processing in the universe as you started to describe. Can you maybe talk through some of those stages from the physics and chemistry to DNA and brains and then to the, to the very end, to the very beautiful end of this process?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Well, it actually gets more rapid. So physics and chemistry, that's how we started.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  So from the very beginning of the universe.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  We had lots of electrons and various things traveling around.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  And that took actually many billions of years, kind of jumping ahead here to kind of some of the last stages where we have things like love and creativity. It's really quite remarkable that that happens. But finally, physics and chemistry created biology and DNA. And now you had actually one type of molecule that described the cutting edge of this process. And we go from physics and chemistry to biology. And finally, biology

• 42:46Speaker 01

  created brains. I mean, not all, not everything that's created by biology has a brain. But eventually, brains came along.

• 42:56Lex Fridman?

  And all of this is happening faster and faster.

• 42:59Speaker 01

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

• 43:34Lex Fridman?

  This physical manipulator device.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:38Lex Fridman?

  That's useful for puzzle solving in the physical reality.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  So I could think, I could look at a tree and go, oh, I could actually strip that branch down and eliminate the leaves and carve a tip on it and it would create technology. And you can't do that if you don't have a thumb.

• 43:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  So thumbs then created technology, and technology also had a memory. And now those memories are competing with the scale and scope of human beings. And ultimately, we'll go beyond it. And then we're going to merge.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Human technology with with human intelligence and understand how human intelligence works, which I think we already do, and we're putting that into our human technology.

• 44:38Lex Fridman?

  So create a technology inspired by our own intelligence and then that technology supersedes us in terms of its capabilities and we ride along. Or do you ultimately see it as?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  And we ride along, but a lot of people don't see that. They say, well, you've got humans and you've got machines and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans. And you can already see that. Lee Sedol, who's like the best Go player in the world, says he's not going to play Go anymore.

• 45:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Because playing Go for a human, that was like the ultimate in intelligence because no one else could do that. But now a machine can actually go way beyond him. And so he says, well, there's no point playing it anymore.

• 45:25Lex Fridman?

  That may be more true for games than it is for life. I think there's a lot of benefit to working together with AI in regular life. So if you were to put a probability on it, is it more likely that we merge with AI or AI replaces us?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  A lot of people just think computers come along, they compete with them, we can't really compete and that's the end of it, as opposed to them increasing our abilities. And if you look at most technology, it increases our abilities. I mean, look at the history of work. Look at what people did 100 years ago. Does any of that exist anymore? People, I mean, if you were to predict that all of these jobs would go away and would be done by machines, people would say, well, that's going to be, no one's going to have jobs and it's going to be massive unemployment.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  But I show in this book that's coming out the amount of people that are working, even as a percentage of the population, has gone way up.

• 46:42Lex Fridman?

  We're looking at the x-axis year from 1774 to 2024, and on the y-axis, personal income per capita in constant dollars, and it's growing super linearly. I mean, it's

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2021 constant dollars, and it's gone way up. That's not what you would predict, given that we would predict that all these jobs would go away.

• 47:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  But the reason it's gone up is because we've basically enhanced our own capabilities by using these machines, as opposed to them just competing with us. That's a key way in which we're going to be able to become far smarter than we are now by increasing the number of different parameters we can consider in making a decision.

• 47:26Lex Fridman?

  I was very fortunate, I am very fortunate, to be able to get a glimpse preview of your upcoming book, Singularity is Near. And one of the themes, outside of just discussing the increasing exponential growth of technology, one of the themes is that things are getting better in all aspects of life. And you talk just about, just about this. So one of the things you're saying is with jobs. So let me just ask about that. There is a big concern that automation, especially powerful AI, will get rid of jobs. There are people who lose jobs. And as you were saying, the sense is

• 48:11Lex Fridman?

  throughout the history of the 20th century, automation did not do that ultimately. And so the question is, will this time be different?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Right, that is the question. Will, will this time be different? And it really has to do with how quickly we can merge with this type of intelligence. Whether Lambda GPT-3 is out there, and maybe it's overcome some of its, you know, key problems. And we really have an enhanced human intelligence, that might be a negative scenario.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  But I mean, that's, that's why we create technologies to enhance ourselves. Uh, and I believe we will be enhanced. We're not just gonna sit here with, uh, 300 million, uh, modules in our neocortex. We're gonna be able to go beyond that. Um, because that's useful, but we can multiply that by 10, uh, 100, 1,000, a million. Um, and you might think, well, what's the point of doing that? It's like asking somebody that's never heard music, well,

• 49:35Speaker 01

  what's the value of music? I mean, you can't appreciate it until you've created it.

• 49:41Lex Fridman?

  There's some worry that there'll be a wealth disparity. You know, a class or wealth disparity. Only the rich people will be, basically, the rich people will first have access to this kind of thing. And then because of this kind of thing, because the ability to merge will get richer exponentially faster.

• 50:03Speaker 01

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

• 50:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there were these big sexy phones.

• 50:23Speaker 01

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

• 50:35Lex Fridman?

  So, so achieving scale is, and making it inexpensive is part of making the thing work well?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. So these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty, pretty cheap.

• 50:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, you can get them for a few hundred dollars.

• 50:52Lex Fridman?

  Especially given the kind of things it provides for you. There's a lot of people in the third world that have very little, but they have a smartphone.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 51:02Lex Fridman?

  And the same will be true with AI.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I see homeless people have their own cell phones and...

• 51:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so your sense is any kind of advanced technology will take the same trajectory?

• 51:15Speaker 01

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

• 51:39Lex Fridman?

  So in which other ways, as you outline in your book, is life getting better? Because I think-

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Well, I have, I mean, I have 50 charts in there-

• 51:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Where everything is getting better.

• 51:51Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a kind of cynicism about, like, even if we look at extreme poverty, for example.

• 51:58Speaker 01

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

• 52:08Lex Fridman?

  And the options are increased by 50%, increased by 25%, remain the same, decreased by 25%, decreased by 50%. If you're watching this or listening to this, try to, try to vote for yourself.

• 52:21Speaker 01

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

• 52:39Lex Fridman?

  So only 1% of people got the right optimistic estimate of how poverty is-

• 52:45Speaker 01

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

• 53:01Lex Fridman?

  So literacy rate increasing over the past few centuries across all the different nations, nearly to 100% across many of the nations in the world.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It's gone way up. Average years of education have gone way up. Life expectancy is also increasing. Life expectancy was- Forty-eight in nineteen hundred.

• 53:24Lex Fridman?

  And is over eighty now.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  And it's going to continue to go up, particularly as we get into more advanced stages of simulated biology.

• 53:33Lex Fridman?

  For life expectancy, these trends are the same for at birth, age one, age five, age ten, so it's not just the infant mortality.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And I have fifty more graphs in the book about all kinds of things.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Even spread of democracy, which I bring up some sort of controversial issues, it still has gone way up.

• 53:55Lex Fridman?

  Well, that one is, uh, it's gone way up, but that one is a bumpy road, right?

• 53:59Speaker 01

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

• 54:17Lex Fridman?

  Do you think super intelligent systems will help with democracy?

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  So what is democracy? Democracy is giving a voice to the populace and having their ideas, having their beliefs, having their views represented?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Well, I hope so.

• 54:41Speaker 01

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

• 54:58Lex Fridman?

  So those kinds of ideas have, uh, on social media, what you notice is they increase engagement, so dramatic division increases engagement. Do you worry about AI systems that will learn to maximize that division?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I do have some concerns about this.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And I have a chapter in the book about the perils of advanced AI.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Spreading misinformation on social networks is one of them, but there are many others.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  What's the one that worries you the most?

• 55:41Lex Fridman?

  That we should think about to try to avoid?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard to choose.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  We do have the nuclear power that evolved when I was a child, I remember. And we would actually do these drills against a nuclear war. We'd get under our desks and put our hands behind our heads to protect us from a nuclear war. It seemed to work. We're still around, so.

• 56:15Lex Fridman?

  You're protected.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  But that's still a concern. And there are key dangerous situations that can take place in biology. Someone could create a virus that's very... I mean, we have viruses that are hard to spread, and they can be very dangerous. And we have viruses that are easy to spread, but they're not so dangerous.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Somebody could create something that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous, and be very hard to stop. It could be something that would spread without people noticing, because people could get it, they'd have no symptoms. And then everybody would get it, and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later. So, I mean, and that actually doesn't occur normally, because if we were to have a problem with that, we wouldn't exist. So, the fact that humans exist means that we don't have viruses that can spread easily

• 57:33Speaker 01

  and kill us, because otherwise we wouldn't exist.

• 57:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, viruses don't want to do that. They want to spread and keep the host alive somewhat.

• 57:44Speaker 01

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

• 57:57Lex Fridman?

  Now, you're excited by the possibilities of nanotechnology, of nanobots, of being able to do things inside our body, inside our mind, that's going to help. What's exciting, what's terrifying about nanobots?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  What's exciting is that that's a way to communicate with our neocortex, because it's, each neocortex is pretty small and you need a small entity that can actually get in there and establish a communication channel. And that's going to really be necessary to connect our brains to AI within ourselves, because otherwise it would be hard for us to compete with it.

• 58:38Lex Fridman?

  In a high bandwidth way?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's key, actually, because a lot of the things like Neuralink are really not high bandwidth yet.

• 58:49Lex Fridman?

  So nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth. How much intelligence would those nanobots have?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't need a lot, just enough to basically establish a communication channel to one nanobot, so.

• 59:04Lex Fridman?

  So it's primarily about communication?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:07Lex Fridman?

  Between external computing devices and our biological thinking machine. What worries you about nanobots? Is it similar to with the viruses?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's the great goo challenge.

• 59:23Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  If you had a nanobot that wanted to create any kind of entity and repeat itself and was able to operate in a natural environment, it could turn everything into that entity and basically destroy all biological life.

• 59:51Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned nuclear weapons?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:58Lex Fridman?

  I'd love to hear your opinion about the 21st century and whether you think we might destroy ourselves and maybe your opinion if it has changed by looking at what's going on in Ukraine, that we could have a hot war with nuclear powers involved and the tensions building and a seeming forgetting of how terrifying and destructive nuclear weapons are. Do you think humans might destroy ourselves in the 21st century and if we do, how and how do we avoid it?

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:50Lex Fridman?

  It's unlikely in your mind.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, even with the tensions we've had with this one nuclear power plant that's been taken over, it's very tense, but I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that that's gonna happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in 45, so now we're 77 years later.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we're doing pretty good.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  We've never had another one go off through anger.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  But people forget, people forget the lessons of history.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I am worried about it. I mean, that is definitely a challenge.

• 1:01:37Lex Fridman?

  But you believe that we'll make it out and ultimately, super intelligent AI will help us make it out as opposed to destroy us?

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  I think so, but we do have to be mindful of these dangers and there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons.

• 1:01:55Lex Fridman?

  So to get back to merging with AI, would we be able to upload our mind in a computer?

• 1:02:06Lex Fridman?

  In a way where we might even transcend the constraints of our bodies. So copy our mind into a computer and leave the body behind.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Let me describe one thing I've already done with my father.

• 1:02:21Lex Fridman?

  That's a great story.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  So we created a technology, This Is Public, came out, I think, six years ago, where you could ask any question and the released product, which I think is still on the market, it would read 200,000 books and then find the one sentence in 200,000 books that best answered your question.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  It's actually quite interesting. You can ask all kinds of questions and you get the best answer in 200,000 books.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  But I was also able to take it and not go through 200,000 books, but go through a book that I put together, which is basically everything my father had written. So everything he had written, I had gathered and we created a book. Everything that Frederick Esrell had written. Now, I didn't think this actually would work that well because

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  stuff he had written was stuff about how to lay out. I mean, he did directed choral groups and music groups and he would be laying out how the people should, where they should sit and how to fund this and all kinds of things that really weren't, didn't seem that interesting.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  And yet, when you ask a question, it would go through it and it would actually give you a very good answer. So I said, well, you know, who's the most interesting composer? And he said, well, definitely Brahms. And he would go on about how Brahms was fabulous and talk about the importance of music education and.

• 1:04:18Lex Fridman?

  So you could have essentially a question and answer, a conversation with him?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Could have a conversation with him, which was actually more interesting than talking to him, because if you talked to him, he'd be concerned about how they're going to lay out this property to give a choral group.

• 1:04:34Lex Fridman?

  He'd be concerned about the day to day versus the big questions.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:04:39Lex Fridman?

  And you did ask about the meaning of life and he answered, love.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you miss him?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:20Lex Fridman?

  What did you learn about life from your father? What part of him is with you now?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:55Lex Fridman?

  Do you have that in you?

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Lex Fridman?

  That kind of light that shines?

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  And you fell in love with it in the same way he did with music?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I remember. This actually happened with my grandmother. She had a manual typewriter. And she wrote a book, One Life Is Not Enough. It's actually a good title for a book I might write. But, and it was about a school she had created. Well, actually, her mother created it. So my mother's mother's mother created the school in 1868. And it was the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls. It went through 14th grade. If you were a girl and you were lucky enough to get an education at all, it would go through like ninth grade.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  And many people didn't have any education as a girl. Uh, this went through 14th grade. Um, her mother created it, she took it over. And the, and the book was about, uh, the history of the school and her involvement with it. Um, when she presented it to me, I was not so interested in the story of the book, of the school. But I was totally amazed with this manual typewriter. I mean, here was something you could put a blank piece of paper into, and you could turn it into something that looked like it came from a book. And you could actually type on it, and it looked like it came from a book.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  It was just amazing to me. And I could see actually how it worked. And I was also interested in magic. Um, but in magic, if somebody actually knows how it works, the magic goes away. The magic doesn't stay there if you actually understand how it works. But here was technology, I didn't have that word when I was five or six. And the magic was still there for you? The magic was still there, even if you knew how it worked. Yeah. So I became totally interested in this and then went around, collected little pieces of mechanical objects. From bicycles, from broken radios, I would go through the neighborhood.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Uh, this was an era where you would allow a five or six year old to like run through the neighborhood and do this. We don't do that anymore. But, but I didn't know how to put them together. I said, if I could just figure out how to put these things together, I could solve any problem. And I actually remember talking to these very old girls, I think they were ten,

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  and telling them, if I could just figure this out, we could fly, we could do anything. And they said, well, you have quite an imagination.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  And then when I was in third grade, so I was like eight, created like a virtual reality theater where people could come on stage and they could move their arms. And all of it was controlled through one control box. It was all done with mechanical technology. And it was a big hit in my third grade class. And then I went on to do things in junior high school, science fairs and high school science fairs, where I won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. So, I mean, I became committed to technology when I was five or six years old.

• 1:09:39Lex Fridman?

  You've talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think, to come up with ideas as a source of creativity. Could you maybe talk through that? Maybe the process of how to, you've invented a lot of things. You've came up and thought through some very interesting ideas. What advice would you give? Or can you speak to the process of thinking? Of how to think, how to think creatively?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, sometimes I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that. But I think the key issue that I would tell younger people

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  is to put yourself in the position that what you're trying to create already exists.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  And then you're explaining like.

• 1:10:35Lex Fridman?

  How it works?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10:38Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting. You paint a world that you would like to exist, you think it exists, and reverse engineer that.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:57Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant, and that requires some imagination, too, some first principles thinking. You have to visualize that world. That's really interesting.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  And generally, when I talk about things we're trying to invent, I would use the present tense as if it already exists, not just to give myself that confidence, but everybody else who's working on it.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  We just have to kind of do all the steps in order to make it actual.

• 1:11:31Lex Fridman?

  How much of a good idea is about timing?

• 1:11:35Lex Fridman?

  How much is it about your genius versus that its time has come?

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Timing is very important. I mean, that's really why I got into futurism. I didn't, I wasn't inherently a futurist. That was not really my goal.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  It's really to figure out when things are feasible. We see that now with large-scale models, the very large-scale models like GPT-3. It started two years ago.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Four years ago, it wasn't feasible. In fact, they did create GPT-2, which didn't work.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  So it required a certain amount of timing, having to do with this exponential growth of computing power.

• 1:12:27Lex Fridman?

  So futurism in some sense is a study of timing, trying to understand how the world will evolve.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Lex Fridman?

  And when will the capacity for certain ideas emerge?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  And that's become a thing in itself, then, to try to time things in the future.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  But really, its original purpose was to time my products. I mean, I did OCR in the 1970s, because OCR is.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  It doesn't require a lot of computation.

• 1:13:01Lex Fridman?

  Optical character recognition.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we were able to do that in the 70s. And I waited till the 80s to address speech recognition, since that requires more computation.

• 1:13:14Lex Fridman?

  So you were thinking through timing when you're developing those things.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Lex Fridman?

  Has its time come?

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Lex Fridman?

  And that's how you've developed that brain power to start to think in a futuristic sense. When, how will the world look like in 2045 and work backwards?

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Lex Fridman?

  And how it gets there?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:51Lex Fridman?

  So you developed that muscle of predicting the future and then applied broadly and started to discuss how it changes the world of technology, how it changes the world of human life on Earth. In Danielle, one of your books, you write about someone who has the courage to question assumptions that limit human imagination to solve problems. And you also give advice on how each of us can have this kind of courage.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's good that you picked that quote because I think that that symbolized what Danielle is about.

• 1:14:27Lex Fridman?

  Courage. So how can each of us have that courage to question assumptions?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  I mean, we see that when people can go beyond the current realm and create something that's new. I mean, take Uber, for example. Before that existed, you never thought that that would be feasible. And it did require changes in the way people work.

• 1:14:54Lex Fridman?

  Is there practical advices you give in the book about what each of us can do to be a Danielle?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Well, she looks at the situation and tries to imagine

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  how she can overcome various obstacles. And then she goes for it. And she's a very good communicator, so she can communicate

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  these ideas to other people.

• 1:15:25Lex Fridman?

  And there's practical advice of learning to program and recording your life and things of this nature. Become a physicist. So you list a bunch of different suggestions of how to throw yourself into this world.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a idea how young people can actually change the world by

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  learning all of these different skills.

• 1:15:52Lex Fridman?

  And at the core of that is the belief that you can change the world. That your mind, your body can change the world.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:16:03Lex Fridman?

  And not letting anyone else tell you otherwise.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  That's very good, exactly.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  When we upload the story you told about your dad and having a conversation with him. We're talking about uploading your mind to the computer.

• 1:16:22Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we'll have a future with something you call afterlife? We'll have avatars that mimic increasingly better and better our behavior, our appearance, all that kind of stuff? Even those are perhaps not no longer with us?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, we need some information about about them. I mean, I think about my father.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  I have what he wrote. Now, he didn't have a word processor, so he didn't actually write that much. And our memories of him aren't perfect. So how do you even know if you've created something that's satisfactory? Now, you could do a Frederick Hurwell Turing test. It seems like Frederick Hurwell to me. But the people who remember him, like me, don't have a perfect memory.

• 1:17:14Lex Fridman?

  Is there such a thing as a perfect memory? Maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel

• 1:17:25Lex Fridman?

  A certain way.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that would be the goal.

• 1:17:28Lex Fridman?

  And that's the connection we have with loved ones. It's not really based on very strict definition of truth. It's more about the experiences we share.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Lex Fridman?

  And they get morphed through memory. But ultimately, they make a smile.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:47Lex Fridman?

  So do you think we'll have a world of replicants? Of copies? Would there be a bunch of Ray Kurzweils? Like, I could hang out with one. I can download it for five bucks and have a best friend, Ray.

• 1:18:02Lex Fridman?

  And you, the original copy, wouldn't even know about it?

• 1:18:07Lex Fridman?

  Is that, do you think that world is? First of all, do you think that world is feasible? And do you think there's ethical challenges there? Like, how would you feel about me hanging out with Ray Kurzweil and you not knowing about it?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Doesn't strike me as a problem.

• 1:18:28Lex Fridman?

  Which which you, the original?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Would you strike, would that cause a problem for you?

• 1:18:34Lex Fridman?

  No, I I enjoy, I would really very much enjoy it.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  No, not just hang out with me, but if somebody hang out with you, a replicant of you.

• 1:18:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think I would start, it sounds exciting, but then what if they start doing better than me? And and take take over my friend group? And then, and then I, because because they may be an imperfect copy. Or there may be more social, all these kinds of things. And then I become like the old version. That's not not nearly as exciting. Maybe they're a copy of the best version of me on a good day.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:25Lex Fridman?

  So it's, but it is a kind of

• 1:19:29Lex Fridman?

  death of this version of you.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Well, not necessarily. I mean, you can still be alive, right?

• 1:19:36Lex Fridman?

  But, and you would be proud, okay, so it's like having kids and you're proud that they've done even more than you were able to do.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:55Lex Fridman?

  Well, that replicant should probably have the same rights as you do.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:26Lex Fridman?

  I think you're gonna have to have laws that say yes. There has to be, if you want to create a replicant, they have to have all the same rights as human rights.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Well, you don't know. Someone could create a replicant, say, well, it's a replicant, but I didn't bother getting their rights and so.

• 1:20:42Lex Fridman?

  But that would be illegal. I mean, like, if you do that, you have to do that in the black market. If you want to get an official replicant.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:05Lex Fridman?

  Sure. So there has to be at least one. And then all the other ones kind of share the rights. Yeah, I just don't, I don't think that, that's very difficult to conceive for us humans, the idea of this country.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  If you create a replicant that has certain, I mean, I've talked to people about this, including my wife, who would like to get back her father. And she doesn't worry about who has rights to what. She would have somebody that she could visit with and might give her some satisfaction. And they wouldn't, she wouldn't care about any of these other rights.

• 1:21:49Lex Fridman?

  What does your wife think about multiple Ray Kurzweils? Have you had that discussion?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  I haven't addressed that with her.

• 1:21:58Lex Fridman?

  I think ultimately, that's an important question. Loved ones, how they feel about, there's something about love.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's the key thing, right? If the loved one's rejected, it's not gonna work very well.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  So the loved ones really are the key determinant whether or not this works or not.

• 1:22:20Lex Fridman?

  But there's also ethical rules. We have to contend with the idea and we have to contend with that idea with AI.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  And that's what's going to motivate this.

• 1:22:47Lex Fridman?

  And that person lives on in some form. And the more data we have, the more we're able to reconstruct that person and allow them to live on.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Right. And eventually, as we go forward, we're going to have more and more of this data because we're going to have nanobots that are inside our neocortex and we're going to collect a lot of data. In fact, anything that's data is always collected.

• 1:23:16Lex Fridman?

  There is something a little bit sad, which is becoming,

• 1:23:22Lex Fridman?

  or maybe it's hopeful, which is more and more common these days, which when a person passes away, you have their Twitter account. You know, and you have the last tweet they tweeted, like something they.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:45Lex Fridman?

  I think that's really exciting because I think in some sense, like if I were to die today, in some sense, I would continue on if I continued tweeting. I tweet, therefore I am.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:10Lex Fridman?

  Do you hope, do you think, do you hope humans will become a multi-planetary species? You've talked about the phases, the six epochs, and one of them is reaching out into the stars in part.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Yes, but the kind of attempts we're making now to go to other planetary objects doesn't excite me that much because it's not really advancing anything.

• 1:24:39Lex Fridman?

  It's not efficient enough?

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're also putting out other human beings, which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects. What I'm really talking about in the sixth epoch, the universe wakes up. It's where we can spread our superintelligence throughout the universe. And that doesn't mean sending very soft, squishy creatures like humans.

• 1:25:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the universe wakes up.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:25:29Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that our bots might meet?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  My hunch is no. Most people say yes, absolutely. I mean,

• 1:25:42Lex Fridman?

  The universe is too big.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  And they'll cite the Drake equation. And I think in Singularity is Near, I have two analyses of the Drake equation, both with very reasonable assumptions. And one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations in each galaxy.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  And another one gives you one civilization, and we know of one. A lot of the analyses are forgetting the exponential growth of computation. Because we've gone from where the fastest way I could send a message to somebody was with a pony. Which was what, like a century and a half ago?

• 1:26:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  To the advanced civilization we have today, and if you accept what I've said, go forward a few decades, you're gonna have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization compared to a pony, and that's in a couple hundred years.

• 1:26:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the speed and the scale of information transfer is just, is growing exponentially in a blink of an eye.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Now, think about these other civilizations. They're gonna be spread out at cosmic times. So if something is like ahead of us or behind us, it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions of years, which isn't that much. I mean, the world is billions of years old, 14 billion or something. So even a thousand years, if two or 300 years is enough to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization, we would see that. So of other civilizations that have occurred, okay, some might be behind us, but some might be ahead of us.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  If they're ahead of us, they're ahead of us by thousands, millions of years, and they would be so far beyond us, they would be doing galaxy-wide engineering.

• 1:27:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  But we don't see anything doing galaxy-wide engineering.

• 1:27:59Lex Fridman?

  So either they don't exist, or this very universe is a construction of an alien species. We're living inside a video game.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:18Lex Fridman?

  Do you, do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment, that we're living in a simulation?

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  The universe is computational, so we are an example in a computational world. Therefore...

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  It is a simulation. It doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world, but it nonetheless is taking place in a computational world. And everything that's going on is basically a form of computation. So you really have to define what you mean by this whole world being a simulation.

• 1:29:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, then, it's the teenager that makes the video game. You know, us humans with our current limited cognitive capability have strived to understand ourselves and we have created religions. We think of God, whatever that is. Do you think God exists? And if so, who is God?

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  I alluded to this before. We started out with lots of particles going around.

• 1:29:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  And there's nothing that represents love and creativity. And somehow, we've gotten into a world where love actually exists. And that has to do actually with consciousness, because you can't have love without consciousness. So to me, that's God. The fact that we have something where love, where you can be devoted to someone else and really feel that love, that's God. And if you look at the Old Testament, it was actually created by several different

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  rabbins in there. And I think they've identified three of them.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  One of them dealt with God as a person that you can make deals with, and he gets angry and he wreaks vengeance on various people. But two of them actually talk about God as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and so forth. That's how they describe God. So that's my view of God, not as a person in the sky that you can make deals with.

• 1:31:09Lex Fridman?

  It's whatever the magic that goes from basic elements to things like consciousness and love. Do you think, one of the things I find extremely beautiful and powerful is cellular automata, which you also touch on. Do you think whatever the heck happens in cellular automata, where interesting, complicated objects emerge, God is in there too? The emergence of love in this seemingly primitive universe?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's the goal of creating a replicant, is that they would love you and you would love them. There wouldn't be much point of doing it if that didn't happen.

• 1:31:53Lex Fridman?

  But all of it, I guess what I'm saying about cellular automata is, it's primitive building blocks and they somehow create beautiful things. Is there some deep truth to that about how our universe works? Is the emergence from simple rules, beautiful, complex objects can emerge? Is that the thing that made us?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Lex Fridman?

  As we went through all the six phases of reality?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:31Lex Fridman?

  Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of it?

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Yes, but I keep going back to my idea of being able to expand human life quickly enough in advance of our getting there. Longevity is cape velocity. Which we're not quite at yet. But I think we're actually pretty close. Particularly with, for example, doing simulated biology. I think we can probably get there within, say, by the end of this decade. And that's my goal.

• 1:33:13Lex Fridman?

  You hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity? Do you hope to achieve immortality?

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:32Lex Fridman?

  A long time, a long time of living well.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:48Lex Fridman?

  How do you think we do it? So there's practical things. In transcend, the nine steps to living well forever, your book, you describe just that. There's practical things like health, exercise, all those things.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we live in a body that doesn't last forever. There's no reason why it can't, though. And we're discovering things, I think, that will extend it. But you do have to deal with, I mean, I've got various issues. Went to Mexico forty years ago, developed salmonella. I created pancreatitis, which gave me a strange form of diabetes. It's not type one diabetes because it's an autoimmune disorder that destroys your pancreas. I don't have that.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  But it's also not type two diabetes because type two diabetes is your pancreas works fine, but your cells don't absorb the insulin well. I don't have that either. The pancreatitis I had partially damaged my pancreas, but it was a one-time thing. It didn't continue. And I've learned now how to control it. But so that's just something I had to do in order to continue to exist.

• 1:35:19Lex Fridman?

  Since your particular biological system, you had to figure out a few hacks. And the idea is that science would be able to do that much better, actually.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I do spend a lot of time just tinkering with my own body to keep it going. So I do think I'll last till the end of this decade, and I think we'll achieve longevity, escape velocity. I think that we'll start with people who are very diligent about this. Eventually, it'll become sort of routine that people will be able to do it. So if you're talking about kids today, or even people in their twenties or thirties, it's really not a very serious problem. I have had some discussions with relatives who were like almost a hundred and saying,

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  well, we're working on it as quickly as possible, but I don't know if that's going to work.

• 1:36:16Lex Fridman?

  Is there a case, this is a difficult question, but is there a case to be made against living forever? That a finite life, that mortality is a feature, not a bug? That, that, living a shorter, so dying makes ice cream taste delicious, makes life intensely beautiful, more than, uh, otherwise might be.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Most people believe that way, except if you present a death of anybody they care about or love, they find that extremely depressing. And I know people who feel that way 20, 30, 40 years later, they still want them back. So, I mean, death is not something to celebrate, but we've lived in a world where people just accept this. Life is short. You see it all the time on TV, life's short, you have to take advantage of it. And nobody accepts the fact that you could actually go beyond normal lifetimes.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  But anytime we talk about death, or a death of a person, even one death is a terrible tragedy. If you have somebody that lives to 100 years old, we still love them in, in return. And there's no limit, limitation to that. In fact, these kinds of trends are going to provide greater and greater opportunity for everybody, even if we have more people.

• 1:37:57Lex Fridman?

  So, let me ask about an alien species, or a super intelligent AI 500 years from now, that will look back and remember Ray Kurzweil, version zero.

• 1:38:11Lex Fridman?

  The before the replicants spread. How do you hope they remember you? In a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summary of Ray Kurzweil? What do you hope your legacy is?

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I do hope to be around, so that's.

• 1:38:27Lex Fridman?

  Some version of you, yes.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:38:30Lex Fridman?

  You think you'll be the same person around?

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  I mean, am I the same person I was when I was?

• 1:38:34Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Twenty or ten?

• 1:38:37Lex Fridman?

  You would be the same person in that same way, but yes, we're different. We're different. All we have of that, all you have of that person is your memories, which are probably distorted in some way. Maybe you just remember the good parts, depending on your psyche. You might focus on the bad parts, might focus on the good parts.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:12Lex Fridman?

  How will you and the other super intelligent AIs remember you of today from 500 years ago? What do you hope to be remembered by this version of you? Before the singularity?

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:57Lex Fridman?

  And optimism that permeates your work. Optimism about the future. Because ultimately, that optimism paves the way for building a better future.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 1:40:10Lex Fridman?

  So you asked.

• 1:40:14Lex Fridman?

  Your dad about the meaning of life and he said, "Love, let me ask you the same question. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This beautiful journey that we're on in phase four, reaching for phase five of this evolutionary information processing. Why?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:50Lex Fridman?

  Love is the meaning of life. The AI version of your dad had a good point. Well, I think that's a beautiful way to end it. Ray, thank you for your work. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for dreaming about a beautiful future and creating it along the way. And thank you so much for spending your really valuable time with me today. This was awesome.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's my pleasure and you have some great insights both into me and into humanity as well. So I appreciate that.

• 1:41:21Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ray Kurzweil. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Isaac Asimov. It is change, continuous change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision could be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. This in turn means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.