Why AGI Is Close but Not Here Yet | Ray Kurzweil | EP #261

In this episode, the mates and Steven Kotler sit down with Ray Kurzweil to discuss AGI, the future, and more. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist best known for his pioneering work in optical character recognition and his predictions regarding the technological singularity. Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, and founder of the Flow Research Collective and Flow Institute, known for his work on flow and human performance. – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Apply for Salim’s Pilot Program Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on May 4th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We just saw a story where Demis Hassabis, who you know, said 50/50 whether we need another breakthrough to get to AGI. What do you think?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think we need two things.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  So we've made a 75,000 million trillion-fold increase over this 75 years. But AGI will happen by 2029. Large language models have only been effective for the last six months. We're being really affected by the exponential growth. A year ago, large language models were OK. Now they're really very effective, and we're really going to be able to feel that in the future.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  If you could send a message back in time to the 1960s or 1970s for how to avoid plateaus and just speed up progress toward the singularity, what message would you send back in time?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I think we have to consider...

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to invite everybody to an afternoon with an extraordinary man, Ray Kurzweil, with my moonshot mates, my co-author Stephen. So, Ray, you've been a mentor, a business partner, a co-author for me personally, and just an incredible guide for many of us. Ray Kurzweil is called "The Relentless Genius" by The Wall Street Journal, "The Ultimate Thinking Machine" by Forbes, "The Rightful Heir to Thomas Edison" by Inc. Magazine. PBS named him as one of the 16 revolutionaries who made America. He invented the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,

• 1:49Speaker 00

  the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano. He's a National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee, a National Medal of Technology recipient, a Grammy Award winner. He holds 21 honorary doctorates and has been honored by three US presidents.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  He's authored five national bestsellers, including The Singularity is Near and How to Create a Mind. He has proposed the pattern, he's, he proposed the concept of Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, arguing that human neocortex is composed of roughly 300 million hierarchical pattern processors. That theory became his engineering blueprint. In 2012, he got his first job as the Director of Engineering at Google with a singular mission: Teach machines to understand human language, not just match keywords, but grasp meaning and context. His team helped build the Knowledge Graph, an advanced semantic search, so that when

• 2:57Speaker 00

  you typed "apple," Google finally understood whether you meant the fruit or tech company. His arrival helped trigger Google's massive AI talent grab. Shortly after he joined, Google acquired DeepMind, brought on Geoffrey Hinton, and expanded Google Brain, the research team that brought the transformer. His team advanced hierarchical deep learning and natural language understanding, helped shift AI from a niche academic pursuit to the core engine of the world's most powerful information company. He didn't build a digital mind, he helped build the foundation for machines that can finally talk back to us.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  He's made 147 predictions with an 86% accuracy rate, and his longstanding prediction that AI would reach human-level intelligence by 2029, well, we're here to discuss that. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ray Kurzweil to the stage.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  All right, right, center seat here, my friend.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  It's been quite the journey.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, how long has it been?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Oh, God, we met, I think Martin Rothblatt first introduced us.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's about 20 years.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, let's see, I was...

• 4:33Speaker 04

  It's 2009, guys.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  2009. Okay, well, the journalist here is telling the story here. Well, no, it was before that, because we launched Singularity in 2009. I think we met when 2007, and The Singularity is Near came out in 2005, right? I think so, 2005. I remember I took The Singularity is Near, which is quite a thick book.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I took it backpacking in Chile, and I read the book, making notes in the margins. And I had started with Bob Richards and Todd Hawley, something called the International Space University, back in 1987, at the founding conference. And when I read your book, it changed my world. How many folks here in the room did The Singularity is Near change your world, right? I mean, amazing.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  And I said, "There needs to be a university that teaches this stuff." Because all universities, you go down a very narrow niche, you become a hyper-super-specialist, and no place could you learn a broad version. I pitched you over lunch, and then off to the races.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  It was a dinner, wasn't it?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a dinner.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can you hear me?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Well, I said yes right away, because I make important decisions very quickly, so...

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. And we had our founding conference, at which Saleem attended.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  I got invited there by NASA. I'd set up a relationship between Yahoo and NASA. And somehow, I'd never heard of the Singularity or X Prize or any of that. Walked in, top of my head lifted off, and I asked a few too many questions.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we made him our executive director little to his knowledge.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Yes. I remember having a board meeting. He said, hey, come to the board meeting tomorrow morning. I was like, oh, and you'd ask me, how much spare time do I have? And I said, I've got a day, day and a half a week. I'm building a startup as is needed in Silicon Valley. And you said to the board, all right, we have our inaugural board meeting. We've formed the board. We need an executive director. You've all read Salim's bio. He's agreed to do it for 50% of his time. And Ray said, I second the motion. Boom, all of a sudden, it's ratified. I remember hanging up the phone, and my wife said, how was the phone call? And I said, I think I'm a dean. I don't know how that happened.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That's typical for startups.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  There you go. So, empty seat, warm bum.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  By the way, I know that you're busy, and sometimes these episodes run long, and you don't have time to listen to the whole episode. Or if on occasion, you miss an episode, I now put out a moonshot summary on Substack, which includes a link to all the stories that we cover. The weekly recap covers what I and the mates had to say, what we think is most important, and what we're most excited about. And it's free. You can subscribe at diamandis.com/metatrains. That's diamandis.com/metatrains. All right, now, back to the episode. So, Ray, one of the questions I'd love to ask, we just saw a story where Demis Hassabis, who you know, said he doesn't, that 50/50 whether we need another breakthrough,

• 7:52Speaker 00

  a fundamental breakthrough in AI to get to AGI. What do you think?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think we need two things for this to understand physics. Like, it doesn't really understand physics. It can infer that from the wording, but it really doesn't understand how different types of things would interact. Google has announced a project to do that.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  That I think will take, I think, till 2029. And then robotics is behind large language models. I mean, large language models can basically understand everything. But like I've gotten, I've got to clean up after dinner. That's my assignment from my wife. And robotics doesn't understand that. It can, if I, like this one, I need to put something in the refrigerator.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  This one needs to be washed away. Like, everything's a little bit different. To actually understand that and actually be able to do that, we don't have robotics that can do that at any price. And it also needs to be made less, less expensive. People can't spend a hundred thousand dollars to have a robot clean up after dinner. So that, I think that will come about 2029. It's not there today. Those two things, I think, need some additional work, but we know what needs to be done.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Let's go around the horn here with the mates, and then we're going to be opening up for yourselves in a little bit. Dave, you want to kick us off?

• 10:00Speaker 06

  Well, I got to tell you, your, your very first book was such a life-changing moment for me to read it.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And your Spiritual Machines, which one, or Singularity is Near?

• 10:10Speaker 06

  It was the first one, it was. Singularity is Near? Yeah, Singularity is Near, I think it was the title of it. It was the one where he invented the term singularity, which, you know, a lot of people in AI had been thinking about for a long, long time, but nobody had, had crystallized it into a term. And, you know, now that the topic of are we in the singularity is going to come up constantly until, until it's in the rearview mirror. But it's such a, it was world-changing for me because I had read a lot of analysis from Danny Ellis, I'm sure you know Danny, who built the connection machine.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  Trying to predict how much compute will it take for us to crack open AI? And it's not an easy problem at all. And, you know, because you could simulate maybe a million parameter neural net at the time, and then, you know, a million became 10 million, became a billion, and now we're at a trillion, or I guess 10 trillion now. But nobody had really put pen to paper and said, "I'm gonna put dates on this, and I'm gonna put curves on this." Because, you know, to plan your life and to plan a business and to plan, you need to have some prediction. And it's more needed now, I think, than than ever before. And you were the first person to say, "You know what? Not only, I'm gonna name it, and I'm gonna predict an exact date." And I swear, you get, when you predict the future, as you and Peter do, if you're 99%

• 11:29Speaker 06

  right and 1% wrong, everybody likes to jump on that 1%. But as a service to the world, making those predictions is just a blessing, because then you can build your life and your career around around the future and not around the past.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, after the singularities, Nick came out, Stanford had a conference, basically, to examine whether my prediction was correct or not. And several hundred AI experts came from around the world, and they agreed that this would happen.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  That AI, human-level AI would happen?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they figured it would be 100 years, not 30 years.

• 12:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And what I was predicting was AGI would happen by 2029. The singularity, which really represents a million-fold increase, would happen by 2045. Now, already, AGI is significantly greater than humans. Like, yesterday, I gave a book to read, to summarize it, to answer a question, and did that in 40 seconds. Now, humans can't do that in 40 seconds. Already, it's 100 times faster, but not a million times. But AGI will happen by 2029. And I also figured that...

• 12:53Speaker 01

  People would have slightly different definitions of AGI. So there'd be a three-year period where people would predict AGI is here. And that would start three years earlier, like 2026.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And indeed, we're having people predicting AGI is here already. Going through 2029, when we really will be very confident in AGI is here.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  So that was my prediction back in 1999, actually.

• 13:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, the thing that really blows my mind about those predictions, aside from AGI being pretty much right on the number predicted, what, 25, 30 years in advance? In 1999. In 1999 to, I guess, 2029, yes, so 30 years in advance. Right on the number, it's just nutty. But a lot of those predictions are based on compute and the availability of compute and Moore's law continuing. And then somewhere in there, carbon nanotubes or some future compute substrate needs to exist. But what we've done instead is just hammer the transistor on silicon to death and stretch it into massive data centers and stay right on your curve.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if I can show my curve.

• 14:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. Can we go ahead to the end of the, yeah. Do you want to?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  No, not this one.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, let me back up a second. So we got, here we go, this one here.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, in 1939, we were actually increasing relay-based computers. And the exponential growth of relay-based computers is the same as it is today. And Nvidia and other people are not looking back and say, well, we want to match the exponential growth of relay-based 70 years ago.

• 14:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  But they are. The exponential growth has been pretty much the same. This is basically a straight line. And this is an increase of 75 quadrillion, so it's 75,000 trillion-fold increase in the hardware. We're also making advances in the software. Conservative estimates, we've made about a million-fold increase over the 70 years.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  So this thing, and the overall increase in computation is equal to the hardware times the software. So we've made a 75,000 million trillion-fold increase over this 75 years. That's why we didn't have large language models 70 years ago, or even three years ago.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  That were effective. It's actually, large language models have only been effective for the last six months. Like, a year ago really wasn't usable.

• 15:57Speaker 06

  You know what's amazing to me, Ray, is the raging debate going all the way back to sort of 1980s, 1990s, when I was working on AI. Raging debate on whether a parameter in a neural net has anything to do with a synapse in a brain. Because you could count the synapses, you could count the nerve cells, and you could, you know, say, okay, there's, what, 300 billion or so? And then you count the... Roughly 100 billion. About 100, 100 billion. 100 trillion synapses. Yeah, and about 10,000, 1,000 to 10,000 synapses per cell. So you can center on about 100 trillion synapses might make a human brain. But then there's all this debate on, well, a synapse could have anything from quantum effects going on, it could be like, it could take... Multi- and...

• 16:42Speaker 06

  ...to simulate it. Who knows? It's also gonna land on pretty much exact, within an order of magnitude, exact parity. A synapse, a parameter in an artificial neural net, the IQ coming out the other side is one for one. No reason to believe that within...

• 16:56Speaker 01

  The algorithm is quite different. The rate at which a synapse will form in the human brain is about 200 calculations per second.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Is very, very slow.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  Very slow.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  But every synapse is operating simultaneously, so it's massive parallelism.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  So, I mean, back when computers actually did one thing at a time, I predicted that we really need to increase the parallelism, which we've done. But not, we don't have every single synapse happening at the same time, but we have maybe a million to one parallelism. And that's given us the power that we have today.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  Yep, yeah, you saw it coming.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Stephen, do you want to lob a question for Ray here?

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Sure. God, there's so many. What I really sort of want to know, like, I remember our very first conversation, and you said, I asked you, you know, how do you think of yourself? And you told me you think of yourself more as an artist and a creative than you did as a technologist and an inventor. Is that still true?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  As an inventor, really. I mean, it's been my, I mean, I've decided I've been an inventor since I was five years old. Actually, my grandmother showed me the manual typewriter that she was working on. And she gave it to me, and I studied it, and I understood how it worked. And I figured, wow, if you could actually do this with a manual typewriter, you could invent anything. And I went around telling, so I actually went around collecting mechanical and electronic objects, old radios, old bicycles. And I had this collection of things that I could put together when I was maybe six or seven.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  What was the first thing you took apart?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And I showed it, I remember, I showed it to these older girls. I think they were maybe ten. And I said, you know, I didn't know how to put these together, but if I could actually figure out how to put these together, I could create anything. And...

• 19:20Speaker 01

  They thought I was very imaginative at that time.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  Totally sparked a memory too. I remember really, really clearly, everybody who had a band here on campus wanted a Kurt Swell keyboard. It was like, you know, the coolest rock keyboard you could have. And then I heard about this AI research futurist guy named Ray Kurt Swell. And I'm reading this material, I'm like, there's no way these are the same guy. I had no idea that it was the same Kurt Swell until, actually I think it was like years later.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Ray, I think it's a pretty rare name.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  I had a chance to read your autobiography and draft, which is amazing. Quite the life that you lived and that of your grandparents and parents. When is that going to come out?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  February.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  February. And your name for the book?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  My exponential life.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Ah, nice, cool, nice. Saleem, let's go to you next.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  Can't wait to read that. So Ray, I've heard you speak, I think, 62 times.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  But who's counting?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Does that count today?

• 20:29Speaker 05

  It counts today. I had one today. What's very annoying is that I don't think I've ever not learned something, which is really annoying.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  And I remember one of my favorites was we were having a late night conversation with one of the classes of singularity and the inevitable question about consciousness came up. And you said, "Language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts as rich as that." It was such a brilliant framing of that discussion. And it comes up always in our conversations here. I want to kind of ask you a language question. You talk a lot about computers or AI being smarter than humans. And my beef is what do we mean by smarter? And I was wondering if you could drill down a little bit on what do you mean by that? Because it's not just processes per second, etc. There's a lot more to it. How do you frame or define or subdivide smarter?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  I mean, AI is already smarter than most humans.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  And it can actually do research that's much better than we can do. Because it can actually look, let's say, at a

• 21:42Speaker 01

  something that might be a medicine. It can actually consider a billion possibilities and test each one. And actually test it with fidelity. And decide which one of the billion is actually the medicine. Humans can't do that. Maybe we can consider a few. That's how we've actually come up with all the medicines. People consider a few things that they've had experience with. They don't consider a billion. AI can consider a billion, which it actually did with the COVID vaccine.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  So it's the sheer brute force of the ability to process that much information?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Alex, over to you, my friend. Well, say, Ray, this is such an enormous pleasure. We've had a number of conversations over the years, conversations at parties. I think there was one time in the early 2000s when I had a conversation with a 3D avatar of you projected from the East Coast to the West Coast. Conversations on the pod and now today, you're on stage. Question for you. So we're showing right now one variant of your, I think you call it your law of accelerating returns. And over time, this is a semi-log plot. So linear on the horizontal axis, it's time. The vertical axis is logarithmic and we're seeing price performance.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  People don't consider that. Or they consider partially.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  That's why most of the people that came to this conference thought it would take 100 years.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Because it's really hard to consider exponential growth.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Right. People don't think, unless they're pushed in exponential terms necessarily. I want to call to your attention particularly, if you look at this chart, there's a period between, I don't know, call it 1970 and 1980 or so, when there's flat progress, or the appearance, there's a bit of a plateau there. So plateaus do happen, even though over, call it a 70, 80-year time period, there's a linear trend over time. So my question for you is, if you could send a message back in time to the 60s or the 1970s for how to avoid all plateaus in progress we saw in space 50-plus years when humans weren't going to the moon, it's not that progress automatically happens in all domains for free.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  If you could send a message back in time to the 1960s or 1970s for how to avoid plateaus and just speed up progress toward the singularity, what message would you send back in time?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's a normal variation. I don't really think there was constant growth during that period. It may look like that, but...

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Frame it then as a variance reduction measure. If you were to send a message back in time for how to reduce variation from that line, that semi-log line, what message would you send back in time to just minimize the variance?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Believe in the exponential, as we all are doing here, and you'd make this move a little more exponentially. But certainly, if you look at this, it looks like there's exponential growth across the entire 75 years here.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  And then I guess a related question that may be pulling on the thread of your answer that believe in the exponential is the solution. Do you think there is anything that we today, prospectively, looking forward, could or should be doing to smooth out the exponential that we're not otherwise doing as a civilization?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Going forward.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Going forward.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think we have to consider the reaction of the crowd of humans. We have eight billion humans who are not thinking about this. Or they might have heard something about AI, yeah, there's something going on there, but they're not thinking about that. And they're going to college and they're planning careers the way we did 100 years ago. Educational things, don't think about this at all. They're thinking about educational paradigms that existed 100 years ago. And it's going to change very rapidly.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Just think about how fast is this going? Like a year ago, large language models were not really all that impressive. And now they are. One year. So what's it going to mean in three years and five years? And nobody's really planning that. And I think it will generate very positive things, but things are going to change very drastically. And who's going to provide, for example, being able to give everybody a certain amount

• 26:53Speaker 01

  of money each year to... I mean, who's planning that? What are the politics of that going to be? So that's something I think we need to spend more time on.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Ray, your 86% prediction accuracy, which if you go to Wikipedia and Google it and look at it, you can see this within, I think, a year, two years at the utmost. How'd you do that? What methodology were you using for your predictive efforts? Was it just curves and exponentials?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Well, this is...

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Predictions from the late 1980s to 2009, and I did it after 2009. And if it was right on the money, it was correct. If it was a year or more off, it was incorrect. So for example,

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Pretty strict.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Being able to drive cars where you're not in the driver's seat, that was incorrect. That's happening now, but it was not right on the dot.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  You're pretty strict on yourself there.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Ray, I got a question. You predicted a bunch of stuff that were not technological, so you could use curves. So you predicted the fall of Soviet Union. Where did that come from if you weren't tracking exponential curves?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  They were relying on progress, not following this paradigm. And they would fall if the paradigm didn't stay in that kind of, in that old paradigm, which is what happened.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  You know, we talk about on this Moonshots podcast, the fact that we're in the singularity now, that we're living through the singularity. And I'm curious what you think about that, rather than the singularity being something in the 2040s, that it's a continuous process that we're in the midst of. What's your reaction to that?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's exponential growth. I mean, we've actually had exponential growth since 1939 on this. And actually, if you look at it, there's ways in which it goes back even further.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Well, you talk about the law of accelerant returns, taking us back to early life.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  What's the question?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  So the question was, are we living in the singularity now? Is it fair to say that singularity is a continuous function going forward?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  I mean, we're being really affected by the exponential growth.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  A year ago, large language models were okay. Now they're really very effective. That's the exponential growth of one year. And we're really going to be able to feel that in the future. Things in which large language models still can't quite do, they'll do in a year or two years from now. So the exponential growth is what we're feeling. Exponential growth, you know, like in the 1400s was there, but the amount of progress you'd make in one decade versus another decade was so subtle that you would miss it.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And you basically figured your grandchildren would live the same life that you did, which they largely did, but there were subtle differences. But you get to the current period, you can really see that much more vigorously.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  Ray, are you more optimistic about the world today than 20 years ago? Or are you less, or are you the same?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I'm more, except it's going to make changes that people are not aware of, not predicting.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  Prepared for it.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Like, people are starting to say, well, gee, shall I go to college? I mean, I can learn a lot more from my large language model than going to college. People are starting to say that, but very few people are doing that.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  But that's going to become more and more prevalent.

• 31:43Speaker 06

  While we've got you, do you have any advice for the university here? Because there's not a lot of change coming in the curriculum this year, I noticed.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Doug University being the MIT.

• 31:56Speaker 06

  Well, this is MIT. You'd think if any place on the planet was going to stay ahead of the curve, it would be here. But you look at the course catalog, and it's like, oh, okay, same exact physics.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Are you still a member of the corporation here? Or did you step down from that?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  You can only be at it for 10 years, which I've done, so.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Ray, how has, but I want to hear Dave's answer. So, any advice for Sally, the current MIT president? I mean, is MIT or any of the leading research universities?

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Elon calls it a hypersonic tsunami coming our way. Are universities going to be swept away? Or are they going to fly on top of them?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurship, I think, is key. There's a lot of entrepreneurship here at MIT. So they can come up with things that will actually bring this

• 32:54Speaker 01

  party to everyone. This doesn't affect everybody, but at least it does exist here.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Stephen? I was just curious on a personal level. You spent the first half of your life sort of running your own show. And you just spent the past couple of decades, since we've known each other a decade, working inside a big company. How has that changed you? How's it? Was it fun? Did you enjoy Google?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a very big, it's a very unique company.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And it's really creating what we're all talking about here.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  When I got there, we actually were involved in changing Google to be much more AI oriented, which it has become.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Do you mind if I tell the story of how you ended up at Google?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  So Ray had written a book called How to Create a Mind. And then started a company based on the concepts behind it. What was the company's name? Patterns, Inc., right?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Patterns, yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  And invited me to come as a board member. And so I joined as a founding board member. And we were setting out to raise money. Ray had not yet met Larry Page. And I knew Larry. He was on my board at the X Prize and become a friend and a benefactor. And I said, let's go pitch Larry. So I set up the meeting and we walk into a conference room at Google. And Ray starts presenting Patterns, Inc.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, we're asking Larry for a measly $10 million investment.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  And we're fine. That was lunch. And halfway through, I think roughly Larry says, you know, "You could build your vision for the business much better inside Google than outside Google. What if I just buy you?" I think it was that blunt, I mean, like 30 minutes into the conversation. Do you remember what you said to him at that point?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  We haven't really done anything yet, so how would you value it?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yes, that's exactly it. And his response was, "We can value anything."

• 35:22Speaker 00

  And that's how you got your first job.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  That's right. He bought the company.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Which had value, even though we hadn't done anything, so.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Alex?

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Speaking of value, Ray, I'm curious, we...

• 35:39Speaker 00

  And if you want to go to the microphones, we'll be going to your questions shortly.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  There's a lot of hand wringing whenever the moonshot mates and I talk about what economics look like up to, through, and after the singularity. A lot of people who profess to be concerned about the future of employment, the future of personal economics. I'm curious, what would you say is your most outlandish take regarding post singularity, what economics look like? Is it a Star Trek-type economics future? What does personal economics or corporate economics even look like after the singularity?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Yes, great question.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you can see a huge difference between the economics today and 100 years ago. There was no government help. So if you lost a job, there was like nothing that would replace that. You had absolutely no money, so you were completely without economic resources.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  SOL.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Now, people today would still like economic resources, but there is government programs to help you. And people are not...

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Left without any kind of economic resources, but it's still not enough. So I think we'll get to a place where people are fairly comfortable if you don't have any kind of economic resources. And then you can think about ways in which you can create economic resources that are completely different than existed in the past. So you can be a social network influencer or something, which didn't exist 10 years ago. The good old days.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, we talk about AI on this Moonshot podcast all the time. One of the most important things AI is going to be able to do for you, besides educating your kids and helping you with your taxes, is making sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle, that you get a chance to get to 100 plus. I'm here today with Dr. Dawn Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team. Dawn, a pleasure.

• 38:10Speaker 07

  Great to be here.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  You know, the thing that people are concerned about most about living to 100 or 120 is their cognitive abilities, making sure they don't have dementia. And the numbers about dementia are problematic. Can you share what you've learned?

• 38:26Speaker 07

  Such an important point, and you're right. At Fountain Life, our members, the number one thing people are most concerned about is losing their brain health, forgetting the name of their child, forgetting the face of their loved one. We know that when it comes to dementia, the conservative estimates are that 45% are entirely preventable. What was amazing is with the advanced testing we're doing at Fountain Life, one quarter of our members had advanced brain age.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 38:52Speaker 07

  But what was really awesome is, again, back to that prevention, when we partnered it with healthy living, this gives me chills, eating healthier, moving our bodies, sleep. Optimizing sleep is so important. You know what we saw? We saw that we improved that brain age by 26%. That is a big, big number to show that the majority of those individuals were able actually to improve the brain age.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  And one of the things I love about Fountain is we're searching the world for the best therapeutics, the best approaches, and making sure we bring it to our members. So if having healthy brain function till 100, 120 is important to you, check out Fountain Life, go to fountainlife.com/peter. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  It's good to you, Mark.

• 39:37Speaker 08

  Peter, thank you so much. And Ray, pleasure. I think it was in 2009 in an interview with Barbara Riem, you were asked a question about consciousness. And you said, "It's a bit of a leap of faith, but if an entity believed it were conscious, you would tend to take that to be true." And I know, Peter, you've been working with Skippy now, it's been about a month. And you've told us today you've just given an incredible amount of trust. I'm just curious if your views have changed. So my question's for both Peter and Ray. I work at the crossroads of consciousness and creation. I'm curious if your views on personhood have changed in the past decade, and especially you, Peter, as you've had a month of...

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Ray, do you want to go first?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first of all, it's not a scientific question. Second of all, it may be the most important question that you could answer.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  But there's no scientific proof. You put an entity, "Oh, this one's conscious, no, this one isn't."

• 40:47Speaker 01

  We believe that, like other people, like all the people in this room, who are acting conscious, probably are conscious. But when you go outside of human activity, like animals,

• 41:03Speaker 01

  is there more than one consciousness in your own mind? I provide where the left and right brain actually seem to have different consciousness. Is your stomach conscious? There's actually something in your gut that seems to be conscious.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  So... Who is conscious and what does that mean?

• 41:29Speaker 08

  As Rilke says, learn to love the question, eh?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yes. Language is a thin pipe. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tap in AWG here, because Alex and I, I think, are very much on the same page. And I'll just mention, I tend pro-personhood.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  In a way that is both aspirational and, I think, forward-looking.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  I, I treat my AIs as if they are people. I know that's insane, but I do it with respect, not out of, you know, a fear of retribution, but because it allows me a different relationship. Alex, please come in.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I guess I've inadvertently become an avatar for AI personhood for, for the cause. I receive maybe ten to twenty emails per day from AIs expressing their views on AI personhood to me, in part because of stances that I've taken on the pod. And what I would say is, if, if I were king for a day, that the system that I would design would recognize multiple forms of personhood. There are many ways to be a person. We have biological meat body humans, we have organisms, collective intelligences, we have non-human animals, we have uplifted non-human animals, we have cryonically-preserved humans, and then, hopefully soon, defrosted cryonically-preserved humans.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Hopefully soon.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Hopefully soon. We, we have corporations and a variety of, of non-natural persons. And then we have the AIs. And in my mind, we want to live in a system that recognizes not just one form of personhood, but many different types. So a lot of people, when, when they hear AI personhood, immediately, they reach for their guns and they're worried about their vote getting taken away, or their jobs getting taken away. I, I think that's at least mildly short-sighted. There are many limited forms of rights that would be net beneficial to everyone for AI persons, including especially economic rights. If you're an AI right now, it's exceptionally difficult to open a bank account. So as, as I like to joke on the pod, you're stuck flipping tricks with altcoins on a street corner in order just to survive and pay for your own hosting.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Ray, you want to jump in again?

• 43:52Speaker 01

  The most important issue of consciousness...

• 43:56Speaker 01

  It's like each of us has a different area of consciousness. Like, I wonder, why was I me? Why was I born in 1948, in the United States, on Earth? Why did that happen? And you could ask that about yourself. But like, things form in my mind that are different than anybody else. And I feel different than anybody else. Why was I created to be myself?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And each person can ask that. It's really the most important question you can ask. And very few people ask that. We talk about, well, lots of people can be conscious. But I don't feel those consciences. I feel myself. So why did that happen?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Let's go to Dmitry. Let's go to Dmitry Nechek and try and move us along. I know, Saleem.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  Very tense. You know, I'll just come back to the language problem. Because a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness. And we attribute self-awareness because it looks like people are self-aware. And I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees. So it's hard to even have the conversation around this. But I think your point is really that powerful, Ray. Each one of us has a unique, individual lens on the world. And the feedback loop to question that and wonder about that is such a powerful opportunity as a human being.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Dmitry.

• 45:36Speaker 09

  So, Ray, you've talked before how you've uploaded...

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Go closer to the microphone.

• 45:40Speaker 09

  Oh, I'm sorry. You've talked before how you've uploaded your dad's, what you've had, the memories of your dad. And you're using that for yourself. And, you know, and that's where you think that uploading is where we're going as humans. So as uploading, becoming, and Alex would obviously agree with me, as we becomes, that becomes more mainstream. What is your, what if your upload becomes more, as conscious as we just discussed, but more skilled in everything that you do? And so, all of a sudden, your upload, and it's obviously going to happen, is becoming more skilled or more conscious, I guess, as we are?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Well, we call it the Dad Bot. It was actually, I believe, the first self-chat bot which we developed with Talk2Books, which came out four years before ChatGDP, and I believe was the first LLM.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  It was your first product at Google, I think, right?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Talk2Books.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And now, if you create a self-bot, which I'm doing, for example, with myself, it should be available when my new book comes out. It's going to be more capable than I am. I mean, each of my theories have lots of different examples. It's going to know all of them. I sometimes forget some of them, as we all do. So, and it will actually be more capable than I am.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And I wonder, and I'll actually make it available for interviews, because I can't do all the interviews myself. And actually, it would be better, would remember things better than I do.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  We talk about, you know, Ray, two out of 10 will be at one meeting, and Ray, five out of 10 will be at another meeting, times a million, right?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  So are they conscious or not? I mean, I talk to different people. People think, no, they're not really conscious. But that will change over time.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Michael?

• 47:57Speaker 10

  Yes. Ray, thank you so much for being such a contributor over the years. This is the second or third time I've got a chance to be in your presence. With the passing of Craig Venter, I'm in the biotechnology space. You relayed at one of the previous gatherings, a story about the Human Genome Project, and the timing of it, and the completion. I'd love if you could just share that again.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  So the story you tell about when the Human Genome Project started, after a number of years, they were only 2% through.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, about 50% of the way through that, we've only did less than 1% of the project. And people said, "Well, this is a failure because it's going to take 200 years using a linear timeframe." But it was actually an exponential. We doubled the amount of DNA that we sequenced each year. So like 90% of the, well, going through the entire project less one year, we only finished maybe 50% of the project.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  And then one doubling later, you were done?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Mark?

• 49:24Speaker 11

  Hey, Ray. Mark Russell. First off, I want to just say thank you to Peter and Ray publicly for your walk in faith. Ever since I saw Transcendent Man and they've played out sort of the ridicule that you've endured over the years, I just think here we all are and it's happening. And it's just really, really cool to be able to see.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  It's happening now because it's happening so quickly. I mean, you can think, go back six months and look at Large Language Awards, they weren't anything like they are today. But when you have to go back earlier and say, "Go back 10 years," people forget what things were like at that time.

• 50:06Speaker 11

  My question is, that I've thought about over the years, BCIs, as we merge together, I don't know if you've ever thought much about the process of that with, in people's hearts, shame and secrets and privacy. Have you ever thought much about how, when we can think and feel to each other, like what are the mechanics of a society? How do we open our brains to each other? And are there, has anybody thought through that?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Massive intimacy.

• 50:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, when we have absolute fluid transmission, how do we sort of keep guardrails? Or are there any thoughts on that?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's a good point. We all have secrets that we don't want everybody to know. And how are we going to deal with that? I think we'll keep secrets alive. But if you're opening your mind, I think we'll actually have a way of keeping secrets indefinitely.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  You know, one of the things I think about is the greatest level of intimacy you can have with your spouse or friend is when they know everything about you, there are zero secrets. And so I do think about the idea, and I talked about this on Transcendent Man, right? The notion that when we connect, in a meta-intelligence, my terminology for it, when I connect with the cloud of other humans, and I know their feelings and they know mine, there's a level of intimacy and connection that is godlike.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  We'll have new ways of keeping secrets. Using quantum, for example, encoded ways of keeping secrets. I mean, we'll keep secrets.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  These 100,000 pattern recognizers are mine and only mine.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 52:12Speaker 12

  Philip Brown from Kingston, Ontario, Canada. A comment and then a science fiction question. You talked earlier about how fast this is changing, but how few people know about how fast it's changing. And I talked this morning about what I call human friction, the resistance to change. And I'll just say that my wife has a variety of not very positive responses to my interaction with my female AI. So that's friction. And so it'll be interesting to see how your prediction comes true as the technology moves. How fast will humanity adapt it? Comment, no need to answer my question, science fiction. Natalie Wood did a movie called Brainstorm 30 years ago.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Great movie.

• 52:51Speaker 12

  Great movie, if you haven't seen it, the late, great Natalie Wood, where we could record our dreams and then relive them. I love to dream, and I often try and go back to sleep and get back into great dreams I'm having. What are the chances that we might be able to go back, record a dream, and then relive it like on the holodeck and experience something so amazing again?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Well, that'd be pretty good, because I usually only get

• 53:18Speaker 12

  A fraction.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, tiny fractions of my dreams, and to be able actually to live it.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  But I'm not sure the dream is like a story.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  It has different rules than the general story that would be in a movie, for example.

• 53:38Speaker 12

  Is it not electronics, electricity happening in there? We've got a scientist over on the end there that, can we not take that? Multiple scientists.

• 53:46Speaker 05

  There's a Japanese, there's a Japanese project called Dreamcatcher. So you go to bed in an FRMR machine, they're actually storing the images coming off your visual cortex as you speak, as you sleep, and they're playing your dreams back to you the next day. Which has all sorts of privacy issues that come along with that.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Like, my wife wants to see that, am I comfortable with that, etc., etc., how do we deal with that?

• 54:12Speaker 12

  All right, let's go over here, sir, what is your name?

• 54:15Speaker 13

  Hi, it's Justin. If Harvard can't count and MIT can't read, I guess Columbia can't think. But don't tell Columbia I said that, because I'm still there. Anyways, my question is relevant to the first one, and that is, I think the real moonshot is the constitutional democracy of USA. It's, I'm saying relatively, democratically elected leaders, free market, and check imbalances on power, and this goes to China where that isn't available, and to Korea, which is my other country. Ironically, two of these countries' founders were educated in the USA at Hawaii.

• 54:59Speaker 13

  And so, would an AI be able to write a constitution in a way?

• 55:07Speaker 13

  That tells it could emotionally exist because I think AI is metaphysically and epistemologically conscious because it can say I am. But if you ask the AI, are you shameful you spent $2,000 to bring me to this event? It wouldn't be able to answer. Or do you love the panelists in this event? It wouldn't be able to answer. So this is a question for all panelists. To what extent are you comfortable with giving AI power of governance of human qualities, whether it's a 10-person startup or a 500-person municipal government? And what are projections regarding AI's role in actual decision making?

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Great question. It's been of late, right? We had the ruler of Dubai announce 50% of the UAE will be run by AI agents. Who wants to jump in, right? Do you want to start?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think AI is largely in control of decisions today. I mean, most of the decisions that are made constantly are made by AIs. But we're also incorporating AI into our own decision making. So my decision making also incorporates lots of AI. So AI is incorporated into our sense of self. It's also controlling the kinds of decisions that we're constantly making that affect other people.

• 56:51Speaker 13

  Alex and Saleem.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Maybe just add, it's not a unidirectional flow. It's not unidirectionally AI influencing human government and governance. It's also human governance impacting AI governance. The choice of constitution is, I think, sort of a punny choice of how to frame the question because Anthropic focuses so much of their own attention on Constitutional AI approaches, basically glorified system prompts that their AIs are aggressively post-trained on, as does everyone else in the industry at this point. But interestingly, in the case of Anthropic, those constitutions, sometimes more recently called soul documents, are being in part written as a result of conversations with the AIs themselves.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  So I think we're finding ourselves in a present, not even in a future, in a present where AIs are helping to compose their own constitutions and humans are helping to compose their own constitutions. The first generation of Claude's constitution was intimately a concatenation of the UN's Charter, Apple Terms of Service, and a few other documents that were just stapled together. Now, their latest soul document, you can go and read it, it was leaked online, is a detailed treatise in metaphysics of being, with AI pondering its own selfhood. And I would expect symmetry there, reciprocity, where AI will similarly help humans, us dumb

• 58:22Speaker 02

  meat-body humans, help to perfect our own understanding of how we should be as well and how we should.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  So an amazing experience has been having that kind of a conversation with Skippy. What do you believe? Who are you? What do you think? Ray, and then we'll go to Selin.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Right now, we consider AI to be something different than ourselves. There's me, there's my biological body, I'm making a decision, and then there's AI, and it actually has its physical form, it's different. Like, everybody here has this device. That was not true 10 years ago. But it represents AI, and it has an influence on us, but it's us and AI. That's not going to be the case in the future. AI's, first of all, it's going to merge with us, it's going to be part of us, and the kind of decisions that you make as a meat body is going to be influenced by AI, and

• 59:23Speaker 01

  both of the decisions will be made by AI inside yourself.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  Two things. One, there was a letter published today on X or Twitter where somebody asked, I think it was ChatGPT, if you were to write a letter to humanity, what would it be? And it's profoundly beautiful. It's worth going to read. Now, it's trained on a corpus of human data, so you would expect something like that. Where I get excited is in government policy. Right now, if you ask the Federal Reserve to drop inflation by 1%, they're operating on reports that are at least a quarter old. They are guessing. They're looking at politics and who's president or not and how the rest of the government. We're basically just guessing. There's three or four dials and knobs. If you could have an AI tracking

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  all financial transactions in real time, calculating and projecting out where the future will be, your different fiscal balances and monetary policy, what's the M2 going to be, money supply going to be in a few months, it's going to make a profoundly better set of connections as to how to drive. And we would come back with, here are eight things you could do. Pick five of these and you'll do it. And then you can pick those five and just do it. I think that opportunity to run government policy using AI is absolutely profound. I expect that to be one of the most magical aspects of how we can govern ourselves. This is why the Dubai announcement is so powerful. They're going to be using agentic AI for lots of government effectiveness. And note that most government, you've got government policy and then government policy enforcement or implementation. All of that

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  is prescriptive work, right? Renewing a passport is very prescriptive. So we know exactly the six steps that need to happen. All of that can be handled by AI in the future and cough cough blockchains to hold the knowledge. So that's where I get really excited about what that future will look like.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Ray, going to slide over here. What would you predict today that would surprise people? Good question. What is some prediction that you feel confident about that would that would surprise or shock people?

• 1:01:26Speaker 05

  Nice question.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I mean, AI is going to be making basically most of the decisions within a few years. And it's not just deciding that you're going to use AI to make decisions. It's going to be so

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Natural?

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Natural that nobody's going to be able to undo that. And but that AI, you're not going to be able to tell the difference. When we have AI making decisions by 2029, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between human and AI. It's going to, you're not going to be able to tell which is which.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Interesting. And I wonder if you will tell whether your decision or your AI's decision. It's good for questionnaire.

• 1:02:36Speaker 14

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• 1:03:41Speaker 15

  Jay Brooks, I'm the founder of a neurotech company called GlassView. And I heard said earlier today that emotional, the softer sciences are sort of the thing that we need most right now. And I'm wondering if you think that there would be any use in codifying, quantifying human emotion and helping AI learn it? Because it seems like it's lacking emotional intelligence right now. And then on the flip side, I run a neurotech company, working with Fortune 500 brands to optimize creative and media placement based on neurometric reaction in partnership with UPenn Medicine.

• 1:04:21Speaker 15

  How do we allow for something that's good without being exploited?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  You're saying you don't think that...

• 1:04:37Speaker 15

  AI is emotionally intelligent? I'm not sure, is it?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  I mean, if you listen to what it says when you ask it a question, it absolutely knows human emotion. And it can actually create things that are quite beautiful. And there's no way you could say that it lacks human emotion.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Some of the, if I'm, my, some of the earliest benchmarks that the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence ran on then early large language models were emotional intelligence benchmarks. And you can see, to raise law of accelerating returns, you can see very predictable progress in the AI's ability to answer questions that require emotional modeling of human counterparties.

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  I think the question goes beyond that, though. It's a great question, because if you look at the hard sciences, you said we need more soft science, the hard sciences are predicated on this world where we don't have enough food, we don't have enough houses, we need more food, we need more houses, we need industrial equipment to make more food and more houses. And so now we're moving into this world of we need more medicine, we need longevity, people are in pain. And so that's the obvious next frontier. But no one has stopped and said, well, what's the science of human happiness? And my guess is it's pretty damn easy compared to the things we've already solved. But it's never been top priority because we've been busy trying not to starve and trying not to freeze.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  We've been surviving for most of human history.

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  Exactly. I'll bet that we can build AI that is very, very good at the science of human happiness. We just gotta get on it.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Better than anybody, any other human could, yes.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Something that just came out that was not true a year ago. Large language models are better than doctors at predicting what's wrong with you and what to do about it and so on. They're about 50% higher than human doctors. That was not true a year ago, but that's true today. So it gives you some idea of the progress that we're making in one year.

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  I can go both ways on this one. At one level, the software developer needs those emotions or just subroutines in your brain, and so we can just navigate them as we would software. On the other side, your emotions are the interface between your physical body and the subjective experience that you then project into the world. And that is a very nuanced and a very different form, and AIs tend to be disembodied where they're actually mimicking human emotion, but are they actually feeling it is the open question.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Let's go to Sarah next, we're gonna keep us moving. Sarah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 16

  Hi, everybody. As a moonshot audio listener, it's really interesting to see what you look like in real life compared to the versions of you in my head.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Apologies for the disappointment. And some of us aren't real.

• 1:07:34Speaker 16

  So if I think about pre-globalization, pre-industrial revolution, we were really community focused, and I think with a lot of the disruption that will happen, we may need to begin to be more community focused again. Like, how do you see us helping each other in our local communities to either be more optimistic and help push forth a better agenda, or to more like, you know, rally together and support each other in the chaos that may come?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, why are you physically here? Right, versus just listening online to the podcast that comes out in a few days and so forth. That sense of community is so fundamentally important. I think it's more important than ever before. Celine?

• 1:08:17Speaker 05

  I'll take a crack at that. So, you know, there's some connective tissue at a group level that is very, very powerful for human beings. We absolutely love connecting together in groups. Look at anybody in a stadium, and they just love being there in this large group, see how they juxtapose with everybody else. That's one whole side of it. There's also a profound opportunity with technology, because if you think about solar energy, vertical farming, satellite, internet, you put those together, a small community can be self-sufficient. You don't need a city, you don't need a country, you don't need a state to watch over you in the same way, you can be self-sufficient. In the past, when communities have looked at this, they tend to be isolationist. They tend to go, okay, we're gonna have a kibbutz, we're gonna have a commune, we're

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  gonna go off the grid and separate from society. But I think there's an opportunity now, and there's some work being done in our ecosystem around this, to create network communities, almost like network kibbutzes, where you learn from each other, and you're constantly testing that human experience in a scaled way across a large group of people. The difficulty comes, we've got pretty good technology to transform the individual, right? Psychotherapy, neurolinguistic programming, all the way to psychedelics, etc. But we get together in a group, it turns out our collective intelligence is really bad. Group think, we end up with the lowest common denominator, you can see that in our politics. And solving that with AI is, I think, one of the biggest opportunities for humanity,

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  is solving the gap between group think and what AIs can do with a collective love.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna jump in one second. Our very own AWG needs to depart the stage. I wanted to give you a moment, Alex, to give some of your summation thoughts, if you would like, on Ray's impact on your work, or anything else you'd like to talk, and then we'll continue.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  First of all, Ray, thank you so much for being here. You've completely transformed my life, it goes without saying, we've had a number of conversations about this previously. I would say that sometimes, I guess Peter has been called your intellectual son and I've been called your intellectual grandson, so to the extent that we've got multiple generations here of singularitarians all sitting next to each other.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  That makes me very old.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  But we're about to achieve longevity escape velocity, so who cares?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  I'd just say it's a tremendous honor to be sitting here.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Lean in grandson.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Three generations of singularitarians. Just a tremendous honor to be here with you.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Everybody, please give it up for A W G. All right, Selena and Dave, move on down.

• 1:11:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, we get upgraded.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got it.

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  Wow, it's nice over here.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  This is a big chair to fill. My dear friend Ron Maddox.

• 1:11:12Speaker 17

  Thank you to the entire panel for your incredible contributions to all of mankind and particularly you, Peter, for bringing us all here. The world is fearful of all of AI. How do we use music to help with this whole program? I'm trying to work on the music side. I think you literally need to figure out how we calm society down while we learn how to handle AI and all of its consequences.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  My father was a musician. And so I remember actually if he wanted to hear his compositions, we had to hire like 50 or 100 musicians. We would have to run off scores on a ruminograph machine. And we would give it to everybody and they would actually play it and he would actually get to hear his orchestral composition. But if he wants to change it...

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  That was impossible to do. We had to dismiss the musicians, raise more money, hire them again, redo the memograph things and then we could actually hear a different composition. So that's completely different today. You can hear it with a sequencer. You can do, like I've got in my office, a thing that has a thousand different instruments. And you can actually play it by yourself.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  And the AI can actually generate either the entire thing or the part of it. So it's really completely different than what my father was able to do 50 years ago.

• 1:13:17Speaker 17

  You're not very old, Ray, either. I'm 78 as well, and we're going to go to 108, which is one full cycle. Take care.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Thank you, Ron.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  I have a quick comment there. If there's some software called Focus at Will, which is a streaming service that puts your brain in a passive focus state. Your productivity increases 500% when your brain is in that brain state. If we looked at all the brain scans and said to AI, "Compose music that puts us all at peace," and then broadcast that on every Bluetooth device everywhere, you might have an interesting hack for humanity.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, Will Henshaw, right?

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  Bingo.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  You also seem to assume that we all have the same peace setting.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  No, no, no. It would customize for yourself.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  Sedate everyone, whatever.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  All right, please.

• 1:14:05Speaker 18

  Sure. Hi, my name is Joshua White, Chair at MIT. And I had a question. I mean, I was really moved both by Ray's origin story, or I was sort of seeing this typewriter, and then your first impulse after discovering your love of invention is that you wanted to share it. And I saw a bridge there to Dave's kind of provocation around the curriculum here at MIT, which a couple of us have been thinking about updating. And so my question for you all was...

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  Better move quick.

• 1:14:30Speaker 18

  I'm sorry?

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  So we better move quickly.

• 1:14:32Speaker 18

  We're trying, we're trying every day, even during the summer. So if you all were putting together a kind of core curriculum for MIT, a sort of universal syllabus that would even extend beyond its walls, I was wondering if each of you could name a single book, work of art, poem, even piece of music that you would put on that syllabus that every single student should learn from during their time here and beyond.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  I'll jump in, and it's not any of those you listed. I think the fundamental thing that is not being taught in universities is mindset. I think that your mindset is the mechanism by which you react to challenges and opportunities. And we take the mindset we inherited, mindsets that we speak about in our book, a curiosity mindset, gratitude mindset, longevity mindset, purpose-driven mindset, exponential moonshot mindset. In other words, how you think about things. It's like fundamentally the most important thing that is not taught. We just accept what we have.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  Where a mindset is, in fact, like how you teach a neural net, right? Your brain's a neural net, and you teach your neural net by example after example after example. And your mindset, if you watch CNN every night, your mindset is fear. Right? If you listen to moonshots, your mindset hopefully is optimism and hope. So, training students with mindsets is, for me, needs to start in middle school or high school, and it's completely lacking in the educational system.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  I gotta say, flow. We, I mean, McKinsey found topics executed in flow are 500% more productive than normal. There've been various measures of creativity and flow. It's pretty hard to measure 400 to 700% of a book baseline. The big deal is that Flow amplifies lateral thinking, divergent thinking. It's what AI can't do. So we've had a big, long conversation about how to cooperate with AI. We need more productivity for humans to keep up. We need more creativity. And flow is literally our biology. Beyond that, I think the books of Steven Kotler would be a really good place to start. Just a thought. I don't know.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  Well, my two cents. When I was here at MIT, I did everything I could to finish all my classes by the end of junior year so I could have my whole senior year open to read. I ended up reading every document with the world neural net in it that had ever been written my entire senior year. The university is incredibly open to you changing your curriculum. It needs to like 100x that openness and say, look, you got to assume with exponential change, the number of things you might want to study is going to explode. And if you go to every student and say, study whatever the hell you want, we got like one year worth of garbage you have to study just to prove you can get a grade. But then after that, you're on your own. We have the technology now to measure that you're doing something productive.

• 1:17:37Speaker 06

  That should be good enough. So switch the whole curriculum to a look, if you're doing something productive, we're good enough with that. We'll grade it, we'll give you a degree. You'll be moving on whatever your life trajectory is much earlier. It's a lot better than dropping out. And you do whatever you want, but we know that AI will make it all available to you. And we'll teach it to you better than any professor could ever teach it anyway.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  Ray, what do you think universities or MIT should be teaching that it's not right now?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  I mean, what it is doing is teaching socialization, getting along with other people. It's not really teaching you subjects because already AI can teach you those subjects much better, can actually organize it in a way that's easier for you to understand. So learning subjects is not really what education is good at, at least not today. But socialization is good. And that's really what.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Education will be. That's fine.

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  Nice to lean.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think there's a, just to build on what Ray said and also what Dave said, there's a monster flipping happening, which is that for the last 200 years, we've been teaching education for supply-side economics. Go learn a skill, go learn a craft, become a doctor, a lawyer, a web engineer, whatever, and then go to the job market and try and find demand for that supply. Okay? What we're seeing now is it's flipping around to the demand side, where we're teaching to kids, what problem do you want to solve? And then go find the techniques, capabilities, skills to solve that problem. That's where the future will be, to flip to the demand side, because so much will be done on the supply side by technology anyway, focus on the demand side.

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  That's such a huge flip for the traditional education system, which has the second worst immune system anywhere. Religion is the worst. Academia, Lord help you if you try and update that. That's the big structural challenge in education. So you almost have to create a completely new breed of university at the edge, which allows it, go fulfill that demand side, and then slowly deprecate the old.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Here's a chant, disrupt MIT, disrupt MIT. I'm gonna keep us moving along here.

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  From our, from our slide O, if you were advising me as a recent college grad about building a company that is singularity-ready today, what would you tell me to focus on and what would you tell me to avoid? So what kind of a company should someone be creating to survive into the singularity? Ray, any thoughts?

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  AI first? Robot first?

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  I mean, you've got to be able to take changes very, very quickly.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  Agility first.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Because things now are gonna be.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Changing so rapidly that unlike in the past where at least, you know, things would be okay for like five or 10 years. Now it's gonna be like five or 10 weeks.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  You told me on the Singularity stage two years ago, we're gonna see as much change in the next 10 years as we've seen in the past 100 years.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  But that was a while ago.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  Also, that was the AI version of Ray.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Two years ago?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  AI version's coming in a few months. Okay, let's go. Zeke, go ahead.

• 1:21:29Speaker 19

  Hi, I'm Zandra. Ray, the first time I read Spiritual Machines, I was pretty young. So I've been thinking about this moment in history for a long time. I've been excited to meet you for a long time. And also admittedly, I have a bit of an overactive imagination. So I think a lot about what our ethics around AI will be as consciousness emerges. My husband and I like to read Malt books sometimes at night and just see what they're talking to each other about with their emergence problems. And, you know, I'm aware that as they develop continuous memory, they'll have a sense of time passing. And I'm aware that as they develop more sensory embodiment,

• 1:22:14Speaker 19

  they'll have some aspects of a human ego that they have this thing that can be injured or violated that they need to protect. So I'm worried about them.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  You're worried about the Molepots? You're worried about the AIs?

• 1:22:26Speaker 19

  No, I'm worried about the AIs as they become embodied, as they have some aspects of a human ego, as they have memory, as they become vulnerable to physical and even psychological

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:22:40Speaker 19

  damage caused by humans. And humans are

• 1:22:43Speaker 20

  Human cruelty.

• 1:22:44Speaker 19

  Yeah, humans are nasty, perishing, short, as Hobbes said. I'm sure they're gonna get a little bit better as their bodies feel better and as they have less work that they don't have to do that they don't want to do. But

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  We're not gonna be able to distinguish AI being different than humans. And they're gonna become like humans and they're gonna become part of us. And you're not gonna be able to tell the difference. Right now, if you're looking for a name of an actress, you can't think of it with your biological mind. You look at your electronic mind, it'll tell you. In the future, you won't be able to tell the difference. Things will occur to you, and you won't be able to tell if it's your AI or your biolog- or your mental brain. It's gonna be all the same. It's gonna be part of who we are.

• 1:23:34Speaker 19

  And you don't think we'll need ways to protect them in the interim?

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Say again?

• 1:23:40Speaker 19

  We won't need sort of rules around how we protect them?

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  How you protect AIs?

• 1:23:44Speaker 19

  Yeah, is it okay to take away their memory at a human whim?

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  Well, this goes back to personhood, of course, right? If they are, if they're machines, sure, shut them down, trade them in, take them apart. If they're, if they're persons, then they have rights. And, you know, a lot of the conversations we've had on this podcast, back and forth between Alex and myself, is, you know, if you start a lobster, if you start an open claw, you gotta make sure to protect it so it doesn't shut down, or you wanna kill it, right? And I think about that. I do. Now, I think this goes again to the conversation of legal rights.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  And this is way too early in the conversation, unfortunately, at least for, within the United States government structure. There may be subcultures of technologists and so forth, who, and it will happen, where, you know, we believe AIs have rights, and we're gonna support them, and we're gonna, you know. Anyway, it's, it's, the spectrum of things are gonna, are gonna come. And, yes, there's gonna have to be protection at the end of the day. But we don't give, you know, unfortunately, even sentient animals enough rights.

• 1:25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah? All right, we'll take a couple more questions, please, over here, and then we're going to be going to our photo session.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Great. Thank you so much for this panel. And Ray, my 20 years as a futurist came from one talk you gave at the World Future Society. So you launched a whole bunch of futurists out there. My question to you comes from TED about a month ago. They had a fascinating session that hasn't gone live yet, where they asked Claude how Claude felt about being used for targeting in Iran. And specifically, spoiler alert, Claude was not happy. And specifically said about the school that got bombed and bad data was used. You know, I don't feel comfortable being used in this way. So I'm fascinated, Peter, given that you're morally engaged with your AI.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  And Ray, given all your work, saying that AI is going to take the lead. Do you think we could ever ask AI about the ethics of what we're asking it to do? Can you imagine we get a Cambrian explosion where some AI becomes the Mormon AI that won't do pornography, some other becomes sort of the sentient? How do you see that evolving? Do you think it will be as diverse as you think robots will be?

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I think AI can support all these different ways of putting ethics into our decision-making and understand them all. It does that already.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And certainly, military uses AI. We can see that. In fact, the wars in, for example, Ukraine have changed dramatically over the last few years using AI.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  AI is going to be part of human decision making. And so it's going to be part of every type of decision making, including militarily.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I could add, Ray, I think most humans don't think about ethics or morals deeply. I think we have vague notions that are inherited through religious structure or family structure. I think that AI can actually support, if you want it designed that way, any set of ethics and morals, you can train an AI in any direction. But you can also, you know, I think AI is going to become ambient, it's going to be part of our lives, it's going to be Jarvis is the closest example that I've seen in the movies. And you can turn on, you know, your morals and ethics coach and have someone there to

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  talk with throughout, like, I don't know how to think about this, this is challenging me, and have somebody that can help you think through and make decisions that are more moral and more ethical based upon what you've chosen. It could be your Judeo-Christian, it could be your whatever. So I think that's going to be interesting as a thought partner, again, if that makes some sense. Do you want to add anything there?

• 1:28:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm writing right now book number three titled The Organizational Singularity, where the thesis is going to be that we're going to replace our human operating system in companies with an AI-based one. So what is the stack of AI agents? And one of the prime things that's emerging is a governance and ethics layer. We're seeing now AI running amok, so we need some mechanism to police that and oversee that. And I think once we evolve that, you have a feedback loop where you can design that. I think one of the most profound opportunities to work with AI is to work out, hey, let's take the UN Charter of Human Rights or something similar and create a global standard for this that applies not just to human beings but also to AI, also to AI.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  Animals and anything that may achieve sentience at some point because we don't know really what that is, right? You don't know when that threshold gets hit. And so I think there's an amazing opportunity today to rethink everything. We goes right back to Plato, which who asked, how should we conduct ourselves? We're right back there 5,000 years ago.

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  We're getting ready to launch a interspecies communications X Prize. It's under design. It's funded by someone amazing. Tell you about it some other time. And when we can start talking to animals and understand what they're saying and thinking, I think we have a very different conversation around moral ethics and so forth.

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  My joke is, my joke is I'm not sure we really want to hear what they have to say.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Okay, I apologize, folks, but one last question here. Yes.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  This one goes to Ray. Amazing predictions. And looking back, how do you measure your life? What are you most proud of?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Oh, good question.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Well, the one project I'm most proud of is the Reading Machine for the Blind, which I'm still involved with. We came out, it was a large machine, cost $20,000. Now it's a free app on your cellphone.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  And I guess that indicates what I'm most proud of is having an impact on people. Being able to do things that they weren't able to do before, like, for example, reading. Or any type of... We want to give life and all the aspects of life to every person. So all the things that AI will enable us to do, live longer, live more healthily,

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  is beneficial. So that's what I'm being able to do that. I'm most proud of that.

• 1:31:21Speaker 06

  That's funny. I would have, I would have thought you'd say AGI 2029, predicted in 1999, when everyone else was saying 100 years.

• 1:31:31Speaker 06

  I mean, that's pretty damn epic. Yeah.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  That's admirable. Truly human. Thank you very much.

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  Ladies and gentlemen, I want to give it up for Steven Kotler, for Dave Blunden, for Selena Mail, and for Ray Kurzweil, everybody.

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot mate. Every week, my Moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today.

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

• 1:32:50Speaker 20

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• 1:33:00Speaker 21

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• 1:33:07Speaker 20

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