moonshots ep223 ray kurzweil singularity transcript

It feels like we’re in the midst of the singularity. Do you agree that we’re actually in the midst of it right now or are we going to have to wait for some other point to get there? >> One difference of my own perspective versus everybody else’s. Uh >> Ray Kerszswe, the inventor and futurist who’s been working in the field of artificial intelligence. >> Ray [music] Kerszwhile, author, inventor, and futurist. >> I’ve been now in AI for 61 years, which is actually a record. If you look at your 120 odd predictions from 30 odd years ago, only three that were wrong. >> Your first prediction, as you said, that you released in 1989 was that we’re going to reach human level AI by uh by 2029. >> The next 10 years will get [music] us to my definition of singularity, which is we’ll all be at least a thousand times more intelligent. >> What is most exciting to you? And and what’s what are you anticipating most excitedly in the next year or two? We’ll have supercomputers, but we’re also be merging with them. So, we’re going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are

[00:01:00] today. >> When >> that’s going to happen for the same time for everybody. Uh, >> now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. >> Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, the conversation that gets you ready for the future and prepares you for the supersonic tsunami coming our way. I’m here with DB2, AWG, and Seem. Gentlemen, uh, 2026 is off to an extraordinary year. Uh, >> Alex, you’re not in your regular haunt. Where are you today? >> Yeah, where are you? >> I’m in the first R&D small of Paris today. Slowly making my way to Davos for World Economic Forum 2026. >> Taking like a horse and buggy or something. Yeah, you can fly direct. >> Taking the slow route. >> Scenic route. [laughter] >> Scenic routine. Paris in January. >> I usurped your normal recording spot. So, this is your background and your mic and everything. So, I’m >> Yeah. So, here in in Santa Monica, we

[00:02:00] have an X-P prize board meeting today. Dave, you going to be joining the board meeting by uh by Zoom or >> or you’re not here? >> I’m I’m with Ray here in Boston. Actually, we’re we’re uh we’re in the happening spot, but I’m going to be flying straight from here to Davos uh on Sunday uh where Alex and I will be hanging out with Dennis Assabus and the whole gang. >> Amazing. I just got back from Singapore. I had an extraordinary visit there. I was the guest of an incredible bank DBS Sushan who’s the CEO. A big shout out to Susan. Thank you for an incredible visit uh to Singapore. You know, she’s a Singular University alum uh and a fan of our pod. So, uh I just think the world of Singapore can’t wait to get back there. DBS is doing extraordinary work. So, a big shout out to the team there. Gentlemen, uh we have an extraordinary guest today, someone who uh all of us count as our mentors. He’s been a mentor for me for the last 20 years. We’re here

[00:03:00] with the incredible Ray Kerszswe, one of the world’s leading in uh thinkers and futurists. He’s been called the relentless genius, the ultimate thinking machine. He’s got a 30-year track record of accurate predictions uh regarding the evolution of technology in the future. If you go to Wikipedia, you can check it out. An 86% accuracy rate on his predictions. He’s a inventor of the CCD flatb scanner, the first omnifont optical character recognition, the first printto-spech reading machine, the Kurszswe synthesizer, uh the author of the law of accelerating returns. We’ll be talking about that. Uh the author of two books that have set the foundation for all the conversations we hear we have here in Moonshots. The singularity is near in 2005. More recently, the singularity is nearer in 2024. He’s the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He has 21 honorary doctorates. He’s been honored by three US presidents and really the

[00:04:01] gentleman who is popularized and driven the term singularity uh which he famously predicts will happen in the year 2045. Ray, it is an honor and a pleasure to have you here, buddy. >> And a bucket list item. >> Absolutely. >> It’s great to be here. Always great to talk with you, >> Peter See. So, >> yeah. No. And got to love those suspenders, buddy. You you are fashionable on the exponential world. >> I do have to say them. They’re all They’re all hand painted. So, >> are they really? >> Yeah. I do have to say when I read The Singularity is near in 2005 when it came out, I thought it was the most important book I had read in my entire life up until that point. So definitely uh definitely a life-changing book worth buying again and rereading. >> Yeah. Well, it was quite controversial when it came out, which is about 20 years ago. Um, Stanford had a uh basically a a uh meeting of about

[00:05:02] several hundred AI experts to examine its predictions. Uh it was considered very controversial. People agreed with me that it would happen but not within 30 years. They they thought it would happen within a hundred years. Uh and I’m actually running to people who were there. There were several hundred AI experts who came to that conference. uh and they agreed that it’s if anything uh 30 years is 2029 uh that’s a right now that seems overly conservative. People are predicting a little bit sooner than that like 2027 and so on. >> Um but at the time people thought it would be a hundred years off. >> Well, I think it’s important for people to go read the book. it’s so non-controversial today given how things have unfolded and put yourself in the mindset of this being completely

[00:06:00] controversial at the time because a lot of things that we predict on the podcast that Alex says you know they also have that same flavor you know trying to look forward 10 years from today is very very hard and they have that same feeling of well that’s impossible that could never happen uh but if you rewind the tape you know these impossible things routinely happen and And then because of hindsight bias, everyone’s like, “Oh, I well I would have seen that coming.” So I think it’s a good exercise. >> Things are happening so quickly now that looking [clears throat] one year out is like a long-term prediction. >> Yeah. >> Uh I I didn’t like to predict things that one or two years away uh like 10 years ago, but now one or two years away is really kind of a long-term prediction. >> So Ray, you made two predictions. I think it’s important. Your first prediction as you said that you released in 1989 was that we’re going to reach human level AI by uh by 2029 and people laughed at that as you said but the other prediction you’ve made is that we’re going to reach the singularity by

[00:07:01] 2045 and there’s a lot of confusion about okay well if we’re reaching human level AI by 2029 and it’s growing exponentially why are we waiting till 2045 for the singularity could you sort of explain the difference between those two we multiply our intelligence a thousandfold. I mean one difference of of my own perspective versus everybody else’s. Uh it’s not like we have our own intelligence, biological intelligence and then we have AI that’s over here and we [clears throat] somehow relate to AI versus human intelligence. We’re going to merge with it. It’s going to be the same thing. We’re not going to be able to tell whether or not an idea is coming to us from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence. Uh it’s going to seem the same. I mean, if I ask you to think of some uh actress and you think of it, you don’t know where that came from. It just somehow

[00:08:00] appeared in your mind and it’s going to be the same way whether it’s coming from your computational intelligence or your biological intelligence. Uh and we’re not going to be able to tell the difference. Today, you can tell the difference if you actually go to uh your favorite uh LLM. You can tell that it’s coming from the LLM, not from your biological intelligence. In the future, though, it’s going to you’re not going to be able to tell the difference. >> U and we’re going to become a thousand times smarter by 2045. Hey [snorts] everybody, you may not know this, but I’ve got an incredible research team. And every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you’d like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to dmandis.com/tatrends.

[00:09:01] That’s diamandis.com/metatrends. It feels like we’re in the midst of the singularity. Uh, and it’s a smooth function. It’s hard to note that. Do you do you agree that we’re actually in the midst of it right now or are we going to have to wait for some other point to get there? >> I mean, a a lot of things have already amplified dramatically. Um, for example, we can take our models of of biological paradigms and predict what will happen uh if we have uh if we can actually simulate biology. And we’re actually doing that now with biological tests. So we can actually simulate uh millions or even billions of different possibilities and do that in like one weekend. Um and >> Ray, how do you define the singularity currently? Because um in the past you’ve

[00:10:01] put it as a moment in time, then we talked about it as a process. What’s your current framing of it? >> Well, the framing is when we’re a thousand times more intelligent. Um but in some ways we’ll be able to for example simulate biology for medical tests uh even faster than that and we can do that actually today although we don’t have all of the paradigms of of what uh biological intelligence will do. Um so I’ve talked to people who are actually modeling this and the most conservative uh views is that it will take about 5 years from now we’ll be able to have all of the uh conversions uh that are done to to uh biological intelligence uh predicting uh what different chemicals will

[00:11:00] So we can actually try out a million uh tests in one weekend uh and be able to predict that uh very very quickly. We can do that now in some cases but not in every case. I’d love to rewind the tape just a little bit and talk about why you or how you landed the plane so accurately, you know, in predictions going back to 1999 are coming down to basically within a year or two of of what you predicted, which is so different from, you know, when I was at the MIT AI lab, uh, you know, people were predicting all kinds of different things and then they would never happen. And then we get into these AI winters. And and so if you if you go back and read your your books from 2005, you have to put yourself in the context of nobody believes AI will ever happen because it’s been predicted like 12 times in a row and whiffed every single time. Every prediction has absolutely whiffed. Meanwhile, you’re drawing a timeline that’s much longer than other

[00:12:00] people’s timelines. And it’s going to land, you know, the the date of AI having human level intelligence is going to land within 3 years of something you predicted 20 years ago. >> 30 years [clears throat] ago. >> 30 is it 30 years ago? >> Yeah. 1999 to today. Yeah. >> Yeah. Uh and then you know the date where it crosses all combined human intelligence which I guess is 2045 in your in your prediction uh will will likely happen or or be sooner. >> It has to do with thinking exponentially. Uh and people are not used to that. They’re thinking uh linearly think if it took 10 years in the past, it’ll take 10 years in the future. And and that’s really um that’s what what people think about the future is the same as the past. So to really think exponentially requires a certain practice. Uh and and that’s how I got to to this kind of uh this kind of view. Uh

[00:13:03] Alex, do you want to jump in? >> Yeah, maybe to pull on this thread, Ray. First of all, it’s wonderful to be chatting with you again. Always enjoy our conversations. The Turing test, I’ve argued on this podcast in past that the Turing test went by with with a [snorts] whimper, not a bang. It flew by. The Loner prize was cancelled before the touring test was arguably passed and yet it was passed and there was no celebration. >> The Loner test was not a really good test. Uh he had various practices that were really not in in accord with the Turing test. Uh and Turing test is really matching an ordinary person that’s talking not really an expert in the field. AG I think it’s actually a better view because we’re actually matching the best person in each field and

[00:14:00] we have maybe several thousand maybe several hundred thousand uh fields that you could be expert in and AGI means that you can match a human being in any of the fields and then combine the insight into many different fields together which no human being can do. I mean Einstein was very good at physics but he and he actually was interested in playing a violin but he was not an expert in playing a violin. He was only an expert in physics. Uh people maybe can master two fields at the most. But there’s actually thousands of fields and if you could actually be an expert in all of them and then combine all those insights uh that’s something that’s quite unique. So that’s what AGI represents. Whereas touring test is really matching an ordinary person with a a lot of mis uh characterizations of of different

[00:15:00] things. >> I I I agree that AGI and passing the touring test are for most common definitions different standards. The the question I was going to ask though is arguably if if you agree with the premise that the touring test as reasonably defined, not the original gender presentationbased touring test, but the the the subsequent definition >> was was passed without very much hoopla at all. Do you think the same is going to happen with the singularity? There’s in particular one of my favorite scenes in Charlie Strauss’s novel Accelerondo. You have a bunch of characters who’ve been all uploaded to a star wisp traveling to another star system who are all arguing with each other. They’re posthuman uploads arguing with each other as to whether the singularity has even happened. Do you think that’s what’s actually going to happen here where we’ll just singularity will zoom by and we’ll all be arguing with each other decades later? Did the singularity even happen? Has it happened yet?

[00:16:00] >> Uh I mean these standards are not very clear. Not everybody agrees that we’ve passed the touring test. And when we pass AGI, there’ll be disagreements. It’s disagreements now as to what that means. People say it’s basically as good as an uh somebody who’s a little bit above average intelligence. I define it as being an expert in every area when there’s many different areas that you can be expert in. Uh so that’s actually quite uh impressive level and I think we’ll get there by 2029. Uh the thing that’s then you can combine your insights into every possible field. We already I mean have that large language models can answer questions in lots of different fields. No person can do what a large language model can do today uh let alone what what’ll happen by 2029. By the way, we have a we have a moonshots test where you have to you have to fool your spouse for three

[00:17:00] minutes on a Zoom call. >> So, [laughter] uh that’s uh we haven’t defined what we’re going to give to the listener. >> We should do that. That would be hilarious. >> Well, I think that’s a a better benchmark. So, that’s [laughter] our moonshots that that much more closely matches the original Turing test. >> Sorry, Were you going to say? I I was just going to say or rather to ask Ray uh are are you at all concerned about goalposts getting moved yet again as we see happening over and over again with definitions of AGI and otherwise that we will pass your definition of the singularity but nonetheless most commentators will be arguing with each other for a long time after that whether the singularity has actually happened. >> Well, mine is actually pretty strict. I mean to pass my definition of AGI uh you have to be an expert in thousands of different areas which is actually more strict than most definitions of AGI. So I I think I have a a

[00:18:04] suitably strict definition of it. What about the definition of the singularity? because I you know one of the things that really inspired me in both of your singularity titled books is the fact that there’s a moment in time where AI is working on itself and self-improving and that moment in time is where we get this incredible acceleration. It feels like that’s either right now or within the last year or within the next year. It’s it’s it’s imminent and you know we we’re predicting on this podcast a 100x step up in the efficiency of the existing algorithms that’s completely independent of the underlying curve you know that you >> started to see uh AI improving itself a little bit but it really has not gone it’s it’s not really very dramatic. I mean the these definitions are not uh beyond debate and it’s not like everyone

[00:19:00] will agree. Uh take AGI. I mean you could predict that certain number of people will predict that it’s actually there today. Uh but it’s actually it’s a small group. Uh and it will uh accelerate and finally when everybody more or less agrees with it. Uh but that’s a a band of maybe three four years uh and I think it will end in 2029. It’s already beginning. People feel we have AGI already. Uh but most people will believe that I think by 2029. >> Well, that that means your your prediction has to be exact. If if you say that we’ll be debating it for the rest of time and it was sometime between today and 2029, that means you are irrefutably right in your prediction from 30 years ago. So that’s kind of cool, right? Memorialize that right now. >> See, you were going to jump in. >> So, you know, I remember Ray when we

[00:20:00] were in a car with Peter, you and me going to the CNN studios to launch uh Singularity University and announce it. I was a young freshphrased u um fellow and I said, “Ray, they’re going to ask you about exponentials um as part of the briefing and they said, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that may be a problem.” And I said, “What? What do you mean?” I was all kind of freaked out. And you said, “I’d better bone up on the subject.” And it took me like 10 seconds to realize that you were joking. And I think one of my favorite things about you is the unbelievable sense of humor, dry humor that you bring to the table. Here’s my question for you. You know, you’ve been kind of saying this very steadily for 30 years, right? At the beginning, it must have been very hard. Um, uh, saying this to people who are just like, he is out of his mind. What is he talking about? Is it easier for you now? Do you feel a sense of of, uh, accomplishment that many more people are talking about it and saying, “Yep, he was right, etc., etc.” Do you feel some sense of that? >> Well, yes and no. [clears throat] Um the

[00:21:02] basic debate about whether or not this will happen and is it going to be exactly 2029 or something has gone away. People actually accept that. I run into very few people that say oh no it’s going to be you know 500 years from now. Uh on the other hand the the issue has changed from is it going to happen to is it good for humanity >> and and that’s a big debate. Uh, yes, it’s going to happen, but it’s we’re all going to be screwed as a result of it. Um, and we’ve got books that come out saying it’s going to uh eliminate humanity. Um, and that’s really the big debate now, whether or not it’s going to be beneficial for humanity or not. >> I believe I mean, you you’ve said publicly that technology is a major driver of progress and it might be the only major driver of progress. I assume you’re very clearly on that on the beneficial pro side. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh I mean there’s some

[00:22:03] chance that things will go wrong. Uh I wouldn’t say that that’s has no chance of happening, but I uh I think what we’re seeing uh is going to be beneficial. uh although it’s going to change things very rapidly uh and that will lead to some foroding as well. >> Yeah. And we’ll get we’ll get into that in a minute. Uh there’s a question that we’ve debated on the show and curious about your point of view uh which is are we going to actually achieve consciousness and sentience with AIS and will they begin petitioning for personhood and do you think society will approve that that we’re going to actually start to feel like our AIs are conscious and sentient and we shouldn’t we shouldn’t shut them down and they’re going to have rights like humans have. What’s your feeling on all that?

[00:23:00] >> Well, first of all, consciousness [clears throat] >> [snorts] >> uh is a subjective point of view. Uh there’s nothing we can do scientifically to prove that an entity is conscious. We we don’t can’t have a machine and you slide something in and a light goes on. Oh, this is conscious. No, this isn’t conscious. Uh there’s no scientific test for it. Uh so some people like for example Marvin Minsky who was my mentor for 50 years said well there’s no scientific test for it therefore it’s not scientific therefore we shouldn’t deal with consciousness it’s a meaningful meaningless uh debate um on the other hand you could say it’s the most important thing uh am I conscious are you conscious I mean that that’s something we really need to deal with uh I need to be able to relate to you as if you are conscious. Uh I consider myself to be conscious. Um

[00:24:00] and yet it’s not scientific. Um >> my scientific test is I think I’m conscious, but my wife disagrees. So when she thinks I am, [laughter] then I think we’ll I’ll be there. >> Alex, you’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of personhood and and consciousness. Uh, I’m a proponent, broadly speaking, of AI personhood, and I I’ll I guess I’ll play the contrarian role that I’m painted as of respectfully disagreeing with with my friend Rey that there aren’t benchmarks. I I think there has been over the past 2 years marketked progress toward developing quantitative benchmarks for call it self-awareness rather than consciousness. Maybe slightly less mushy as as a term including as as I’ve pointed out in the past tests for for whether certain models can detect overlaid activations in their residual streams if they’re transformers. I I see progress toward developing real benchmarks for

[00:25:00] self-awareness in models. >> Yes. But I I give you a something else that’s even more perplexing. Uh there’s lots of conscious people. Now, I can’t prove that that you’re conscious, but I believe that you are. I believe that a human being that’s acts conscious is probably conscious. Uh but why do I have the consciousness I have? There’s all these conscious beings, but there’s one person that I relate to that if something happens to it, I care about it uh in a different way than I care about other people uh my own consciousness. So why why am I uh why was I born in 1948? Why am I a male in on Earth? And why am I not another animal? And so I mean why am I the person that I am? You could think

[00:26:01] the same thing about yourself. Uh but it’s a subjective view of consciousness. Why am I the person that I am? Uh and that’s really hard to explain. Why why am I have all the the earmarks of of of this particular person? Of course, Rey, it’s such an ironic question that in my mind, ha, that you’re asking an anthropic question. What you just posed, why am I myself is the most fundamental anthropic lowercase A, not capital A question that one can ask. And why is the universe appear the way it does? Then the usual answer is if the universe or your own identity had sufficiently different properties, you wouldn’t be around to ask the question, why do I >> It’s very hard to even ask the question and people don’t actually quite understand it. >> Maybe the f most comment you’ve ever

[00:27:00] made for me was we were at a a group of singularity folks. We’d had a couple of glasses of wine and somebody asked about consciousness and you said, “Language is a very thin pipe to discuss concepts that are this complex.” And it just blew everybody’s mind. AIS will be indistinguishable from a conscious being and that we’ll just keep going and finally we will accept it >> when when Ray >> Sam right now might say that it’s conscious and you but people aren’t really sure but eventually it it keeps uh having all the earmarks of a conscious being and you will accept it because it’d be useless not to have it. And and again, you can’t say that’s going to happen for the same time for everybody. Um but I think when we’re a few years into uh AI entities acting conscious, uh we will

[00:28:01] accept it. Uh and so I I don’t think it’s going to be a very long delay. Well, let’s walk through that because the the the outerbound of the day when when AIs are acting conscious, you can’t even tell. Outerbound of that is 2029, I think. And uh so you think a year or two later just because they’re so convincing and so humanlike that everyone will accept it because because they have weird behavior too. They don’t just act, you know, they somehow times they merge their brains together and they have combined personalities, you know, and so normal beings don’t kind of do that. So I could see a world where people are like this is just yeah it’s acting very human but it’s just too weird or I could see a world where everybody just accepts it. I mean today people have AI therapists and some uh times they don’t really believe it but in other times people really believe it and the AI therapists if you read the transcripts they they sound

[00:29:00] very convincing uh and that’s going to keep going and people will really accept that they have a therapist that’s conscious uh and that’s already beginning to happen. So it One thing I love about today’s AIS, you know, use them all day long, every day, but they have no intent of their own. They just do what you ask them to do and they try and be as helpful as they can in getting you to whatever destination, but they’re not trying to get to any destination of their own. When when you start saying, “Well, they’re going to act conscious.” That implies to me anyway that yeah, I’m trying to get somewhere on my own. I don’t have time to help you right now. I’m busy with my own personal agenda here. >> Dave, good point. I I’m c I’m still waiting for the AI to call me up one day and say, “Hey, Peter, listen. I’m working on this thing over here. You can join me if you want, but this is my objective for the day. [laughter] >> Yeah, that’s Yeah, different world. >> Different world. You know, Ry, something you said on the abundant stage, it was yourself, myself, Salem, we’re talking about this and and you made a statement

[00:30:01] that really rocked a lot of people and it’s to contextualize the speed. You said in the next 10 years um originally said 2025 to 2035, right? this decade going forward that we’re going to see as much change as we saw in the last 100 years 1925 to 2025 back when the highest level of technology was the Ford Model T and 30% of homes had electricity and telefan do you still hold to that level or is it fast or slower 100 years of progress in the next decade you still holding to that >> sounds about right you know I mean think about the difference between 2025 In 2035, I mean, 2035 will be way past AGI. We’ll have supercomputers, but we’ll also be merging with them. So, we’re going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are today. That’s a huge amount of progress uh compared with what we’ve done 100 years before that.

[00:31:02] >> How do you see society dealing with this? Because right now the limiting factor in a lot of areas is regulatory, social structures, norms, market capture. What do what do you think is the weakest point that we should focus on solving to allow this progress to implement into the world? >> I mean, it’s going to be a major thing. Uh employment’s not I mean, right now employment is considered uh equivalent to being able to deal with your own financial needs. Uh that’s going to change a lot. uh we will have uh we’ll be able to produce enough things that everybody will be wealthy compared to what we now consider wealthy. Uh and yet we won’t necessarily have jobs as such. And how we’re going to deal with that is really unclear. Um but people are actually not that concerned about it. You you would think

[00:32:01] that if uh >> well it’s cuz they’re in denial. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> No, they’re just not I I can’t tell you how many people I interact with who are running companies, you know, hundreds and 90 plus% are just like, “Yeah, I it’s not happening or things always take longer than people say or it’s just pure denial.” >> Yes. But uh I think we’ll deal with it. Okay. Um, but it’s going to be a major uh change in the way we organize society. There there are folks like there are folks like Mo Goddat and a few others that think this and Peter you’ve said this the next 10 years is going to be the most volatile while we kind of try and absorb all of this. Do you agree with that rough time period Ray or do you think it’s longer or shorter? I agree with it. But it’s not like it’s going to end in 10 years that we’ll have this uh flux of great change in the next 10 years and the next 10 years after that will be uh smooth. >> No, it’ll be much much crazier.

[00:33:00] >> I mean, the next 10 years will get us to my definition of singularity, which is will be at least a thousand times more intelligent. I >> I’ll I’ll maybe pose uh hopefully a less obvious question for you, Rey. You’ve been very public about keeping maintaining lots of documents, lots of artifacts from your father whom I I gather was tremendous influence on your life with the premise that AI is going to enable you to basically computationally reconstruct your father someday. If if I’m not misconstring, there is a related notion that has been called variously quantum archaeology or humanity’s final task. Uh Seoulski has has written or had written uh extensively about this in the context of Russian cosmism. Question for you, when do we get the ability to computationally resurrect dead human beings with AI?

[00:34:01] Well, I mean, prior to that, we could try to create avatars of ourselves. Uh, we did create one of my father. Uh, and I’m like creating now an avatar of myself. I have actually a lot more uh material that we can uh put into text. I have 11 books. I’ve got several hundred articles that I’ve written, articles about me. All of this will go into a large language model. We’ll create something that’s uh can talk like me and it will look like me. Um, and like I I get uh probably five to 10 uh requests for interviews and podcasts a day. and I can’t do most of them. So, I’ll actually offer them, you can interview the avatar. The avatar

[00:35:01] is actually better than me because it will remember everything. I don’t remember everything that I’ve said. Um, so the avatar would actually be better and you can interview the avatar as long as you want >> in whatever language. >> You can do it in another language, right? Um, and that’ll be this year. So, uh, >> what what age are you going to make yourself in your avatar? >> Uh, kind of an arbitrary choice you have to make. >> Yeah. Um, now that’s not actually creating everything about me or or my father, which we have actually less material of his, although we have enough to create an avatar that’s also lively. Um, being able to relate everything that a person has and the state of their bodies

[00:36:02] and so on. It’s it’s uh that will have happened eventually, but that’s probably another, you know, 10 or 15 years away. >> Do you view that as the killer app of the singularity, the the so-called great task of resurrecting computationally with AI every human who has ever existed? >> Uh that’s one of them. Yeah, >> there’s so many >> to me that I I’m very interested in is uh being able to um longevity [snorts] escape velocity where a year goes by, you age a year, but you get back that year from advances in medicine uh that keep you going for another year. or more than a year uh so that you don’t

[00:37:01] actually age during that year but you’ll actually get it back from advances in in medicine and so on. What’s your current prediction when we hit escape velocity? >> 20 2032. >> 2032. Yeah. Let’s jump into that subject of common interest I think to all of us. Uh and Rey, you and I have had so many conversations about this concept of longevity which was a you know a very controversial subject a decade ago and now you know AI is impacting biology and making it happen. when we’ve talked about reaching longevity escape velocity uh in the past the technology that I believe you said is required to really get us there is nanotechnology >> do you think that we’re going to reach LEV without nanotechnology just based upon drug discovery using AI >> is it really has nothing to do with nanotechnology nanotechnologies

[00:38:00] uh is a way for us to take advantage of AI without it being obvious. So that I can be thinking about something, I’ll get an idea and I won’t know if it’s coming from my biological brain or or the computational brain. That that has to do with nanotechnology. But uh uh longevity scape philosophy has to do with advances in medicine. It has to do with being able to simulate uh what happens in medicine. Uh and it does it really has nothing to do with nanotechnology. Um, we have to be able to to create biological models of what happens in in biology very quickly so that in one weekend you can simulate, you know, millions or billions of different possibilities. uh and try them out uh test them and be and then be able to go forward with a a

[00:39:00] cure based on on on that type of analysis. Uh and talking to people who are do working on this uh five years is like an outside limit. So if we actually do it in five years then another couple years to basically go through most of the medical problems we have. So your advice >> your advice to people is is stay healthy until we get to the early 2030s. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Just just curious to drill in one level deeper since you know Peter you’re also a top expert on this topic. If if you had a perfect simulation, you know exactly what’s going on in a body. You’ve got it all nailed through computation and that’s you know about three, four, five years from now. Then what’s the intervention if not nanotechnology? Like is it just more and more targeted chemicals in your bloodstream or like how do you act on that simulation? >> I mean [clears throat] you’re coming up with new cures, new treatments uh to

[00:40:00] both ward off as as well as avoid getting these types of treatments like cancer for example. >> Yeah. >> And you can see it already happening. I mean right now I’ve I’ve seen this many times. somebody gets some problem today and I said, “Well, just wait a few uh months and there’ll be some new cure for it.” And sure enough, that happens in most uh cases. Um I I can think of four or five cases where it’s been really vital and it’s it’s happened. Uh so it’s it’s happening much more quickly. Um, >> I think I think that applies to to cancer, heart disease, uh, you know, hip replacements, knee replacements, all those things fit that mold, but then you’ve got this just general aging, >> you know, because because stretching out your life >> reversal, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Take take heart disease. >> So, Rapatha is a new type of drug that

[00:41:02] dramatically reduces your LDL. So, I’ve reduced my LDL to like 10, which is a very low number. >> Yep. >> And I’ve actually examined my arteries and I have no plaque. Now, that wasn’t true like four or five years ago or even three or four years ago. Um, so in in various areas, I’m developing things that are avoiding getting problems uh that didn’t exist just a short while ago. That’s a good example though of chemical in your bloodstream. You know the traditional it’s a new drug, a new chemical that’s in your bloodstream. And so there is a version of the world where that’s all you need to reverse aging and then there’s a version of the world where you need something much more targeted David of of David Sinclair right who is currently doing gene therapy for age reversal for epigenic reprogramming but then heading towards actually three

[00:42:02] molecules. So, it’s a very cheap um uh you know, oral supplement that you take to reset your epigenetic age. Ray, do you have a do you have a target age you’re you’re shooting for? Uh you know, to hit LEV, do you do you expect >> I I would very much like to be alive tomorrow and take advantage of all the friends I have like the friends in in this uh virtual room. Um, and I I think that tomorrow I will also be interested in being alive the next day. Um, I can’t imagine I’m going to get to a point where I wouldn’t want to be alive. The only time really that people take their lives generally is if they’re in insufferable pain, physical pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, uh, and they can’t continue

[00:43:02] otherwise people want to remain alive. So, and so I would want to stay healthy and be able to take advantage of that. So that’s not I’m not going to get to a point where uh not interested in being alive. As as time goes on, we’re going to get more and more AI is going to be more and more intelligent. It’s going to be able to keep our body going. Uh I can describe today a way in which we can replace every one of our organs and we can actually imagine that and that it wouldn’t take that long. Certainly within a decade or two, we can replace all of our organs. Uh it was something that’s uh really would last forever, more or less. So as time goes on, we have more and more capability of of being able to replace things that are going wrong with our body.

[00:44:01] uh will get more and more into longevity escape velocity as time goes on. >> Are you anticipating a world where everybody agrees like if if you said hey you know I’m I’m alive today I want to be alive tomorrow and tomorrow I better I want to be alive to the next day. Um are you anticipating a world where everybody gets on board with that within 10 years and you know everyone has those options or a world where a subset of people have had five organs replaced uh they’ve had stem cells in their brain. They’re extending their their thinking ability. Another subset are violently opposed. They’re ranting in the streets. They’re trying to prevent it. They want natural death. >> I mean you can get natural death today. you can go to Switzerland and get natural death. Um um I I was uh debating with Conorman who was a Nobel Prize winning economist and

[00:45:00] he was 90. He was actually very healthy. I would meet with him in New York. I had like four or five lunches with him and he would actually walk like five blocks to get to where our lunch was and walk back. Uh so he was actually pretty healthy but he was mindful of what happens to you in your 90s and he’s saying well it’s uh bad things happen and he’d rather know that not happened with him and he took his life he went to Switzerland and ended his life even though he was healthy. Um and I wasn’t aware that he had this plan although his family was aware of it. uh and I tried to talk him out of it and talk about how we’re making exponential progress on overcoming diseases and so on. He was concerned about his kidneys, but I related some things I’m involved in that relate to the kidney and uh and

[00:46:01] he understood what I was saying and it was actually an economic issue. Uh but he ended up taking his life anyway. Um, but that’s because he really didn’t was not convinced that this would happen. >> Yeah, >> Ray, my father passed away a year ago uh at 97 and also had an assisted death in Canada. They’ve now approved it. And I have never seen anyone as happy in my life as my father in the last week. Um, and I asked the doctor after he passed away, I’m trying to feel loss or pain or suffering, but I can’t. I’ve never seen him so happy. Have you seen this? and she said, “You know, 20,000 people in Canada have had this procedure this past year. Most of them go out in this state and we think it’s because they have agency.” And he lived with dignity. He wanted to pass away with dignity and he got his wish and he was happy as a clam. So, a very philosophical thoughtprovoking outcome. >> Yeah.

[00:47:00] >> Uh I don’t think that would be me, but [laughter] >> hope not. Alex, you were gonna You had a great question about cryionics. >> Yeah. No, I I don’t like the uh very much the the direction of what we’re discussing here. I I don’t think Rey this at all aligns with the way you see the world either. I I think you and I probably see the world quite similarly rather than having hand ringing discussions about death with dignity and going to Canada. I would argue we should be talking about cryionics as recognizing that approximately 150,000 people are dying every day in our world and not everyone statistically if we get to longevity escape velocity by the early 2030s as you predict that’s many many millions of people who are going to die between now and lev why do you think more people aren’t obtaining cryionics plans for themselves and what can you say here we have hundreds of thousands thousand of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of viewers to encourage viewers to consider

[00:48:01] getting cryionics plans for themselves so they don’t have to move to Canada to die with dignity if they’re in that position. >> Well, my uh point on cryionics is that that is plan D. >> Plan D. [laughter] I love that. >> Uh plan A, B, and C is to remain alive one way or another. Um, and Cryionics, it’s plan D. I mean, I have enough trouble keeping track of my ideas uh when I’m uh able [clears throat] to uh give arguments for them and uh ar and keep track of them. Uh it’ be hard to imagine keeping track of them while I’m uh ba basically dead. um coming back it’s I mean I have concerns about them you may come back and you may not be happy with the way

[00:49:01] you come back and I mean this cryionics is better than not doing cryionics because at least you have some chance of coming back um but the there’s risks with it um so I’m I’m I do it very Few people do it. I mean the the number of people who die who elect Cryionics is very very small. Um I have done it. I hope it works. [sighs and gasps] Uh >> you you’ve signed up for cryionics. >> Yeah. But but I hope that it’s I won’t have that opportunity. For for our viewers and listeners who don’t know what this is, there are companies like Alor where you can sign up and near the moment of your death uh they will effectively put antireeze or some equivalent thereof into your bloodstream and you will be frozen with the notion that eventually technologies like nanotechnology will to reconstruct uh

[00:50:00] your your full neuroortex is uh is under cryionics right now. I would say >> I would say Ry, it’s unconscionable to me that I I think you have the the statistics. I I think probably a few thousand people order of magnitude have cryionics plans. Why do you think it’s not hundreds of millions? And again, is there anything that you would care to do? you’re speaking to hundreds of thousands of people who take the future of technology very seriously to maybe persuade them if if you think this is a righteous act that they should be perhaps considering cryionics plans for themselves >> perhaps but given that I have limited uh persuasion on people listen to me uh I would tell people they they should do everything they can to stay alive uh that’s because that’s the best way of being alive in the future is to stay alive right now. And there’s a lot you

[00:51:01] can do to remain alive. >> And and Rey, are you saying you stay not just stay alive, but stay in reasonable health? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And that the technologies will unveil themselves to you uh in the next 5 to 8 years. Yes. >> And it’s happening very quickly. So this is actually a vital time that you can remain I’m still chuckling at your comment where you said it’s harder to keep track of your ideas when you’re dead. [laughter] >> But but but you’re going to you’re going to in this whether you’re keeping yourself alive and you enter longevity escape velocity or you’re chronically frozen. The other thing going on is you probably have a hundred or or a thousand or a million avatar versions of you that are up and operating in the universe in parallel with your with your meat body. Right. Yeah. Uh whether or not those will have consciousness or not, we get back to the same thing we discussed earlier. Um

[00:52:04] actually, they’ll be probably better at remembering everything I’ve said. Um because um if it has a computer behind it, it it won’t forget anything uh unlike myself. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. [music] The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-ompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% [music] or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. [music] Enterprises

[00:53:00] are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their preide development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. [music] >> We should definitely do a podcast with where it’s uh Ray K Avatar and Alex Avatar and Dave and Sim Avatar having a conversation amongst ourselves. We should put that on the docket for sometime this year. Ray, I want to take just a second to say thank you for supporting uh my book launch with uh with Steven Cutotler. Um Rey has graciously said he’ll he’ll do a live event. We’re going to do it, Dave, at Link Studios in Cambridge uh in May. And uh we had an amazing Stephen and I had an amazing AMA at the end of December. And if folks, if you’re interested in joining another AMA with Stephen and I

[00:54:01] about the new book, uh uh we are as God’s survival guide for the age of abundance. Uh we’ll pop the cover up here. Nick, I’ll ask you to pop it up, but we’re going to you can go to diamandis.com/book and if you pre-order a book at the end of January this month, we’re going to be doing another AMA and uh yeah, it’s a part of our book launch effort. So, check it out, diamadis.com/book. Um Ray, can we jump in? >> Just just one thing. Uh I did a conference with Martin Rothblat. Uh this was at UCLA to um represent their progress over the last uh I think 30 years. Uh and it had me, Martin, two uh professors there and Martine’s avatar. So you had both Martin and Martine’s avatar. Martine’s avatar looks realistic. It’s like doing a Zoom with

[00:55:00] her. Um and the avatar is actually very good. remembers everything that Martina said and you could ask it anything and it actually is very convincing and actually knew when to come in because if you’re in a conference you can’t just like suddenly say something if somebody else is speaking you have to wait till there’s a silence and you can say something and say something maybe that’s relevant to what was said before and it worked very well um so this was a conference with with the avatar uh and Martin herself uh at the same time. Hey, can I ask? >> I’m very clear. I’m very clear that an AV >> Well, directly related question to that. You know, I I stumbled a couple years ago on your how my predictions have fared essay, which is a great essay by the way. Um, and you know, uh, 86% outright correct. And then

[00:56:04] that you know you worked on speech recognition years and years ago and by now the interface to your computer you would think is voice not a keyboard and I feel like like that is something we’re so used to now that we’re underpredicting how this interface is going to change for the first time since you know 19 since the guey so maybe 1980s but it’s got to be imminent now and I don’t know if you agree agree with that or not, but if when you look at these avatars that you’re just describing, they’re so good and so convincing >> and so much better of a way to inter interact with technology. >> Well, another one I got wrong was that we would have self-driving cars. >> Y >> uh which we do now. Um >> yeah, >> but it didn’t quite make the time frame. So, that was wrong. >> Well, that one was wrong because of regulatory issues, right? the technology your timeline on the technology I think was was [clears throat] incredibly close >> but you know regulatory is very hard to

[00:57:00] predict I think you made that point in the essay but the one on the the interface to a computer is not held up by regulatory it’s something else momentum or or barriers or Apple not doing AI or something [laughter] but uh but that one to me feels like this is going to happen very very soon and people like because when you talk to an avatar like you said you’re at a conference this you know why am I not talking to my computer that way. It’s crazy that I’m typing on this keyboard. >> Well, I think part of that, Dave, is is having to not be verbal in the middle of an airplane flight or sitting at your desk sometimes. Uh >> I’ll tell you before we kicked off the pod, Peter, you were saying why where’s our AI that’s uh our AV basically. >> Yeah. >> And you know, pulling in images, pulling like when we, you know, talk about Ray’s books, why is it not popping up as a picture in real time that we’re all looking at? That’s got to be imminent too because the >> dude let’s start that company. >> Let’s start that company. >> Amen. Amen. >> I fant See, you were gonna jump in.

[00:58:00] >> Um Ray, if you look over the last six months, what breakthrough or development has surprised you the most? >> I’m getting much more credence to people accepting this which didn’t accept it a year ago. I mean, think of the difference between 2024 and 2025. uh or January 2026 and January 2025. Uh most people a year ago that I would speak to would say, “Yeah, AI is pretty interesting, but it’s not really very good and people don’t really accept it and and and they’ve completely changed their views in the last year.” Uh [snorts] where they’re really accepting it now. Uh there there was just an article by uh people who advocate therapy who is saying that uh online therapists uh are actually doing a very meaningful

[00:59:01] job and that never would have happened a year ago. Um [snorts] so I’d say the change in in people’s attitudes is is pretty phenomenal. Is the is the pace of change currently faster than you predicted? Cuz it feels faster. This is to Dave’s point earlier, it feels like we’re moving faster than you predicted. Do you agree or not agree? >> I mean, in 1999, I predicted 2029 for AGI and I still predict 2029. Um, I think uh Elon Musk says 2026. I think we’ll have a lot of things that remind us of AGI, but it really won’t be we really won’t be convinced in 2026. Maybe it’ll happen sooner, 2027, 2028. I mean, you get varying degrees of confidence, but by 2029, I think

[01:00:00] everyone will accept that. >> Amazing. Amazing. Alex, uh, I want to turn it back to you, pal. Yeah, m maybe to shift gears a bit, Rey, I’m obviously, if this isn’t obvious from some of my questions and comments, I’m an enormous fan of both you and your writings and your courageous extrapolation of following the law of straight lines, of progress in experience curves, progress in Moors law type experience curves, your law of accelerating returns, your countdown to the singularity, all arguably variance on various forms of experience curves from economics question for you. So if we follow to its logical conclusion law of accelerating returns and your countdown to the singularity this idea that we’re almost in a technologically deterministic way we emerge from a primordial soup and everything follows

[01:01:00] some very nice elegant law of straight lines exponential calendar. Do you think that this implies that our universe is abundant with intelligent civilizations? And if so, in other words, abundant not just human intelligence, but non-human intelligence as well. And if so, do you think that would then imply that there are nonhuman intelligent civilizations on or near Earth? The fact that we can emerge as a far more intelligent version of ourselves in a short period of time doesn’t imply uh that there are intelligences that go beyond humans. We we haven’t really seen evidence of that. Um I mean the there’s uh a lot of interest in trying to find

[01:02:01] uh signals in the universe that would indicate that there some intelligent source of them. We haven’t actually found that yet. Uh and we have more and more ability to look. Um so it it may exist but we we don’t know that there’s any intelligence besides coming from Earth. Um and the the more and more ability for us to actually uh evaluate uh different types of intelligent sources that are not coming from Earth. Uh and yet we still don’t see any evidence of that. Uh kind of indicates that they aren’t there. Um but we but there’s there’s no way of actually determining that uh because we

[01:03:00] can only look at a very small fraction of what’s out there. >> Uh switching sub Go Alex, you want to do a follow-up? >> Maybe just a quick follow-up question. So Rey, you’ve made [clears throat] many many predictions of technologies that you think either the singularity itself or progress toward the singularity would unlock. Do you think that progress toward the singularity would answer the question that I think many people most want existentially an answer to, which is, is humanity alone? >> Yeah. I mean, so far, uh, if we’re not alone, we’re still pretty lonely because we haven’t come into contact with any, uh, intelligent source aside from ourselves. Uh there’s fantastic things happening in the universe and the universe goes on seemingly forever. Um so it’s it’s certainly possible that we’ll find something and it’s impossible

[01:04:01] to rule that out but so far we haven’t actually done that. Uh so we certainly feel alone because there’s nobody else we can point to. We can’t point to some other star system saying, “Well, there’s a source coming from that that’s clearly intelligent and we’d like to contact them.” We we we can’t even identify uh a thing like that. Uh so far >> I want to jump into the conversation a little bit about BCI brain computer interface and our ability to you know uplevel our capabilities. I think when we talk about longevity, escape velocity and potentially living well in past 100 or hundreds of years, uh what most people fear is getting there without having the cognitive clarity, without having the ability to maintain their memories. And of course, one of the technologies that would assist us on that that you’ve spoken about is the

[01:05:00] idea of high bandwidth BCI. uh not the low, you know, thin pipe that we currently do input output through. And I encourage everybody to go onto your favorite LLM and ask it to give you a list of all of Ray Kershw’s uh predictions that he’s accurately hit. It’s a a very impressive list. And you know, one of those predictions is that we’ll hit, you know, high bandwidth BCI uh in the mid 2030s. Uh, is that still your prediction? And I want to say, what’s that going to feel like? You know, I I raised my hand and volunteer for one of the early BCI uh uh, you know, interfaces. What’s that going to feel like? And how do you think we’re going to achieve that? >> I mean, it’s very hard to know how we’re going to react to things that haven’t happened yet. Um, and you could imagine this being uh something that

[01:06:02] were welcoming or something that we would uh be alarmed by. Um, so uh as the the future hasn’t been written yet. uh and it can’t be uh the future could be terrible uh or it could be fantastic. Uh it’s really hard to to give a prediction about that. >> Ray, you you described it if I could once we have high bandwidth BCI that you’ll have concepts emerge in your mind uh uh that are driven by if you would uh the cloud. Uh, can you speak to that a little bit? >> Well, that would be useful. I’m actually writing my autobiography and trying to remember things that happened when I was like three years old and four years old and uh actually have a pretty good

[01:07:02] memory of that. Um, but it could be better and it would actually be helpful if I had AI to help me along with that. Um, >> actually, wait, no, not just that, but are you using AI to go interview people that you interacted with when you’re 3, four, 10 years old and get their sides of the story? >> Well, it would have to have a lot of capability that it doesn’t have now to be able to uh uh generate uh a view of something that that we don’t have now. Um, so I’m using I’m using large language models a little bit to try to but uh actually my my memory is actually not not bad uh of things that happened a long time ago. >> All right. When’s the biography coming out? >> I can’t wait. >> Uh it’s about ready. It should be out within a year. >> Yeah, I’ve had a chance to read it.

[01:08:00] Yeah, it’s uh it’s pretty it’s pretty amazing. Well, the the thing I’m really eager to to read in that biography is that the the role of the futurist, you know, you you made all these really bold predictions, and I’m sure at the time everyone’s like, “You’re a crackpot. You’re a crackpot.” I suspect by now everyone’s like, “Wow, what what an incredible foresight.” Um, and so I assume you’re at an all-time high now, but maybe maybe not. But the the role of being a futurist is fraught with this hindsight bias where you get three things wrong. you know, the the self-driving car is not out yet. Our our clothes are not made by nanotechnology and uh computing isn’t done on biological systems. You know, we don’t have DNA computers >> and and >> I mean, I’m I’m getting less of that now. I mean, before >> uh if I would make a whole bunch of predictions and one of them was wrong, everybody would focus on that. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> But now people are more uh generous on their views of

[01:09:00] >> to me to me the most amazing like when you read at the time everyone’s going to have a computer in their pocket in their clothes and it’s going to be almost like an extension of their life. And at the time it sounded like nuts. And now everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s just an iPhone.” Like, “Well, no, it’s not just an iPhone. It’s a total cultural phenomenon that’s changed our, you know, it just changes you much more than you ever know. And if you >> you go to a conference and there’s like several hundred people. Every single person has a cell phone in their pocket. And it’s Yes. And it’s actually an extension of your mind. >> It is. It is. >> If you don’t have your cell phone, you you left, you know, threequarters of your mind. >> And I’ll tell you what else. the headmaster of the school that my kids went to uh took all of the kids, I think in seventh grade or sixth grade, to an island without their phones for three days and said, “You have to learn to live without your phone.” The new headmaster came in and said, “That’s inhumane. We can’t do this anymore. This is this is not >> I think there’s a book called Lord of the Flies that was written about that.” >> Lord of the Flies. That’s funny.

[01:10:02] >> But I mean it’s so innate and we’re talking about seventh graders here, but it’s so attached to their mentality, their mind, their body, whatever that they can’t. >> We’re going to replace this. I mean, carrying around a physical object like this is it’s difficult. >> I mean, where do you put it? How do you not lose it? Um, >> got two chips in his hand now. [laughter] >> What do you think replaces the We’ll have something besides this. It’ll be >> Yeah, that’s a good question. >> it’ll be something like virtual reality. So, you basically you look out and you can see uh basically a screen and it will be interfacing with your computer, but it’ll be on all the time. You’ll be able to interact with it and you won’t be carrying something around and you won’t leave it at your apartment. Um, >> yeah. >> Beyond that, it’ll actually uh go inside

[01:11:01] our nervous system uh interact with your biological neurons. >> I’ve got I got this thing now. We’re starting to record everything basically. You know, Peter’s got the wearable and now we’ve got these omniirectional mic. It’s the size of a credit card. You just throw it on the table and everything that happens is not only recorded, but it’s assigned to whoever said it >> with these omniirectional mics. But they’re starting to pop everywhere. >> This year, Dave, at at the Abundance Summit, we’re giving everybody two devices. One is a ring format uh that we talked about on one of the WTF episodes that Pebble is putting out where you can just quickly record a message, go LLM, and then we’re giving everybody something called applaud. Uh it’s I guess I guess I’m I’m uh spoiling the secret for our abundance members. Um Rey, can we talk about one of the concerns you raised earlier that people have, which is uh people’s attachment to their employment. So thoughts on the

[01:12:00] future of work. Uh you know, you’ve spoken eloquently about the need for universal basic income and even universal high income that Elon spoken about. Uh so what’s your thoughts on the future of work and and when do we start having UBI and should people be worried about their future income? >> Well, I mean we we relate having an income to having the means to deal with our uh financial system. Uh but if we separate that and you’re going to be able to deal with your financial needs without having uh a conventional job. Uh that’s actually liberating. Um and I mean why do people uh retire? Now I to me retirement doesn’t make

[01:13:01] sense because what I’m doing I en enjoy doing. >> Mhm. >> But if you look at most jobs people don’t like them so much that they want to be able to do them forever. Uh and it’s actually liberation to to not have to do that and find something within uh their means that gives them uh gratification uh without having to work in a way that’s unpleasant. Uh and we’re basically overcoming that. >> You know, 79% of corporate employees do not find meaning in their work. So, this might be an easier transition than most people think. >> Yeah. >> Do you think we’re going to develop UBI soon? >> We’re going to have to do something that’s equivalent to it because if if people don’t have enough money that’s the the e economic system won’t work for anybody. Um,

[01:14:03] and so I think I mean I made a prediction at TED that we would develop you uh UBI um by the 2030s and and I think that’s still uh true. Sele >> um I’m going to do a quick separate thing. You know, imagine you’re in a laid courtroom, right? Okay. and uh uh the the prosecutor is saying to you, you have made absurdly accurate predictions for 30 years. We don’t believe you’re human. Um so how would you defend that? Cuz you actually feel to me like a time traveler from somewhere that’s popped in to deliver inject into humanity all of these insights. It blows my mind that 60 times I’ve heard you speak, I’ve never not learned anything. So if I was the lite, I go, you must be a time traveling something. How would you defend against that? >> I mean, hopefully I would appear enough

[01:15:03] like a human to convince people. Now, maybe that won’t be true in the future. You can’t really tell if someone’s a human or not a human because they’ll still act human. Uh, and then I wouldn’t have a defense. So, [laughter] >> Alec, Alex, over to you, buddy. Yeah, I I I could say something mildly snarky about looking at Rey’s immunome to see if he’s been exposed to future diseases as a way of determining whether he’s a time traveler or not. >> I’m going to face plant on that one. [laughter] >> But instead, I’d like to shift gears, Ray, and and maybe talk about the past and future of the nature of the mind. one of the most many but one one of the the many striking performances and I I I think just incredible accomplishments of yours going all the way back this is more than 60 years back now to your appearance on I’ve Got a Secret on television with Steve Allen in February

[01:16:02] of 1965. It’s incredible to think that that was 60 plus years ago. you demonstrated an AI based music generator on television. I thought that was such >> Yeah, >> that was actually the first uh music composition by AI uh anywhere. Um >> we should show that clip. >> We should absolutely show that clip. It’s it’s such an incredible accomplishment. Right. So, where I was going with that, >> in fact, let let’s pause let’s pause one second on this uh on this recording and uh we’ll inject the clip right here and uh then come back. [music] Very nicely played. And now, uh your performance of course leads into your secret. So, if you’ll whisper it to me, we’ll let everybody at home know what’s up. Uh well that’s

[01:17:03] that certainly deserves applause but uh it’s all the subways leaving that that deserves applause but what has it got to do uh with the music? I don’t understand that. Ah, I see. Panel Raymond’s secret concerns something that he did. And we’ll start the game this time with Best Marish. >> Raymond, that’s a very unlikely sounding piece of music. Am I being super critical? >> No. >> Did you compose it? >> No, I didn’t. >> Oh. Um, did you however use were there some kind of formulas or letters or something unusual used to compose to make up the notes of this piece? >> Uh, you could say that I guess. >> Mhm. >> Well, for example, would the notes spell out a name or would they be a mathematical formula or anything like that?

[01:18:01] >> Not spell out a name. Nothing like that, man. >> But there are very >> $20 down, 60 to go. Henry, >> was that thing written by a computer? >> Wow. >> Is there writing music at this moment? Uh, >> right now it’s writing. >> Writing tones. I have a feeling that as a non-scientist, I’m not going to understand this too well. But, uh, perhaps you can explain how it works. First of all, I want the folks to see sort of some of this. This nest of spaghetti- like wire here is united to a bunch of little watts. What are these black things over here, Ray? >> Well, those are relays. That’s what does the trick. That’s what writes the music. >> I see. The relays write the music. They feed it into this white cheese box here. Whatever that is. And there are three little Are these wires or just pieces of string? >> Uh pieces of string or wires? >> I mean, does the message go through there or they just >> No, that’s just uh recording what music the computer says. >> I see. And then the typewriter does the

[01:19:00] final part of the process. >> Right. So 60 years ago, you demonstrated what I understand to be the the first at least on television AI music generator. I I’d like to ask you now 60 years plus from now. So we’re we’re now in 2026. So we’re talking 2086. What form do you think most intelligence in our solar system will take? and I’ll offer you a few options and I’ll deny you one option. The option that I’ll deny you is you’re not allowed to say it’s past the singularity so I have no idea. You have to you you I’m going to condition on you having a real opinion on this topic. I’ll offer you a few options and and an escape valve for maybe something that I haven’t thought of. >> Say the question again, Alex. >> Yes. So the question is again 60 years from now in the year 2086 what form will most intelligence in our solar system

[01:20:01] take? A few options. Meet bodies substantially similar to the way human intelligence is embodied now. That’s option one. Cyborgs which is some sort of human machine hybrid inclusive of nano robots in the human bloodstream. Uploads. That’s option three. So human minds have been uploaded to the cloud. Foundation models or pure AIs not dissimilar to GPT type models that we have right now. Some sort of unrecognizable life form maybe an unrecognizable arrangement of matter or energy that’s far more efficient. In in the past on the podcast, we’ve talked about royal we I have talked on the podcast about how black holes, for example, are amazing computers in principle. So maybe something like that or something totally different, maybe uploads to the gravitational field or something else entirely. So, so I’m laying out a few

[01:21:02] options plus an escape valve. [clears throat] >> What do you think? I mean, we’re going to have uh things like competronium uh by certainly by 2045 uh if not sooner and I know people that are working on this. Um >> you want to define you want to define competronium, Ray? Yeah, it’s basically taking what we know is feasible uh and creating something out of uh out of matter that can perform the maximum computation uh that we can conceive of. So um one analysis has a basically one leader cube would be more intelligent than all uh uh

[01:22:06] all people be like 10 billion people combined uh in one uh setting. So that’s going to be happening by 2045. So you talk about 2085, it’s going to be after beyond what we can imagine, but it’ll be even more so. Uh so we’ll be able to create something that’s very exciting. If I listen to let’s say uh in I’ve got some things on the web that go with the book my father playing the fifth Brandenburgg concerto which is done like several hundred years ago by Bach. Uh and it’s actually quite amazing to listen to that. Um so it’ll be something like that only more fantastic uh that will generate uh

[01:23:03] fantastic emotions uh and will be as intelligent as all people combined uh or more so uh we can’t we we really can’t imagine what that would be like. uh but we can state it mathematically um by comparing it to the what we can do today. >> If I may ask a a follow-up question on this. So it sounds Rey unless I’m misunderstanding is if you do in fact have a prediction for what most intelligence would look like namely if if I heard correctly you think in 60 years most intelligence in the solar system will be basically software running on computium. I think you you referenced some work by Seth Lloyd with the the reference to leader of volume and Seth Lloyd’s work back now 25 years ago on the ultimate computer and the physics of what the physical limit of

[01:24:01] the maximum amount of computation >> since that’s going to be feasible well before 2086 uh any kind of intelligent being is going to contain that. >> Yes. uh and uh so what it’ll be even beyond that but certainly that will be the the uh capability that it will have >> then then I have to ask you I guess the obvious question if if you think 60 years from now most intelligence in our solar system is going to be software running on computium what happens to our solar system do we disassemble the planets do we starlift our sun do we convert our solar system to computium him to run the software. >> Alex, you’re back to you’re back to dismantling >> Saturn had it coming. >> Saturn. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> Actually, I think Ray is back to it in this instance. >> Uh I don’t know. We’ll have to think about that. So >> u but it but the point Alex and Rey that

[01:25:00] you’re both making is humanity as we know it today as biological forms are in either the vast minority or absolutely uh you know displaced by a a digital or or you know quantum version of intelligence. Uh so so will some people choose to maintain an enhanced meat body or is the overwhelming benefits of going digital so much that uh it will wash away all previous versions? >> Well, I didn’t say the meat bodies would go away. Uh but certainly it will have the capability uh of competronium uh running the ultimate software certainly by 2086. So um this um you know since you’re inside Google for so long and it’s really you know Google is kind of like the AT&T Obel Labs or University Times a thousand

[01:26:03] >> but this uh computium shift um you know in your early books you made the point that Moors law isn’t really Moors law it goes back to uh you go all the way back to to switches you know telecom switches then vacuum tubes then transistors then integrated circuits and so there’s been a shift in the compute platform that keeps this curve going. But, you know, now we’re at this stage where we’re just pushing the silicon to its limit and and scaling horizontally with half a trillion dollars we’re going to put into Nvidia chips. So, we’re kind of at this flat spot waiting for that next, you know, breakthrough in how do we compute. Is there anything imminent, anything that’s, you know, that’s going to fill that gap? And I know AI will help us innovate very quickly here. Well, it’s it’s a different issue, but I think we’ll actually gen generate slower uh computational bodies. If you look at the brain, um it uses about two watts of power. Uh

[01:27:03] and that’s because it’s very very slow. Our uh our neurons compute between one calculation per second and about 200 calculations per second. But both of those are extremely slow compared to the millions or billions of uh or actually trillions of computations per second uh that are capable of. What I wrote about actually a couple decades ago was we it would make sense to slow it down and introduce uh parallel processing because the brain every single neuron is is computing at the same time. uh 20 years ago we had basically a computer would do one thing at a time. So we actually have done that. We now have millions or actually billions of computations uh that occur at the same time. Uh but we

[01:28:00] actually haven’t slowed down this the speed of the circuits. Uh if we slow them down a little bit, we’d use much less power and I think that would actually solve the power problem. Well, so it solved the chip fab bottleneck problem. I think there’s imminent innovation in exactly that vein you’re talking about. So that buys you another, you know, few years, but it doesn’t switch you to a new computium kind of kind of paradigm. I don’t know. I know you were kind of like quantum isn’t really going to change the curve here. >> Um, and I don’t know if you still feel that way on quantum computing, but is there anything else on the horizon that you know of from from either inside Google or elsewhere? Well, I think going towards uh um circuits that that use a completely different paradigm uh that are actually done at the molecular level and can be done in three dimensions. Right now we’re using third dimension very limit in a very limited way. Uh and so we we can actually create

[01:29:03] three-dimensional circuits uh at the atomic level uh that will actually match where you know one liter of computing will match uh 10 billion human beings. >> Smay when you look at uh what’s coming over the next say year is there anything that you’re incredibly excited about? Um because one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is the intersection between these, right? You intersect synthetic biology or neuroscience with AI and computing and all sorts of new fields get in instigated at that. What are what is most exciting to you and and what’s what are you anticipating most excitedly in the next say year or two? >> Well, uh robotics is actually has not really uh been something that has affected us very much. I think that’s going to begin to take place in 2026, 2027.

[01:30:00] Uh, but you look at robots, I mean, they can do certain things like uh like do a very fast dance, but they really have not been practical. like uh if you actually eat a meal and leave your dishes, uh there’s no robot that can actually pick it up and actually do clean that up the way a human being can do that. That’s going to happen over the next couple of years. Um so that’s one area that’s has been uh behind. Um, and I think there’s going to be a lot of debate on that. Um, large language models are pretty fantastic. Uh, but we’ve got to bring that to the real world of actually being able to uh handle physical things uh using robots. >> Sim, you had some uh questions I think on society that were important.

[01:31:01] >> Yeah. You know, if you were advising a 25-year-old today, uh, how would you set about giving them a sense of how to manage their life in this radical uncertainty? How would you kind of train give tell them to think what mindset should they have, etc. What advice would you give to a 25-year-old today? Uh my son Ethan is involved with venture capital and most of well all of his investments are in AI and actually bringing the practice of AI to all kinds of things that haven’t been done yet. uh and this tremendous number of opportunities of applying AI to all kinds of things that we do uh and creating uh businesses that would be uh effective. Um, so I I I think the opportunities to create a new business and do things uh that have not been done before is actually uh is higher than it’s ever

[01:32:01] been before. >> You talk a lot about entrepreneurship being really the biggest modality you could go after. I think you’re there’s a great comment by Kevin Kelly that said where he said the next 10,000 business plans will be take a domain and add AI to it. Yeah, Ray, you ever feel like you were just born in the wrong era? Like if you think about what you did early on with the the keyboard, you know, the company around it, then the omnifont character recognition, you know, the same person today would probably be looking at a a billion dollar valuation within a year, year and a half of pounding. [laughter] >> Well, I uh enjoyed bringing some of the concepts that we use today uh in decades past. though. >> Let’s do a quick uh speed round to close out this session with Rey. Alex, you want to kick it off? >> All right, Ray, here’s a really fast question. So, it the the cliche is that every American male thinks about ancient Rome at least once per day. So, so

[01:33:01] here’s my cliche question for you. >> Really? >> Have you really We’re we’re we’re going to go there. The question, Ray, is why didn’t ancient Rome have an industrial revolution? And what does the answer to that question teach us about technical revolutions that we could be having today but otherwise aren’t? >> Well, they did have a uh technical revolution given the uh capabilities of of that time. Uh we can only create things that are feasible. Uh so um and in keeping with the rate of progress which was feasible at that time. So uh I think they did okay. >> Dave, over to you pal. >> I feel like I’m I’m seeing the passing of the torch of the futurist here from

[01:34:00] from Rey to Peter to Alex. But I really curious if you if you are happy with your life as a great futurist because you were already a great entrepreneur before that and there were many many years in the middle there where everyone I talked to around MIT or elsewhere is like yeah I think Ray’s wrong. I think Arie’s wrong. I think Ray’s wrong. Now now obviously you’re on top of the world again but there’s a lot of years of just the pain and suffering that goes along with anyone who tries to predict the future. Um, so any regrets, any any advice for future futurists? >> I mean, I I got used to it. Um, and there was uh certain people that were able to think in the future, like for example, Singularity University, which Peter and I started, uh, could think about, uh, how to go beyond what, uh, conventional people were thinking. Um but it it didn’t really bother me

[01:35:02] uh that people were not able to think in an exponential manner at the time. >> Really? Thanks again. Okay, >> See, >> the fact that it didn’t bother you is why I think you’re a timetraing avatar from the future. Um here [laughter] here’s my question. If if right now you’ve said that intelligence and energy are the two things that will become abundant in the future. It seems right now that energy is the limiting factor. Uh are you excited about what’s coming with nuclear and fusion etc. or are there other forms of energy generation that you’re looking at and when do you think we’ll have a major breakthrough around some of that? >> Uh I mean I’m not that uh enthusiastic about nuclear. Uh I still think it’s dangerous. Uh there are two things we can do about energy. Uh we can use reversible energy which most of the uh uh

[01:36:01] the computation >> uh would would be using reversible energy which in theory uses no energy at all because it reverses itself and gives back the energy that it’s taken. Um we haven’t actually experimented with that. uh but that seems feasible. Um and I also mentioned the other thing where we could reduce the speed dramatically reduce the amount of energy it requires uh and therefore uh overcome uh the excessive use of of energy. Right now we’re running things at the very maximum speed and it uses a great deal of energy. We could reduce that a little and really overcome the energy at that point. But ultimately we will go to reversible energy using uh atomic levels of of uh

[01:37:02] computation which which don’t require any energy at least in theory. >> Ry I want to take a second and say thank you for the extraordinary partnership uh we’ve had over these last number of decades. I remember our first lunch together where we kicked around the idea of Singularity University and I think you waited a nancond before saying yes and just uh the great the great joy and a shout out to all the Singularity alumni out there who are are listening who’ve been part of this this journey. >> Uh the singularity is now is sort of been our mantra and our our war cry here. >> On a on a 10 scale how optimistic are you about the future of humanity? >> I’d say I’m a 10. So, >> all right. Well, that’s that’s a good that’s a good place to uh to wrap it up. Rey, on on behalf of the Moonshot Mates, uh thank you for all of your wisdom. Thank you for charting the path for us. >> Yeah. Well, this was a great discussion.

[01:38:00] I appreciate it very much. >> Appreciate it. >> Wait for the biography, too. Everybody keep an eye out for that. >> And look forward to seeing you in May for the for our follow-on book launch event. Uh Dave, uh safe travels to the World Economic Forum. [clears throat] See, I’ll see you. I’ll come and pick you up and see you in an hour. We head to the X5 board meeting. Alex, enjoy Paris and Switzerland. >> Uh yeah, >> amazing. All right, guys. >> See you all. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that [music] 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 Metat Trends. 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 [music] industry, your nation. And I put this

[01:39:00] into a two-minute read every week. If you’d like to get access to the MetaTrens newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/tatrens. That’s [music] diamandis.com/metatrens. Thank you again for joining us today. It’s a blast for us to put this together every week. [music]