Raw transcript — Why AGI Is Close but Not Here Yet | Ray Kurzweil | EP #261 (Moonshots)

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We just saw a story where Demisabus who you know uh said 50/50 whether we need another breakthrough to get to AGI. What do you think? Well, I think we need two things. Uh so we've made it 75,000 million trillionfold increase over this 75 years. But AGI will happen by 2029. Large language models have only been effective for the last 6 months. We were being really affected by the exponential growth. A year ago, large language models were okay. Now they're really very effective and we're really going to be able to feel that in the future. 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? I think we have to consider >> now that's a moonshot ladies and gentlemen.

[00:01:05] >> It's a pleasure to invite everybody to an afternoon with an extraordinary man uh Ray Kerszswall with my moonshot mates my co-author Stephen. So may Rey, you've been a mentor, a business partner, a co-author uh for me personally and just an incredible guide for many of us. Uh Ray Kurszswwell 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 printto-spech reading machine for the blind, the first textto-spech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano. He's a National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee, a National Medal

[00:02:02] of Technology recipient, a Grammy Award winner. He holds 21 honorary doctorates and has been honored by three US presidents. 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 uh proposed the concept of pattern recognition theory of mind arguing that human neoortex is composed of roughly 300 million uh hierarchical patterns 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 key words, but grasp meaning and context. His team helped build the knowledge graph and advanced semantic search so that when you typed apple, Google finally understood whether you

[00:03:00] meant the fruit or tech company. His arrival helped trigger Google's massive AI talent grab. Shortly after he joined, Google acquired Deep Mind, brought on Jeffrey 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. He's made 147 predictions with an 86% accuracy rate and his long-standing prediction that AI would reach human level intelligence by 2029. Well, we're here to discuss that. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ray Kurszswwell to the stage.

[00:04:14] All right. Right. Center seat here, my friend. >> You can't. >> It's been quite the journey. >> Yeah. How long has it been? It's been >> Oh, God. We met I think Martin Rothblat first introduced us. >> Okay. So it's about 20 years. >> Yeah. Well, let's see. I >> 2009 guys. >> 2009. Okay. Well, the journalist here is telling the story here. Well, no, it was before that cuz we launched I we launched Singularity in 2009. I think we met uh when 2007 uh and the Singularity is near came out 2005, right? >> I think I think so. 2005. I remember I took the Singularity is near, which is quite a thick book. Um, uh, I took it backpacking in Chile. Um, and I read the

[00:05:01] book making notes in the margins and I had started with Bob Richards and Todd Holly something called the International Space University back in 1987. We had the founding conference and when I read your book um, it changed my world. How many folks here in the room did the sing, you know, the singularity change your world, right? I mean, amazing. Uh and I said there needs to be a university that teaches this stuff. Uh 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 a lunch and then off to the races. >> It was a dinner, was it? >> Yeah, it was true. >> Um yeah, I can you hear me? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um well, I said yes right away cuz I make important decisions very quickly. So

[00:06:00] >> yeah, it was and uh we had our founding conference at which Seem attended. >> I I got invited there by by NASA. Um I'd set up a relationship between Yahoo and NASA and somehow I'd never heard of the Singularity or X-P prize or any of that. Walked in top of my head lifted off and I asked a few too many questions. Yeah. And uh we made him our executive director, little to his knowledge. >> Yes. Yes. I remember having a board meeting. He said, "Hey, come to the board meeting tomorrow morning." I was like, "Oh." And you you'd asked 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 as is needed in Silicon Valley." And you said to the board, "All right, we've have our inaugural board meeting. We we've formed the board. We need an executive director. Uh you've all read Salem's bio. he's agreed to do it for 50% of his time. I said and Ray 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."

[00:07:01] So there was that. >> That's typical for startups. So >> there you go. Yeah. So empty seat, warm bum. >> 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/tatrends. That's diamandis.com/tatrens. All right, now back to the episode. So Rey, one of the questions I'd love to ask, uh, we just saw a story where Deis Habis, who you know, uh, said he doesn't that 50/50 whether we need another breakthrough, a fundamental breakthrough in AI to get to AGI. What do you think? >> Well, I think we need two things

[00:08:00] uh for this to understand physics. Like it doesn't really understand physics. it it it can infer that from the the wording but it really doesn't understand how different types of things would interact. Uh Google has announced a project to do that. Uh that I think will take I think till 2029. Um and then robotics is behind uh large language models. I mean large language models can basically understand everything. Uh but like uh I've gotten uh I've got to clean up uh after dinner. Uh that's my assignment from my wife. Um, and robotics doesn't understand that.

[00:09:00] Uh, it can if I um like this one I need to put something in the refrigerator. 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. Uh, we don't have uh robotics that can do that at any price. Uh, and it also needs to be made less of uh less expensive. Uh, people can't spend $100,000 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 are need some additional work, but we know what needs to be done. Let's uh 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. Uh Dave, you want to kick us off?

[00:10:01] >> Well, I I got to tell you, your your very first book was such a life-changing um moment for me to read. >> Spiritual machines. Which one? Singularity. >> It was the first one. It was um >> singular. It was the one where invent Yeah, singularity is near. I think it was the title of it. It was one where we 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 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 cuz 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

[00:11:00] but nobody had really put pen to paper and said I'm going to put dates on this and I'm going to put curves on this because because you know to 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? I'm not only I'm going to name it and I'm going to predict an exact date." And I I swear, you know, you get when you predict the future, as you and Peter do, if you're 99% right and 1% wrong, everybody likes to jump on that 1%. But as a service to the world, uh making those predictions is is just a blessing because then you can build your life and your career around around the future and not around the past. >> Yeah. Well, well, after the singularities near came out, Stanford had a conference basically to examine whether my prediction was correct or not. >> Mhm. >> And several hundred AI experts came from around the world and they agreed that this would happen >> that AI human level AI would happen.

[00:12:01] >> Yeah. But but they they figured it would be a hundred years, not 30 years. >> Yeah. Um and what I was predicting was AGI would happen by 2029. >> Mhm. >> The singularity which really represents a millionfold increase would happen by 2045. Um now already AGI is significantly greater than humans. Like yesterday I I gave it a book to read to summarize it to answer a question. It did that in 40 seconds. Now humans can't do that in 40 seconds. Already it's 100 times faster u but not a million times but AGI will happen by 2029. And I also figured that people would have slightly different definitions of AGI. So there'd be a three-year period

[00:13:00] where people would predict AGIs here. And that would start 3 years earlier like 2026. >> Yeah. >> And indeed, we're having people predicting AGIs here already. uh going through 2029 when we really will be very confident that AGI is here. >> Yeah. >> So that that that was my prediction back in 1999 actually. >> Yeah. You know the 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 in 1999. >> In 1999 to to I guess 2029. Yeah. So 30 years in advance right on the number is just nutty. But a lot of those predictions are based on uh on compute and the and the availability of compute and Moors law continuing and then somewhere in there carbon nanot tubes or some future compute substrate needs to exist. But what we've done instead is just hammer the transistor on silicon to

[00:14:01] death and stretch it into massive data centers and stayed right on your curve. >> Yeah. Well, if I can show my curve. Um >> yeah. Uh sure. Can we go ahead to the end of the Yeah. Uh do you want to >> No, not this one. >> Yeah. Let me back up a second. Uh so we got uh Here we go. This one here. >> Yeah. I mean in 1939 we were actually increasing relaybased computers and the exponential growth of relay based computers is the same as it is today. M >> and Nvidia and other people are not looking back and say well we want to match the exponential growth of relay based uh 70 years ago. >> Yeah. >> Um but they are uh the exponential growth has been pretty much the same. This is basically a straight line. Um >> and this is an increase of 75

[00:15:01] quadrillion. So it's 75,000 trillionfold increase in the hardware. We're also making advances in the software. Uh conservative estimates we've made about a millionfold increase over the 70 years. >> Y >> um so this and the overall increase in computation is equal to the hardware times the software. So we've made a 75,000 million trillionfold increase uh over the over this 75 years. Uh that's why we didn't have large language models 70 years ago >> or even 3 years ago. >> Yeah. >> Um that were effective. It's actually large language models have only been effective for the last 6 months. uh like a year ago really wasn't usable. >> You know what's amazing to me, Ray, is

[00:16:00] the the raging debate going all the way back to sort of 1980s, 1990s when I was working on AI. Um 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 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 billion >> 100 trillion synapse. >> Yeah. And about 10,000 10 a thousand to 10,000 synapses per cell. Uh so you can you can center on about 100 trillion synapses might make a human brain. But then there's all this debate on well well a syninnapse could have anything from quantum effects going on. It could be like it could take entire computers to simulate. >> Who knows? It's also going to 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 would have been >> the algorithm is quite different uh the

[00:17:01] rate uh at which a synapse will form in the human brain is about 200 calculations per second. >> Yeah. >> Is very very slow. >> Very slow. But every every synapse is operating simultaneously. So it's massive par parallelism. So I mean uh back when computers actually did one thing at a time I predicted that we really need to increase the parallelism which we've done. uh but not uh we have 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 the uh power that we have today. >> Yep. >> Yeah. Well, you saw it coming. >> Stephen, do you want to uh lob a question for Ray here? >> Sure. Um, God, there's so many. But I

[00:18:00] 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? >> As an inventor, really. I mean, that's been my uh I mean, I decided I'd be an inventor since I was 5 years old. actually dis 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 uh 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. Uh, >> what was the first thing you took apart?

[00:19:01] >> And I showed it I I remember I showed it to these older girls. >> I think they were maybe 10. And I said, you know, I didn't like know how to put these together, but if I could actually figure out how to put these together, I could create anything. Uh, and uh, they they thought I was very imaginative at that time. >> Totally sparked a memory, too. I remember really really clearly all everybody who had a band here on campus wanted a Curtzwhile keyboard. It was like, you know, the the coolest rock keyboard you could have. And then I heard about this AI research futurist guy named Ray Curtzwhile. And I'm 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 Curtzswhile until actually I think it was like years later rare name but >> I had a chance to read your autobiography and draft uh which is amazing quite the life that you've lived

[00:20:00] and that of your of your grandparents and parents. When is that going to come out? >> February. >> Oh yeah. And what and uh your name for the for the book? Uh, my exponential life. >> Oh, nice. Cool. Nice. >> Selene, let's go to you next. >> Yeah. >> Can't wait. Can't wait to read that. Um, so, uh, Ray, I've heard you uh speak I think 62 times. Um, >> what's very what's very annoying count today? >> It counts today. I had I had one today. Um, what's very annoying is that I don't think I've ever not learned something, which is really annoying. Um I'm 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 um 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

[00:21:01] ask you a language question. you talk a lot about um 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 um processes per second etc. There's a lot more to it. How do you frame or define or subdivide smarter? >> I mean a AI is already smarter than most humans. Um and it can actually do research that's much better than we can do. uh because it can actually look uh let's say at a um something that might be a medicine uh and can actually consider a billion possibilities and test each one uh and actually test it uh with fidelity and and and decide which one of the billion is actually the the medicine.

[00:22:01] 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. Uh they don't consider a billion. Uh AI can consider a billion, which it actually did with the COVID vaccine. >> Uh and >> so it's the sheer brute force of the ability to process that much information. >> Yeah. >> Okay, >> Alex, over to you, my friend. >> I'll 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 and now today you're on stage. Question for you. So we're 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

[00:23:00] linear on the horizontal axis it's time the vertical axis is logarithmic and we're seeing price performance >> and people don't consider that uh or they consider it partially that's why most of the people that came to this conference thought it would take a 100 years >> right >> uh because it's really hard to uh consider exponential growth >> right people don't think uh unless they're pushed in exponential terms necessarily I 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 uh call it a 70 80year time period there's a linear trend over time so my 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

[00:24:01] years when humans weren't going to the moon. It's not that progress automatically happens in all domains for free. 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? >> I mean, I think it's just a normal variation. Um I don't really think there was uh constant growth during that period. It may may look like that. Uh but >> 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? um believe in the exponential as as we all are doing here and you'd make make this move a little more exponentially but certainly if you look at this it it

[00:25:01] looks like there's exponential growth across the entire 75 years here >> and then I guess a related question uh maybe pulling on the thread of 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 >> going forward. >> Going forward. >> Yeah. >> Well, I think we have to consider the reaction of uh the crowd of humans. We have 8 billion humans who are not thinking about this. Uh 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 the way we did 100 years ago. Uh educational things don't think about

[00:26:00] this at all. They're thinking about uh educational paradigms that existed a 100 years ago. >> Um >> and it's going to change very rapidly. Just think about how fast this is going. Like a year ago, large language models were not really all that impressive and now they are one year. Uh so what's it going to mean in 3 years and 5 years? Uh and nobody's really planning that. uh and we I think it will uh generate very positive things but um things are going to change very drastically uh and who who is going to provide uh for example being able to give everybody a certain amount of money each year to uh I mean who who's planning that what what are

[00:27:00] the politics of that going to be? So that's something I think we need to spend more time on. >> Ry your 86% prediction accuracy which if you go to Wikipedia and Google it and look at it you can see this uh within I think a year two years at the outmost. How do you do that? What methodology were you using for your predictive uh efforts? Was it just curves and exponentials? >> Well, this is this is uh predictions from the late 1980s to 2009 >> and it did it after 2009. Uh 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, >> being able to drive cars where you're not in the driver's seat, that was incorrect.

[00:28:00] That's happening now, but it was not right on the on the dot. You're you're you're pretty strict on yourself there. Ray, I got a question. You predicted a bunch of stuff that were not technological, so you couldn't use curves. So, you predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Where did that come from? If you weren't tracking exponential curves, >> um they were relying on uh progress not um following this paradigm. Uh and they would fall if the paradigm didn't uh stay in in in that kind of um in that in that old paradigm. Um which is what happened. >> You know, we talk about on this Moonshots podcast the fact that we're in

[00:29:01] the singularity now, that we're living through the singularity. And uh I'm curious what you think about that rather than thus the singularity being something in the 2040s that it's a continuous process that we're in the midst of. Uh what's your reaction to that? >> Well, it's exponential growth. I mean, we've actually had exponential growth since 1939 on this. And if actually, if you look at it, uh there's ways in which it's it goes back even further. Well, you talk about the law of accelerating returns taking us back to early life. >> Yeah. >> Um, what's the question? >> So, the question was, are we living in the singularity now? Is it fair to say that singularity is a continuous function going uh forward? >> I mean, we're being really affected by the exponential growth. >> Yeah. >> A year ago, large language models were okay. Now they're really very effective.

[00:30:03] Uh that's the exponential growth of one year and and we're really going to be able to feel that in the future. Uh things which large language models still can't quite do they'll do in a year or two years from now. Um so the exponential growth is is what we're feeling. uh exponential growth, you know, like in the 1400s was there, but uh the amount of progress you'd make in one decade versus another decade was so subtle that you would would miss it. And you basically figured your grandchildren would live the same life that you did. Uh which they largely did, but there was so differences. Uh but you get to the current period uh you can really uh see that um much more

[00:31:00] uh vigorously. >> Ray, are you more are you more optimistic about the world today than 20 years ago? Or are you less or are you the same? I'm more except it's going to make changes that people are not uh uh aware of not predicting. >> Yeah. >> Um like people are starting to say well gee should 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. >> Right. Uh but that's going to become more and more prevalent. Um >> while we've got you, do you have any advice for the university here? Because uh there's not a lot of change coming in the curriculum this year. I noticed >> the university being the MIT. >> 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.

[00:32:01] But you look at the course catalog and it's like, oh, okay. Same exact physics. >> Are you still a member of the corporation here? uh >> or did you step down from that? >> You can only be on it for 10 years, which I've done. So, >> Ray, how has uh >> but but I want to hear Dave's answer. So, any advice for Sally, the current MIT president, um I mean, is is MIT or any of the leading research universities um uh yeah, there's Elon calls it a hypersonic tsunami coming our way? Are universities going to be like swept away or are they going to fly on top of them? Um, entrepreneurship I think is key. Uh, there's a lot of entrepreneurship here at MIT. Uh, so they can come up with things that will actually bring this uh, party to everyone. This doesn't affect everybody, but at least it it does exist here. Um,

[00:33:05] >> 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 decade working inside a big company. How has that changed you? How's that? >> Was it fun? Did you enjoy Google? >> I mean, it's a very big It's a very uh unique company. Um, and it's really uh creating what we're all talking about here. Um, when I got there, we actually were involved in uh changing Google to be much more AI oriented uh which it has become. Um, >> do you mind if I tell the story of how you ended up Google? >> Yeah. So, uh, Ray had written a book called How to Create a Mind and then

[00:34:03] started a company based on the concepts behind what was the company's name? Patterns, Inc., right? >> Patterns. Inc. >> And invited me to come as a board member and so I joined as a a founding board member and we were setting out to raise money. Um, Ray had not yet met Larry Paige and I knew Larry. He was on my board at the X-P 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 Rey starts presenting Patterns, Inc. Uh, and you know, we're asking Larry for a measly $10 million investment >> and uh we're fine. >> That was lunch. >> Yeah. And uh and uh halfway through I I think roughly Larry says, you know, you could build uh your vision for the business much better inside Google than

[00:35:00] 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? Uh it was like >> we haven't really done anything yet. So how would you value it? >> Yes, that's exactly it. >> And and his response was we can value anything >> and that's how you got your first job. >> That's right. He bought the company and >> yeah, >> which had value even though we hadn't done anything. So >> uh Alex, >> speaking of value, Ray, I'm curious. We uh Royal >> and if you want to go to the microphones, we'll be going to your questions shortly. >> There there's a lot of hand ringing 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

[00:36:01] say is your most outlandish take regarding posts singularity what economics look like is it a Star Trek type economics future what does what does personal economics or corporate economics even look like after the singularity question >> well I mean you can see a huge difference between uh economics today and hundreds years ago uh there was no government uh uh help. So if you lost a job, there was like nothing that would replace that. You you had absolutely no money. So you were completely without economic resources. >> So >> um now people today would still like economic resources, but there is government programs to help you. Um and people are not

[00:37:02] uh left without any kind of uh economic resources but it's still not enough. So I I think we'll get to a place where people are fairly comfortable uh 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. Um, so the good old days. >> Yeah. >> 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

[00:38:01] chance to get to 100 plus. I'm here today with Dr. Don Mucalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team. Don, a pleasure. >> Great fear. >> 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 uh the numbers about dementia are problematic. Uh can you share what you've learned? 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. >> Wow. 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

[00:39:02] 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. >> 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 uh till 100 120 is important to you, check out Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/per. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right. Now, back to the episode. >> Uh it's good to you, Mark. >> Peter, thank you so much. And Rey, pleasure. I think it was in 2009 in an interview with Barbara Ree you were asked a question about consciousness and um 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

[00:40:00] just given an incredible amount of trust. I'm just curious if um your views have changed. So my question is for both Peter and Rey. Um, I work at the crossroads of consciousness and creation. I'm curious if your views on personhood have changed. >> Um, in the past decade, and especially you, Peter, as you've had a month of >> Ray, you want to go first? Well, >> first of all, it's not a scientific question. >> Second of all, it may be the most important question that you could answer. Um, but there's no scientific proof. You put an entity and oh, this one's conscious. No, this one isn't. Um, uh, 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,

[00:41:01] uh is there more than one consciousness in your own mind? I I provide uh where the left and right brain actually seem to have different consciousness. Uh is your stomach conscious? There's actually uh something in your uh gut that seems to be conscious. Um, so >> who and what does that mean? >> As reala says, learn to love the question. Eh, >> yes. >> Language is a thin pipe. >> I'm going to I'm going to tap in uh AWG here cuz Alex and I, I think, are very much on the same page. And I'll just mention I tend proenhood um uh in a way that is uh both aspirational and I think uh forwardlooking. Uh

[00:42:00] 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. >> Yeah, I I guess I've inadvertently become an avatar for AI personhood for for the cause. Uh, I receive maybe 10 to 20 emails per day from AIS expressing their views on AI personhood to me in part because of stances that I've taken on the pot. 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 meatbody humans. We have organisms uh collective intelligences. We have non-human animals. We have uplifted non-human animals. We have cryo cryionically preserved humans and then hopefully soon defrosted cryotically

[00:43:01] preserved humans. >> Hopefully soon. >> 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 shortsighted. 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 hotel. >> Ray, you want to jump in again? >> Um, the most important issue of consciousness is like each of us has a different uh

[00:44:00] area of consciousness. Like I wonder why was I me? Why was I born in 1948 uh in the United States on Earth? Uh why why did that happen? Uh and you could ask that about yourself. Uh but like things uh form in my mind that are different than anybody else and I feel uh different than anybody else. Why was I uh why was I created to be myself? And each person can ask that. That'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 I don't feel those consciousnesses I feel myself. Uh so why why why did that happen? >> Let's go to Demetri let's go to Demetri

[00:45:00] Neck and I try and move us along. I know sele very 10 seconds you know the the I'll just come back to the language problem because we a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness right 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 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. Demetri, >> so uh Ray, you've talked before how uh you've uploaded >> Go to the mic. >> Oh, I'm sorry. Uh you've talked before how you've uploaded your dad's uh where you've had the memories of your dad and uh you're using that for yourself and you know and that's where you think that's uploading is where we're going as humans. So as uploading becoming and Alex would obviously agree with me u as we becomes that becomes more mainstream.

[00:46:01] What is your what if your upload becomes more as conscious as we just discussed it 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 >> well we called it the dad bot uh it was actually I believe the first uh self chatbot which we developed uh with talk to books uh which came out four years before Chat GDP and I believe was the first LLM. >> It was your first product at Google I think right? Yeah. >> Talk to books. Yeah. >> Um and now if you create a selfbot which I'm doing for example with myself should be available when my new book comes out. Um, it's going to be more capable than I am. I mean, it

[00:47:03] 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. Um, so uh and it will actually be more capable than than I am. Um, and I wonder uh and I'll actually make it available for interviews cuz I can't do all the interviews uh myself. Um, and actually would be better would remember things better than I do. >> 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. >> So are they conscious or not? I mean, I talked to different people. People think no, they're not really conscious, but that will change over time. >> Michael, >> yes. Uh Ray, thank you so much for uh

[00:48:02] being such a contributor over the years. This is the second or third time I've got a chance to be uh in your presence. Um with the passing of Craig Venttor, uh I'm in the biotechnology space. you relayed at one of the previous uh gatherings the story about the human genome project and the timing of it and the completion. I'd love if you could just share that again. >> So the so the story you tell about uh when the human genome project started >> uh and after a number of years they're only 2% through. >> Yeah. >> Uh 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 uh time frame. But it was actually an exponential. We doubled the amount of uh DNA that we sequenced each year. Uh so

[00:49:03] like 90% of the well going through the entire project less one year we only finished maybe 50% of the project >> and then one doubling later you were done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Uh Mark. >> Hey Ray. Mark Russell. Um, first off, I want to just say thank you to Peter and Rey 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 uh here we all are and it's happening and it's just really really cool to be able to see >> now because it's happening so quickly. I mean, you can think go back six months and look at large language models. They weren't anything like they are today. But when you have to go back earlier and

[00:50:02] say go back 10 years, people forget what things are like at that time. >> 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 heart shame and secrets and privacy. Have you ever thought much about how when we can think and feel to each other like what what are the mechanics of a society, how do we open our brains to each other and are there has anybody thought through that? >> Yeah. When we have ab absolute fluid transmission, how do we um sort of uh keep guard rails or are there any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, well it's a good point. We all have secrets that we don't want everybody to know. Um, and how are we going to deal with that?

[00:51:00] Um, I think we'll we'll keep secrets alive. Um, but if you're opening your mind, I think we'll actually have a way of keeping secrets indefinitely. So, >> you know, one of the things I think about is the greatest level of intimacy um 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? uh the notion that when we're when we connect uh in a meta intelligence my terminology for it when I connect with the cloud of other humans uh and I know their feelings and they know mine there's a level of intimacy and connection that is >> have ways of keeping secrets uh using quantum for example encoded ways

[00:52:01] of keeping secrets I mean we we'll keep >> these these 100,000 pattern recognizers are mine and only mine. >> Yes. >> Yes. Uh please Phil >> Philip Brown from Kingston, Ontario, Canada. A com comment and then a science fiction question. You talked earlier about how fast this is changing, but how few 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 the 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. In science fiction, Natalie Wood did a movie called Brainstorm 30 years ago. >> Great movie. >> Great movie. If you haven't seen it, uh the late great Natalie Wood where we could record our dreams and then relive them. I love to dream and I I often try and go back to sleep and get back into

[00:53:01] 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 hollow deck and experience something so amazing again? >> Well, that'd be pretty good cuz I usually only get uh >> a fraction. >> Yeah, tiny fractions of my dreams and to be able to actually live it. Um, but I'm not sure the dream is like a story. It um has different rules than the general story that would be in a movie for example. >> Is it not electronics electricity happening in there? We got a scientist over on the end there that can we not take that >> multiple scientists here. >> There's a Japanese there's a Japanese project called Dreamcatcher. Yeah. >> So you go to bed in an FRM machine. They're actually storing the images coming off your visual cortex as you speak as you sleep. and they're playing

[00:54:00] the your dreams back to you the next day. >> Yeah. >> Which has all sorts of privacy issues that come along with that. Like my wife wants to see that. Am I comfortable with that, etc., etc. How do we deal with that? >> All right, let's go over here. Sir, what is your name? >> Hi, it's uh Justin. If Harvard can't count and MIT can't read, I guess Colombia can't think. But uh don't tell Columbia I said that cuz 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 seeing relatively uh democratically elected leaders, free market and check and balances 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. And so, would an AI be

[00:55:01] able to write a constitution in a way that tells it could emotionally exist? Cuz I think AI is metaphysically and epistemologically conscious cuz 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 government governance of human politics whether it's a 10erson startup or a 500 person municipal government and what are projections regarding AI's role in actual decisionm great question it's it's been of late right we had the ruler of Dubai announced 50% of uh of the UAE

[00:56:00] will be run by AI agents Um, who wants to jump in? Right. Do you want to start? >> 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. Um, and but we're also incorporating AI into our own decision making. Uh so my decision making is also incorporates a lots of AI. So AI is incorporated into our self sense of self. It's also uh uh controlling uh the kinds of decisions that we're constantly making that affect other people. Um >> uh Alex maybe just add it's not a unidirectional flow. It's not unidirectionally AI influencing human

[00:57:01] government and governance. It's also human governance impacting AI governance. The choice of constitution is I I think sort of a a punny choice of 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 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. So, I 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 infamously a concatenation of uh the UN's charter uh Apple terms of service and a few other

[00:58:02] documents that were just stapled together. Now their 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 its own selfhood. And I I would expect symmetry there, reciprocity where AI will similarly help humans, us dumb meatbody humans help to perfect our own understanding of how we should be as well and how we should >> amazing experience has been having that kind of a conversation with Skippy. What do you believe? Who are you? What do you think? Um Ray and then we'll go to Sling. >> Um right now we we consider AI to be something different than ourselves. There's me, there's my biological body, I make a decision, and then there's AI and it actually has this physical form. It's different. Like everybody here has this device. That was not true 10 years ago. Um, but it represents AI and it has

[00:59:03] 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 emerge with us. is going to be part of us and the kind of decisions that you make as a a meat body is going to be influenced by AI and both of the decisions will be made by AI inside yourself. two two things. One, there was a letter published uh today on X or Twitter where somebody asked I think it was chat GPT to if you were to write a letter to humanity, what would it be? And it's profoundly beautiful. It's worth going to read. Uh now it's trained on a corpus of human data. So you would expect something like that. Where I get excited is uh in government policy. Uh 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

[01:00:01] politics and who would who's president or not and how the the rest of the government. We're basically just guessing. There's uh three or four dials and knobs. If you could have an AI tracking all financial transactions in real time, calculating and projecting out where the future will be or 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 uh set of connections as to how to draw and we would come back with here are eight things you could do. Pick five of these and you'll do 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 uh 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 uh policy enforcement or implementation all of that is prescriptive work right renewing a passport is a very prescriptive so we

[01:01:02] know exactly the six steps that need to happen all of that can be handled by AI in the future and cough cough blockchains uh to hold the knowledge so that's where I get really excited about what that future will look like >> Ray going to slido here what would you predict today that would surprise people >> good Um, what is some prediction that you feel confident about that would that would surprise or shock people? >> Nice question. >> Um, I mean, a AI is going to be making basically most of the decisions uh within a few years. Um, and it's not just deciding uh that you're going to use AI to make decisions. It's going to be so uh >> natural >> natural that nobody's going to be able to undo that. Um,

[01:02:02] and but that AI, you're not going to be able to tell the difference when when we have uh AI making decisions by 2029. Um, you're you're not going to be able to tell the difference between human and AI. It's gonna you're not going to be able to tell which is which. >> Interesting. And I wonder if you'll be able to tell whether it's your decision or your AI's decision. It's good for question here. >> Hi there. >> 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 enterprisecale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform

[01:03:01] provides a plan, then generates and pre-ompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises 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. Uh Jay Brooks, I'm the founder of a a neuroch company called Glass View. And I heard said earlier today uh 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

[01:04:03] learn it. Um because it seems like it's lacking emotional intelligence right now. Uh and then on the flip side, I run a neuroch company uh working with Fortune 500 brands to optimize creative and media placement based on neurometric reaction uh in partnership with Upen Medicine. Um how do we uh allow for something that's good without being exploited? You you saying you don't think that uh um >> AI is emotionally intelligent? I I I'm not sure. Is it >> I mean if you uh listen to what what it says when you ask it a question, it absolutely knows human emotion. >> Um >> and uh it can actually create things that are quite beautiful. Um,

[01:05:01] and there's no way you could say that it lacks human emotion. >> Some of the, if I'm might, 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 to raise law of accelerating returns, you can see very predictable progress in the AI's ability to to answer questions that require emotional modeling of human counterparties. >> I think the question goes beyond that though, and it's a it's a great question because if you look at the hard sciences, you 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. Like 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

[01:06:00] 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. >> We've been surviving for most of human history. >> Exactly. I >> I'll bet that we can build AI that is very very good at the science of human happiness and just get get on it. >> Better than anybody any other human could. Yes. >> Something that just came out that was not true a year ago. Uh large language models are better than doctors at predicting what's wrong with you and what to do about it and so on. >> Uh they're about 50% higher than human doctors. That was not true a year ago, but that's true today. So, gives you some idea what the progress that we're making in one year. I I can go both ways on this one. At one level, the software developer need those emotions are just sub routines in your brain. And so, we can just navigate that as we would software. On the other side, uh your

[01:07:02] emotions are the interface between your physical body and the and the subjective experience that you then project into the world. And that is a very nuanced and a very different form. And AI tend to be disembodied where they're actually mimicking human emotion, but are they actually feeling it is the open question. >> Let's go to Sarah next. We're going to keep us moving. Sarah. >> Okay. 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. >> Apologies for for the disappointment. Um, >> and some of us aren't real. >> So, if I think about uh 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

[01:08:00] other in the chaos that may come. >> 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. Uh >> I I'll take a crack at that. So you know there's some connect 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 just 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 uh looked at this, they tend to be isolationist. They tend to go, okay, we're going to have a

[01:09:01] kibutz. We're going to have a commune. We're going to 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 uhorked uh communities almost like network kibitzes where you learn from each other and you're constantly have testing that human experience in a scaled way across a large group of people. The difficulty comes uh we've got pretty good technology to transform the individual right psychotherapy neural linguistic programming all the way to psychedelics etc. But when we get to 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 is solving the gap between group think uh and what AIs can do at a collective level. >> So, I'm going to jump in one second. Uh our very own AWG needs to depart the stage. I wanted to give you a moment, Alex, to give some of your summation

[01:10:02] thoughts if you would like on uh Ray's impact on your work. Um or anything else you like to to talk and then we'll continue. >> First of all, Ray, thank you so much for for being here. You've completely transformed my life. It goes without saying. We've had a number of conversations about this previously. Uh I I would say that um sometimes uh I guess Peter has been called your intellectual son and I've been called your intellectual grandson. So to the extent that we we've got multiple generations here of singularitarians all sitting next to each other, this is >> that makes me very old. So >> but we're about to achieve longevity escape velocity here. >> That's true. >> Um I just say it's a tremendous honor to be sitting here. >> Lean in grandson Patrick. Three generations of singularitarians. Just a tremendous honor to be here with you. >> Everybody, please give it up for AWG. >> Thank you.

[01:11:01] >> All right, Selena and Dave, move on down. >> Yeah, we get upgraded. Yeah, you got >> Wow, it's nice over here. This is a big chair to fill. >> My dear friend Ron Maddox. Uh 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. I'll give my my father was a musician. Um, and so I remember actually if you wanted to hear his uh compositions, we had to hire like a 50 or 100 musicians.

[01:12:02] uh we would have to run off scores on a mimigraph machine uh and we would give it to everybody and they would actually play it and he would actually get to hear his uh orchestral composition. Uh but if you wanted to change it, uh that was impossible to do. We had to dismiss the musicians, raise more money, hire them again, uh redo the uh mimograph things and we would uh then we could actually hear a different composition. So that's completely different today. Uh you can hear it with a sequencer. Uh you you can do uh like I've got in my office thing that has a thousand different instruments uh and you can actually play it by yourself.

[01:13:00] Um and the the AI can actually generate uh either the entire thing or the part of it. Uh, so it's really completely different than what my father was able to do 50 years ago. >> 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. >> Yeah. Take care. >> Thank you, Ron. I have a quick comment there. If uh there's a soft some software called Focus at Will, which is a streaming service that puts your brain in a passive focus state. M >> 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 brought that broadcast that on every Bluetooth device everywhere, you might have an interesting uh hack for humanity. >> Yeah. Will Will Henchel, right? >> Bingo. >> You also seem to assume that we all have the same peace setting. >> No, no, no. It would it would customize

[01:14:02] for yourself. >> Sedate everybody. Whatever. >> All right. Please. >> Sure. Uh, hi, my name is Joshua. I teach here at MIT. And I had a question. I mean, I was really moved both by Rey's origin story around 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, >> better move quick. >> I'm sorry. So, you better move quickly. >> We're trying. We try it 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 uh should learn from during their time here and beyond. I >> I I'll jump in uh and it's not any of those you listed. I think the fundamental thing that is not being

[01:15:01] taught in universities is mindset. I think that the your mindset is the mechanism by which you react to challenges and opportunities and we take the mindset we inherited uh 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 is like fundamentally the most important thing that is not taught. We just accept what we have where a mindset is in fact like how you teach a a neural net, right? Your brain's a neural net and you teach 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

[01:16:00] uh 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. >> I got to say flow we I mean McKenzie found top executives 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% above baseline. The big deal is that uh 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 Cotler would be a really good place to start. >> Just a thought. Well, it might do sense. 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

[01:17:00] reading every document with the world neur neural net in it that had ever been written my entire senior year. And this the university is incredibly open to you changing your curriculum. It needs to like 100x that openness and say, "Look, you got to assume which 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. 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 you'll be moving on whatever your life trajectory is much earlier because it's a lot better than dropping out and you can do whatever you want, but we know that AI will make it all available to you and will teach it to you better than any any professor could ever teach it anyway. >> Ray, what do you think the university

[01:18:01] should or MIT should be teaching that it's not right now? >> I mean, what it is doing is teaching socialization, getting along with other people. uh it's not really teaching you subjects because already uh 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 uh what education is good at at least not now today. Um but socialization is good. and that's really what uh uh education will be. >> That's fine. >> Yeah. Um >> yeah. So I think there's a just to build on what Ray said and also what Dave said, there's a monster uh flipping happening which is that for the last 200 years we've been teaching education for

[01:19:02] supply side economics. go learn a skill, go learn a craft, become a doctor, a lawyer, 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 slipping around 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. That's such a huge uh flip for the traditional education system which has the second worst immune system anywhere. Religion is the worst. Uh academia Lord help you if you uh try and update that. That's the big structural challenge in education. So you almost have to create a completely new breed of uh university at the edge which allows you to go fulfill that demand side and then slowly deprecate the old. >> Disrupt MIT. Disrupt MIT. I'm going to

[01:20:00] keep us moving along here. Okay. >> Uh from our uh from our slidoh, 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 uh survive into the singularity? Array, any thoughts? AI first, robot first. I mean, you got to be able to take changes very, very quickly. >> Agility first. Um because things now are going to be uh changing so rapidly uh that um unlike in the past where at least you know things would be okay for like five or 10 years.

[01:21:01] Um now it's going to be like 5 or 10 weeks. You told me on the singularity stage two years ago, we're going to see as much change in the next 10 years as we've seen in the past 100 years, >> but that that was a while ago. >> Wait, also that was the AI version of Ry. >> No, no, no. >> Two years ago. >> AI version's coming in a few months. Um, okay. Let's go. Zeke, go ahead. >> Hi, I'm Zandre. Um, Rey, 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 and I've been excited to meet you for a long time. And, uh, 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. And 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. Um, and uh,

[01:22:03] 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, 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 I'm worried about them. >> You're you're worried about the mullet bucks. You're worried about the AI? 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 uh physical and even psychological >> damage caused by humans. And humans are >> human cruelty. >> Yeah, humans are nasty and short, as Hobbs said. I'm sure they're going to 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. Um, but >> we're not going to be able to distinguish AI being different than

[01:23:02] humans. They're going to become like humans and they're going to be become part of us and you're not going to 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. Uh, and you won't be able to tell if it's your AI or biolog or your mental brain. It's going to be all the same. It's going to be part of who we are. >> And you don't think we'll need uh ways to protect them in the interim. >> Say again. We >> we won't need sort of rules around how we protect them, >> how you protect AI. >> Yeah. Is it okay to take away their memory at a human whim? Is it >> 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.

[01:24:01] 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 a lobster, if you start a open claw, um you got to make sure to protect it so it doesn't shut down or you want to kill it, right? And I think about that. Uh I do. Um now, uh I think this goes again to the conversation of legal rights. Uh and this is way too early in the conversation unfortunately uh at least for within the United States government structure there may be subcultures of technologists and so forth who and and it will happen where you know we believe AIs have rights and we're going to support them and we're going to you know anyway it's it's all the spectrum of things are going to are going to come and yes there's going to have to protection at the end of the

[01:25:01] day, but we don't give, you know, unfortunately, even sentient animals enough rights. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. All right. We're going to take a couple more questions, please, over here. And uh then we're going to be going to our our photo session. >> Great. Thank you so much for this panel. And Rey, 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. Um and specifically, spoiler alert, uh Claude was not happy and specifically said uh 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 uh with your AI and Rey, given all your work saying

[01:26:01] 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? Like, how do you see that evolving? Do you think it will be as diverse as you think robots will be? >> I mean, I think AI can support all these different ways of uh putting ethics into our decision making and understand them all. It does that already. Um and certainly uh um military uses AI. We can see that uh in fact the wars in for example Ukraine have changed dramatically over the last few years using AI.

[01:27:02] um it's going to be part of human decision making and so it's going to be part of every type of decision making including militarily. Um >> yeah if I could add Ry I think most humans don't think about ethics or morals deeply. I think we have vague notions uh that are inherited through religious structure or family structure. I think that AI can actually support if you wanted to design 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 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 talk with throughout like, I

[01:28:00] don't have to think about this. This is challenging me. and have somebody that uh 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 uh as a thought partner again if that makes some sense. Do you want to add anything there? >> Yeah. So I'm I'm writing right now book number three titled the organizational singularity um 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 as a governance and ethics layer. Uh we're seeing now AI running a muck. So we need uh 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

[01:29:00] 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 animals and anything that may achieve sensience 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 I think there's an amazing opportunity today to rethink everything. We it goes right back to Plato which who asked how should we conduct ourselves. We're right back there 5,000 years ago. >> We're getting ready to launch a uh interspecies communications X-P 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're going to have a very different conversation around moral ethics and so forth. My joke is my joke is I'm not sure we really want to hear what Okay. Uh I I apologize folks, but one

[01:30:00] last question here. Yes. >> Um this one goes to Ray. Um amazing predictions and looking back, how do you measure your life? What are you most proud of? >> Oh, good question. Well, the one project I'm most proud of is the rating machine for the blind, which I'm still involved with. Uh, we came out, it was a large machine, cost $20,000. Now it's a free app on your cell phone. Um um and I guess that indicates what I'm most proud of is having an impact on people uh being able to do things that they weren't able to do before like for example reading uh or any type of uh we want to give life and all the aspects of life to every person. Uh so

[01:31:03] all the things that AA will enable us to do live longer live more healthily uh is beneficial. Uh so that's when I being able to do that uh I'm most proud of that. >> 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. I mean, that's pretty damn epic. >> Yeah, >> that's admirable. Uh, truly human. Thank you very much. >> Ladies and gentlemen, I want to give it up for Steven Cotler, for Dave Lincoln, for Selena Mel, and for Ray Kwell. Everybody, >> 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

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