Ray Kurzweil - The Future & The Technological Singularity (3 Hours)

[Music] the next three hours is your chance to participate in a discussion with one of today's leading inventors join us as booked TVs in depth welcomes Ray Kurzweil author of the best-selling book the age of spiritual machines his latest is the singularity is near when humans transcend biology [Music] [Applause] first of all would you tell the folks your name and the size of the curtain that's moving in your name my name is Raymond Kurzweil and I'm from Queens New York Queens New York well Pamela Raymond and I just happened to have brought along this little piano here as you see and Raymond in addition also happens to have the old saying goes happens to have a piece of music with them and before we show the audience what his secret is we have just a few seconds for Raymond to play this piece of music Raymond pianos are you feeling [Music] nicely played and now your performance of course leads into your secret so if you'll whisper it to me will everybody [Applause] [Music] Raymond secret concerns something that he did and will start the game this time with Mars no I didn't did you however use what is some kind of formulas or letters or something unusual used to compose to make up the notes of this piece ah you couldn't say that again well Kappa would the note spell out a name or would they be a matter anything like that not still haven't named nothing like that $20 down 60 to go Henry where's that thing written by a computer is there writing music at this moment understand this issue well but 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 two black things over here really that's right I see the relays right 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 Hopkins hanger wire I mean this is a message go through there is important what music I see and then the typewriter does the final part of the process Ray Kurzweil what were you thinking as you were watching that I haven't seen that for a while I looked pretty relaxed there that's at age 17 so what made you want to create a computer that could write music that was actually my first pattern-recognition project I mean that's been my field of interest I've been fascinated with how the human brain is able to recognize patterns and we actually realize now that that is the heart of human intelligence I mean that is that is what humans are good at that's what we're we still excel in comparison to machines and that we can recognize patterns only a certain type of patterns but machines are getting better and I've been studying that field and trying to teach computers to recognize patterns and and that's I think it's really the heart of you intelligence when we figure that out we'll be able to create machines that have the full range of human intelligence and why is it important to have machines do that because it's an expansion of our own intelligence I mean we already expand our own intelligence with our machines and we were routinely doing intellectual feats it would be impossible without a computers whether it's math or science or if in fact few professionals could do their jobs today without our machines we have an exponentially expanding knowledge base we're the only species it has knowledge and that doubles in size every year and we need our technology to keep track of it and we need pattern recognition to actually find the information that we want to fine and so this is really part of the manifest destiny if you will of our civilization to expand knowledge and pattern recognition is really the key to both creating knowledge and finding it and applying it and could you boil that down to a practical application if a computer does and is able to do that what computers do with that kind of information and knowledge well one thing that's I've found exciting I mean it what's exciting for an inventor is is not just an abstract theory but that sort of leap from formulas on a blackboard to actually changing people's lives and for people that have sensory disabilities for example blindness and I've worked in that field for thirty years we can use pattern recognition to overcome those problems so actually the first major project they worked on was a printer speech reading machine for the blind worked with the National Federation of the blind on that the nation's leading organization blind people and created a machine that could read printed books out loud to people by recognizing the print in any type style character recognition at that time was not really intelligent it would just match pixel for pixel it was called template template matching and so prints had to be in one type style and it had to be perfectly printed so couldn't read think ordinary books and magazines and newspapers so my team and I created the first omni font any type font character recognition and we created a princess between machine for the blind and I've stayed involved with that field for 30 years we just introduced a pocket-sized reading machine that Kurzweil National Federation of the blind readers a blind person can stick it out of their pocket and reprint as they go through the day sign on a wall back of a cereal box ATM displaying a Manian restaurant handout at a meeting and really overcomes the principle handicap associated with visual impairment what our today's computer is able to do as far as your ideas for how they can accommodate that technology and what do the future of computers hold as far as what they'll be able to do well a lot of people who ask whatever happened to artificial intelligence and can reminds me people are going the rainforest and say we're all the species that are supposed to be here when 50 species of ants with him you know 10 yards of them AI artificial intelligence machines doing tasks that used to require human intelligence is deeply integrated into our infrastructure I mean every time you send an email or connect the cell phone call or you buy a product it was designed with computers it's design software this intelligence just-in-time inventory levels are controlled by intelligent algorithms manufactured robotic factories intelligent algorithms flying land airplanes guide intelligent weapons systems make billions of dollars of financial decisions and I could give you a long list so we are I mean our whole economic infrastructure is amplified we are far more productive and in fact far wealthier because of of this type of intelligent technology and these were actually research projects 15 years ago and the thrust of my books is that we will actually achieve the full range of human intelligence both because computers are growing exponentially in capability they're doubling every year for the same price that's multiplying by a billion in 30 years it's actually 25 years to be exactly if you imagine how influential they are already imagine multiplying their capability by a billion in the next quarter century you get some idea of what will be feasible and the software is also improving one of the sources of that is to actually figure out how the human brain works and we're making exponential progress in that the spatial resolution of brain-scanning is doubling every year the amount of data we're collecting on the brain is doubling every year the latest generation of brain scanners can actually see now for the first time individual interneural connections we can see our brain create our thoughts you can actually see our thoughts create our brain because we actually create new brain matter as we think about things and we're also showing that we can turn this information into working models and simulations of brain regions this is already 20 regions of the brain out of several hundred that exist that we have actually modeled and simulated in computers and then we can apply a sophisticated test of the simulation get similar results as applying those same tests to to human capability includes the cerebellum where we do our skill formation which important region comprises more than half the neurons in the brain and I make the case in my latest book of singularity is near fact chapter 4 is devoted to this that within 20 years we will actually have models and simulations of all several hundred regions of the brain including the cerebral cortex where we do our abstract reasoning and there's already a simulation of that being developed by IBM and we will have then the tool that well we'll have the secrets of human intelligence we'll have more insight into ourselves and the toolkit that we use in artificial intelligence to create intelligent machines will be greatly expanded to incorporate the methods that our own brains use and then and then machines will operate at human levels but it won't be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us I mean it really is amplifying our own civilization and we're gonna literally enhance our own intellectual capabilities by ultimately merging with this technology and that's what you mean by the term singularity well this leads up to the singularity and we can talk more about how we get there but a really key threshold is achieving you 'men levels of intelligence the full range particularly our powers of pattern recognition which as I say this is the core of human intelligence in a machine and I and I've been consistent for decades now that 2029 we will achieve that threshold but that won't automatically profoundly transform human civilization we already have human intelligence we've got billions of people walking around with human intelligence but the biological intelligence of our civilization is fixed we have 10 to the 26 power calculations per second in all the 6 7 billion humans on this planet that's not gonna grow 50 years from now it will still be 10 to the 26 power non-biological intelligence it's multiplying by a thousand every decade and even that speed is speeding up so non-biological intelligence will ultimately exceed biological intelligence we will merge with this technology and we can describe how that will happen but if you go out to the 2040s the non-biological portion of the intelligence of our civilization will be about a billion times greater than the biological portion now that's a profound transformation and we used the metaphor borrowed from physics of a singularity really referring to the event horizon in physics as an event horizon around a singularity around a black hole it's very hard to see past it because the gravity inside the event horizon keeps all the information in there's some quantum ways that you can get the information out but basically it's hard to see past the event horizon but we can use our intellect to talk about what life would be like past the event horizon so following that metaphor to human history there will be this profound transformation we're going to amplify our own intelligence a billion-fold by the middle of this century and it's hard to see past that event horizon because it's so transformative on the other hand we can use our intellect such as it is to talk about what life will be like 20 and 20 45 20 50 and that's what I try to do in my book because it basically refers to a profound transformation as we multiply our own intelligence through this exponentially growing you know non-biological intelligence that we're creating why not leave human intelligence as it is and let it progress as it as it should on its own well there's a few reasons I'm gonna mention too I mean one is we have a lot of suffering in the world that we want to overcome and technology's already greatly amplified our ability to solve problems human life expectancy was 25 post infant mortality a thousand years ago it was 37 in 1800 I mean Schubert and Mozart died in the thirties it was pretty tragic but that was typical there was no sanitation no antibiotics life was short brutish disaster prone disease failed poverty failed I mean Thomas Hobbes describes it quite well and we've come a long way because of technology and we're now going to be reprogramming the information processes underlying biology biology basically is a set of information processes but we didn't have the genome until three years ago but then we're now actually gaining the means to reprogram our biology we can turn with RNA interference discovers of that just got the Nobel Prize a couple weeks ago we can add new genes with gene therapy we can turn on and off enzymes we can reprogram biology and we can go beyond biology by merging it with nanotechnology that's something that will be feasible in 20 years but if you look at where we've come this is not a new story we are the species it goes beyond our limitations we didn't stay in the ground we didn't stay in the planet and we haven't stayed with the limitations of our biology human life is very very hard I mean extremely high levels of struggle just a hundred years ago human life expectancy was 45 in 1900 when Social Security was put in place in the 30s 65 was considered quite old I mean I'm pushing 60 and I don't consider I mean I can collect Social Security a few years I don't really I mean I feel that the nature of Aging has changed and this but there's still a lot of suffering I mean you don't have to look far to find people who what's they got a diagnosis of cancer or struggling with some other disease or profound problem of one kind or another poverty we're making progress because of Technology World Bank reported that poverty in Asia it's been cut by half of the last decade because of information technology but we still have a long way to go and only technology really has the scale to really solve the problems that that we're facing and we can talk later for example I believe we will solve the energy and global warming problem within about 20 years using nanotechnology and there's really no other way to do it so these technologies enable us to solve problems and overcome suffering and basically I see that it's the grand goal purpose of human civilization to go beyond our limitations and fundamentally to expand human knowledge no other species has knowledge and our knowledge base is literally doubling every year with this you know 50 different ways to measure it but no matter how you measure we find the doubling time is 11 months 12 months 13 months depending on what you're measuring and we need our technology just to hold it and keep track of it and search through it and we're going to need more intelligent search engines to really find it knowledge based on concepts and so on so expanding our intelligence which which we've already done I mean even though most of the computers are not yet inside our bodies and brains they will make their way into our bodies and brain so most of them are not although if you're a Parkinson's patient you can have a computer put inside your brain that replaces the biological neurons either destroyed by that disease and the latest generation actually allows you to download new software to your computer inside your brain from outside the patient so that's for Parkinson's patients but ultimately when we can send computers inside our brain through the capillaries non-invasively which will be feasible in the 2020s we'll be amplifying quite directly our own intelligence but we routinely do it now with the tools that we that we have at our fingertips I mean just take how quickly you find knowledge about a professor or some product that you hear about with search engines and think back five years ago people didn't use search engines now that sounds like ancient history I'm gonna mention life without search engines but that was five years ago three years ago we didn't have blogs at least people didn't talk about them there was no social networks no podcast a lot of things have changed in just a few years time so we are expanding at an accelerating pace our own frontiers and our own capability and fundamentally we need to get smarter by amplifying our intelligence with this mental amplifier which is our technology in order to continue this grand quest to expand human knowledge and I've defined knowledge quite broadly to include music art as well as science technology and so on our guest is going to be with us for the next two hours and forty-five minutes if you want to ask him your questions about his writings or his thoughts on the future of technology here are the numbers for those of you in the eastern and central time zones it is 202 seven three seven zero zero zero one and for those of you who live in the mountain and Pacific time zones 202 seven three seven zero zero zero two you can also email your thoughts to him that email book TV at sea - span dot org essentially man and machine will become one in the well let me describe how that will happen we're gonna send blood cell size devices inside our bloodstream inside our bodies and also inside our brains through the capillaries to do two things want to keep it's healthier to reverse efforts Gross's destroy pathogens remove debris correct DNA errors if that sounds very futuristic I point out we are doing at least the first generation of that already in animals one scientist cured type 1 diabetes with a blood cell size device that lets insulin out in a controlled fashion scientists at MIT have a blood cell size device it actually destroys cancer cells by detecting the antigens on their surface borrowing inside releasing toxins and destroying the cell and this is today and take this billion fold magnification or expansion that I talked about in a quarter-century of the capabilities of information technology computers and communication and apply that to what we can already do and in 25 years we'll have these nanobots blood cell size devices will be very sophisticated they'll be a they'll be capable of keeping us healthy from inside and also interacting directly with their biological neurons we've already shown that that's feasible and expanding human intelligence how smaller nanobots well blood Southside's nano refers to a billionth of a meter but that means the key features are measured in some modest number of nanometers a nanometer is that the width of five carbon atoms but it doesn't mean that the nanobot is one nano that the nanobot is one nanometer it means that the features are measured in a modest number 5 10 20 nanometers the whole device is actually microns millionths of a meter which is the size of a blood cell and a blood cell is basically a nano robot and it's can be quite sophisticated a white blood cell is actually intelligent can detect friend from foe and devise strategies to destroy it but there's one actually deficient that's a couple of deficiencies but there's one significant deficiency of our white blood cells I've actually watched my own white blood cells in the microscope they're very slow biology is actually quite sluggish took my white blood-cell an hour and a half to destroy this bacteria on the slide and I think your words operating at full speed ultimately these nano robots will be able to do that in seconds there won't be subject to autoimmune disorders they can download software from the internet to combat specific pathogens if that sounds very future is to get pointed there's lots of devices we're putting inside the body and brain now today the download software from outside the body like like this implant for Parkinson's patients so as these devices get smaller according to my models were shrinking technology at an exponential rate a rate of 100 per to the 3d volume per decade so in 25 years these devices will be a hundred thousand times smaller in terms of key features and there'll be a billion times more capable and they're already pretty impressive if that plays out where does human and and machine begin and how I guess is there a moral question when you combine those two not in my mind I mean where the species that goes beyond our limitations and so expanding our horizons with our tools is really what human civilization is all about I mean we have a cerebral cortex it can do abstract reasoning so we can look at that stone and say hey you know I could combine that stone with that stick and creates up a tool that extends my leverage we have an opposable appendage that actually works other chimpanzees hands look similar but it's actually not very well designed they don't have a power grip they don't have fine motor coordination they just aren't quite at that level to create technology and they use tools but the tools never evolved so we've been able to actually create tools and technology and then we always use the latest technology to create the next that's why the process accelerates and that has been its own evolutionary process and that that has enabled us to expand our horizons so if you ask a Parkinson's patient whether that neural implant is part of him or her you know maybe different people would answer differently but it's very much actually part of their their sense of identity because they used to be able to do things then they had the disease and they found they develop certain disabilities and then this implants when it's successful which it often is allows them again to to do what they used to do they could they're delighted to consider that part of themselves if machines as you say will become more human in their reasoning is they're going to change our relationship that we have to computers and machines right now typically they're typically impersonal things that sit in our desk is that going to change absolutely I mean machines and that's a grand trend that's underway I mean machines used to be very remote I mean you couldn't deal with them at all unless you were technician and you know when I went to MIT in 1965 there was one big computer and in their condition Rome and you couldn't get close to it you have to be pretty much of an expert to have any interaction with it and then we had the personal computing revolution and now these devices are family friendly there are no pockets carried them under our arms they're really extensions of ourselves search engines really enable us to find information quite easily the next revolution is going to be a certain amount of natural language understanding these machines will be able to deal with normal conversation not at human levels but enough to actually find information and do routine transactions so they're getting friendlier and friendlier so they're moving more towards us rather than us having to move towards a classical concept of what a machine is which is kind of a 19th century concept of something that's not very warm and fuzzy but machines are getting more complex I mean we have trillions of moving parts in the human being and a 19th century machine had maybe hundreds of thousands of parts now they have billions of parts still not at human levels but they're moving in that direction because of this exponential expansion and it's worth making another point which is people say you can't predict the future and that and that's kind of the common wisdom and it it is in fact not possible to predict specific projects specific people but the overall impact of information technology turns out to be very predictable for example the price performance of computing would say the cost of a MIPS of computing Mitsos million instructions per second I have a graph in the book that goes back to 1890 a very smooth exponential progression despite Wars and peace and war and depressions and boom times and the cold war and through all those vagaries of human history a very smooth very predictable exponential progressions and you have there the age of intelligent machines which was my first book I wrote 20 years ago that has hundreds of predictions about the 1990s nearly 2000 years based on these models based on this very predictable exponential progression of information technology and they've tracked quite accurately many of those predictions were quite controversial at the time and you might wonder well how could this be I mean how can we make reliable predictions about the overall impact of information technology when each specific project each company each person is unpredictable and we see other examples in science of them I mean thermodynamics you have a gas made up of a lot of unpredictable particles each particle is in fact modeled by a random walk you can't predict where one molecule will be 10 seconds from now but the overall gas is very predictable according to the laws of thermodynamics it's a very high degree of precision so if you have a large dynamic chaotic system with where each element is unpredictable the overall system can have some very predictable properties and that's really the and technology evolution is just such a dynamic system where we can make these reliable predictions despite the fact that every specific project and every specific individual is unpredictable and that's really the basis of of the predictions I've made and I've been using these models for for three decades as you look at the future what are important dates then for us to consider about your thoughts on the future of Technology well about 2020 $1,000 of computation will equal the 10 of the 16 10 million billion calculations per second that I used to made is required to simulate the whole human brain but that actually won't by itself achieve human levels of intelligence we'll need the software of human intelligence and we're gonna get that in a number of ways but one of the important ways is actually by reverse engineering the human brain and that'll take a bit longer so I've been very consistent saying 2029 will have a computer that can pass the Turing test this was a test devised by Alan Turing to ascertain whether a computer was actually achieving human levels of intelligence and in the Turing test you have a human judge interviews a computer and a human using a basically instant messaging so the judge can't see the human and the computer and just chats with him you know what movie did you see what do you think of the principal character and and if after a few hours of this dialogue the the human judge can't tell the difference between the the two you know can't tell which one is the computer and which one is the human we say the computer has passed the Turing test and I believe that will happen in 2029 and it's actually a good test there's no simple trick with language or simple you know computational trick you could deploy to enable a computer to pass that test without actually giving it the equivalent of human intelligence San Diego California good morning thank you see spent this is an Albert Taurus and I want to know two questions basically the ones gonna be answered really quick you could just give me like an arbitrary percentage and the second one you can just expand on basically I want to know how much do you think at the technology that's currently being created is used for military use and secondly are you aware of any connections between some of the research that's been going on between quantum mechanics and spirituality about like movies like what the bleep basically things that are trying to prove the existence of God okay well let's see if we can make some estimates I mean here in the United States our military budget order magnitude is maybe half a trillion and a gross national product order magazines about ten trillion but let's say three or four trillion of that is technology related so maybe one-sixth of our technology efforts go into military applications in this country and that's probably a high percentage compared to other countries because such a large military establishment so that's an off-the-cuff estimate you bring up actually a pretty rich issue quantum mechanics these some interpretations of quantum mechanics bears some relationship to Eastern or Buddhist thoughts where the principal reality is actually human awareness and that we actually create the world with our awareness because at least according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics a particle actually doesn't decide where it is it can be in many different places but when we observe it we resolve that quantum ambiguity in it it reality actually becomes manifest as a result of observation by a conscious observer there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's interesting that there actually is a meeting of the minds between certain schools of Eastern thoughts with certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and there's also there's been speculation by scientists such as Roger Penrose that human consciousness arises from quantum interactions that take place in our brain people went it out to Penrose well the brain is actually pretty messy place and the neurons are not really at the right scale for quantum events to take place or for there to be quantum ambiguity or quantum entanglement so he came up with a theory that the two wheels which are very fine structures within the neurons do quantum computing that remains controversial we've never actually detected quantum computing inside the human brain my own feeling is if we look at what human beings are capable of we don't see evidence that we're doing quantum computing because chronic computing would be able to simultaneously consider every possible combination of solutions to a problem simultaneously and the kinds of things that humans do seem to be explained by more classical computing but this means both a technical and controversial area I would approach spirituality a little differently I mean I'm quite enamored with the powers of evolution in fact we can use evolution in a computer and actually simulate evolution and the computer will actually evolve an intelligent solution to a problem it's really quite amazing we let millions of solutions compete in a simulated environment and it comes after hundreds of generations it actually evolves in a surprising an intelligent solution to a problem so a biological evolution gave rise to a technology creating species which and evolution is actually capable of creating more complex more intelligent entities than you started with and then the technology creating species has ushered in this whole evolutionary process of technology and that has enabled us to and that is actually the cutting edge of evolution right now on earth I mean biological evolution is continuing but we are making you know a thousand times faster progress with technological evolution and ultimately that is the way which we're going to lift ourselves up and what happens in an evolutionary process well things get more complicated the entities actually get more knowledgeable they get more creative they actually get more beautiful to get more capable of higher-level emotions like love so they become you know more more knowledgeable more creative more beautiful all the things that have been attributed to God in our religious traditions without limit and an evolutionary process action never reaches infinite levels but it gets but it explodes exponentially and so it seems to becoming infinite literally stays finite but it explodes in a capability moving closer to that ideal of infinite knowledge infinite intelligence so you could say that evolution is a spiritual process and I I believe that's the case I mean you asked before what what is the purpose of all this and I really see it as a spiritual process to expand knowledge but knowledge it's not just it's not just information it's not just dry facts now is expressions of a loving sentiment art music science the grant expressions of human civilization and and that is a spiritual quest in my view one of your titles of your books is called the age of spiritual machines what do you mean by a spiritual machine well I was making two allusions one is to this concept of spirituality that I just articulated that an evolutionary process starting with biology now with technology is actually moving towards greater levels of intelligence and therefore becoming more like God at least moving in that - in that spiritual direction of greater intelligence so we could say it's a spiritual process but there was another illusion I mean what do we mean when people say well a person has a soul they're really referring to consciousness the fact that I'm aware of my own existence I'm not just aware of it I feel it and I feel the emotions associated with it and he's a these emotions are not just technical states there's some there they're rich in meaning and that is that so human beings I mean are a machine I mean a neuron this is a collection of molecules and ion channels and you can describe and we are in fact describing those in very precise terms and you put a hundred billion of them together in a very specific way and you create a human being and a lot of people would consider you and being to be a spiritual machine well we're gonna be able to recreate the powers of human intelligence all of the subtlety and supplements of your intelligence in the machine and therefore those machines I mean if human beings in fact they're spiritual machines and those machines that emulate human intelligence and have the same complexity and a based on the design of human intelligence will share in that property and then you ask the question okay well if is a machine like that conscious well how can you tell well let's ask the Machine are you conscious of machines yeah I'm conscious well a machine could say that today do you believe it well today you don't believe it when a character in a videogame says I'm very jealous or I'm very angry at you you don't really take it serious because we can see the edges of its intelligence and not fully convincing they don't have all the subtle cues that go along with that emotion so we don't really believe that they're really conscious we think they're just a software program but the point of my thesis is that as we get out to the late 2020s early 2030s these machines will be so complex and so rich in their emotional reactions and so realistic in their recreations of you intelligence that when they talk about their feelings they will have all the subtle cues and we will and we will be convinced by them and but ultimately this is not a philosophical proof that they are consciousness consciousness is a synonym for subjectivity in science is really objectivity and rational deductions from our from our objective observation and there's a gap between science objectivity and subjectivity and there's really no scientific tests we can postulate said we could slide an entity in and a green light comes on okay this one's conscious no this one's not conscious we could build a machine like that but it would have philosophical assumptions built into him so john Sarla would make sure that it's squirting neurotransmitters and roger penrose would make sure that it had something equivalent to the tubules during quantum computing and other other scientists or philosophers would make other assumptions but there's really no objective way to absolutely answer that question and we don't even know that other people are conscious but we assume that but actually when we go outside of shared human experience talk about for example animals we we're not sure and or at least we disagree and we'll have disagreements about these machines someone who disagrees with you is on the line from Knoxville Tennessee hello I am a material scientist I work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory I'm a big fan of book TV and the reason I'm calling today is to express my disappointment that you have invited this highly sophisticated crackpot and given him a national forum to express his pseudo religious predictions that have no basis and objective reality and I'll just point out two big problems with what he says the first is that he believes evolution is aggressive but he offers no evidence for this claim he says that it's getting more complex but he doesn't offer an objective measurement of complexity that he can show is following some trend and even if there is a trend random phenomena can produce things that look like trends it doesn't mean that there is one there you have to show that we were produced our species was produced not from random mutations which we know this is how natural selection works he presents a plot in his book where he shows it exponentially accelerating he uses species and genus and family and group that that our species came from but you can produce the exact same plot for any species they'll all show exponentially accelerating trends if you just use their taxonomic branching points I'm sorry to get technical here it does not prove that we were the products of an exponential trend it actually arises out of the statistics of natural selection the second point is that small is almost always more expensive imagine if you were asked to reproduce a replica of the chair that you're sitting on you could probably go to Home Depot and get the tools to do this and it wouldn't be that expensive now imagine if I asked you to produce a replica of the same chair except that is the size of a grain of salt how would you do this what tools would you would you buy you maybe use a couple lasers to polymerize a liquid but it would be much more expensive and this is the trend the corollary to Moore's law is Moore's second law which is that these production facilities are getting exponentially more expensive it doesn't matter what you do just from the second law of thermodynamics small is going to be more expensive I have also problems with mr. Kurzweil estimation of the computational power of the human brain he doesn't consider process like phosphorylation where individual proteins can act as molecular switches okay caller thank you well you bring up a number of interesting issues if we look at biological evolution go back billions of years and bacteria single-celled organisms were the cutting edge were the most complex and most intelligent entities we then went to multicellular organisms we then went to more and more complex ones like lizards and then finally mammals and then primates that actually had and that and then there was the evolution of cognitive functions and then the evolution of Homo sapiens there's been a continual acceleration at every pace it took evolution works through indirection it creates a capability and then it uses that and that's why the process accelerates so it took a billion years to evolve DNA actually RNA came first then the Cambrian but then evolution used DNA so the Cambrian explosion and all the body plans that the animals evolved only took about ten million years and then higher cognitive functions evolved in only a few million years and then Homo sapiens evolved in only a few hundred thousand years and then we moved to technology evolution with the first state stages like stone tools fire the wheel took only tens of thousands of years and that has continued to accelerate cuz we always use the latest technology to create the next 50 years ago computers were designed pen on paper wired with screwdrivers it took years to design the first computers we now use computers in tenth generation computer assisted design software to design computers and you can design a new computer system in days and there's been a continual acceleration and I review that in in a number of different ways and in terms of your points on nanotechnology the key the key features of technology have been getting smaller and smaller we don't have the tools now to create full-scale massively parallel molecular nanotechnology today but we're moving in that direction the key features of technology are getting smaller declining by about a hundred per 3d volume per decade and they make that case in the book at that rate we will get to full-scale molecular nanotechnology in about twenty years so at that point we'll be able to create macro objects designing them at the molecular level and these will be self-organizing the the counter trend to the second Moore's Law where these fabrication facilities get more and more expensive it's that chips will be self-organizing and that was actually controversial notion when my book age of spiritual machines came out 99 there's been so much progress in that that's very much a mainstream view you can talk to the Intel scientists in fact I was just at IBM recently and they showed me some self organ in molecular circuits that are beginning to work in three dimensions a nanotube based memory is actually going to hit the market next year which uses self-organizing features so we are actually moving in the direction of being able to create in very small facilities desktop facilities that can actually create three-dimensional circuits that are not chips but are actually self-organizing that self-diagnosing work the the latest generation chips actually has self-healing and self-diagnostic capabilities because they're so massively so massive that they don't want to throw the whole chip away because one transistor is broken so they're actually able to route information around that information the Internet is based on that the Internet hasn't gone down for one second in ten years because information routes around damaged portions so I mean I the whole book makes this these the case for these two exponential trends quite extensively through 600 pages I can't summarize all of it so going back to the concept of what he brought up with nanotechnology is it fair to say it's a little robot is that we're talking about when we're talking about a nano bot or whatever then a technology it's being able to design technology where the key features are a few nanometers or at least less than a hundred nanometers in scaled so electronics has already actually passed that threshold right now the key features in chips are 65 nanometers there's already chips working under 50 nanometers if you look at the Intel's and the semiconductor industries roadmap by 2020 the chips will have four Anatomy two features it's about 20 carbon atoms so and another key step is that we'll go from the second dimension into the third dimension chips today are flat we live in a three-dimensional world we might as well use a third dimension and that is kind of we will ultimately run out of speed or steam with Moore's law of shrinking the key features on a flat circuit we'll need to go into the third dimension that's gonna be the next paradigm actually the sixth paradigm in electronics and chip designers we talk to the Intel scientists as I have they're very confident that the crossover point between two dimensions and three will be in the teen years well before we run out of steam with Moore's law so Electronics is going to be revolutionized by being able to build electronic circuits as well as communication devices in three dimensions at the molecular level using self-organizing circuits we'll also be able to create small devices that have mechanical capabilities that have computers and communications built in and these can go inside the UN body keep us healthy from inside there's going to be one major application and there's already significant harbingers of that that we can see there's four major conferences on something called bio MEMS biological micro electronic mechanical systems dozens of experiments are placing blood cell size devices in the bloodstream of animals to produce in some cases very sophisticated therapeutic effects and that's today and if you apply this billion fold increase in the price performance and capability and bandwidth of electronics communication and hundred thousand fold shrinking of mechanical technology over the next quarter century you get some idea of what will be feasible San Francisco is next with a question about voice technology hi I have a question I'm a retired retired court reporter and I'm very interested in what the status is of verbatim real-time voice recognition technology specifically translation into text and that could be purchased by the consumer and if you could address the leaf legal and privacy issues that might restrict use of the technology such as you know recording recording conversations for instance in California it's illegal without the consent of both parties and the second part of my question is will this technology do you see it playing some role in transparency of government and politicians perhaps on the internet too provide the consumer and the citizenry a better line into what's going on with government thank you well you bring up some interesting issues in fact speech recognition is widely used today for surveillance by intelligence agencies because they do listen in one way or another to millions of conversations around the world we don't have enough people detection listen to them so we use speech recognition they use to beat recognition to try to actually interpret what people are saying and you'll run it to speech recognition on the phone there are millions of people that use speech recognition to create their written documents I've put together a prototype with my company in the 80s created the first larger camera with speech recognition we took a contemporary version of that combined it with speech synthesis and language translation to create a translating telephone and actually we have a demonstration of that that available for viewers one of my companies we developed the first Texas speech synthesis there was the company that developed the first reading machine this was in the 70s and another company that I started developed the first launch vocabulary speech recognition there was actually commercially marketed and I put those two together with some contemporary language translation software and created a translating telephone and I've actually use this to communicate with people in other countries and this will be a routine service of your cell phone in a few years early in the next decade this is a typical structure of a coal translating in telephone theory from any prototype - telephones we will be able to talk to anyone we've been freezing - even mentally the translations aren't perfect but some of them are actually quite good human translators are better but because human translators are no it's available now for important UN discussions they use human translators but this would be a routine way to communicate around the world thank you for your attention and what year will that become commonplace do you think I think early in the next decade this will be a routine service of your cellphone and communicators of course we have language translation software already on the Internet it varies in quality the better systems are actually quite good I was out of Google and they showed me in English to Arabic in Arabic to English translator they had put together because they have these very large rosetta stone texts where they have the same text translated in English and in the other language in this case Arabic and they and we and they can use pattern recognition software to automatically find the translation rules they didn't actually tell it how to translate that they said they let the software find its own rules and the system actually compared well to human translators and nobody on the team that created it spoke a word of Arabic so the system actually found its own rules and so language translations getting is getting better we have a email and I don't have the email but he says what kind of technology do you use personally well I use remote desktop to actually always be on my computer work because I don't want to have multiple copies of my files so I take around a little notebook and connect through a high-speed connection whether I'm in a town car and or in a hotel room and I'm on my computer at work I used search engines I use both Google and Microsoft and I use pretty routine technologies different databases nothing too exotic but actually finds well actually have one interesting technology that a label that's a virtual reality technology enables me to be at another venue in 3d and a third of my speeches actually give using this virtual reality technology it's called teleport tech and I appear at the venue in three dimensions life-size I can move around as I move around the audience sees the local background behind me so it looks like I'm there and it's pretty convincing one guy actually walk up to me to give me a question on a piece of paper and I'm actually the only speaker in the world that has one in my office because I get invited to good speeches in Asia and Europe and Australia and I can't always go there so I and this is expensive technology today we have to send a technician with the other half of the equipment to the venue instead of communication lines this will actually be routine ubiquitous technology early the next decade will have images written directly to a retina from our eyeglasses they'll be able to create virtual reality environments either overlaying real reality so I'll have pop-up displays when I see you there'll be a little pop-up saying riding me it's your birthday next Tuesday or riding me what your name is or reminding me where you know where a building is that I'm looking for or completely overtake vision the visual field of view and create a virtual reality environment so you and I could meet in a virtual Cancun beach even if for hundreds of miles apart and will feel just like we're there this will actually be routine technology in the in the second decade of this as it gets more complex though if you give speeches about thousands of miles away doesn't it take out the personal element of human communication it isn't that one of the key components of being human I guess being able to completely it's doing the opposite enhancing human communication because I can communicate I mean they see me in real-time it's not recorded it's like it's real-time I see the audience I can establish eye contact like I'm doing now I can point at people and and all the technology actually works correctly and this is how this feature of virtual reality technology will work also where we have early versions of that already I mean the telephone what's the first virtual reality technology that enabled you to be with someone else just as if you were together even if you were hundreds of miles apart and that has never happened before in human history and that's actually how they saw it I mean before that you actually get together to talk to someone and that those are not virtual the word virtual is unfortunate as if it these aren't real conversations you can't say well that wasn't a real agreement I made that was in the virtual reality environment called the telephone no I mean those are real conversations between real people communicating and the internet now because of its decentralized nature and the fact that it's everywhere allows us to create communities based on common interests so if someone hasn't se a chronic disease they can create communities of other people and gather information and stay abreast of that condition around the world or any subject whether it's you know collecting cat figurines which I do I can be in touch with all the other cat figurine lovers around the world and create a community so we're not stuck with the communities of Geographic accidents the people that happen to be near us we can create communities with people around the world and you go around you see people on their cell phones and on their communicators and on their notebooks and they are communicating not just with the people in their vicinity but with groups around the world and also enhances work environments I mean I have work groups that are that are spread out geographically and we work very effectively together and that wasn't feasible ten years ago you brought up virtual reality real reality with that mine who is Ramona well this is a project that started a number of years ago she's a female she's my female alter ego and I wanted to demonstrate at this conference called Ted Technology Entertainment Design at the 2001 TED conference a feature of virtual reality that you can be someone else because I mentioned that's you know you and I could go into a virtual reality environment and take a walk on a virtual Cancun Beach in in virtual reality environments and we'll have virtual bodies in these virtual reality environments particularly when it's through the nervous system when we have nanobots in our brains they can shut down the signals coming from a real senses replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment then it'll feel like you're in that virtual environment and design of new virtual environments will be a new art form and as I go to move my hand it'll move my virtual hand and so I could be an actor in this virtual environment and we could shake hands and we give each other hug or we can take we can run on the beach or sit down at a desk and have experiences in these virtual reality environments but your your body doesn't have to be the same body that you have in real reality a couple could become each other for example and there's okay and so I wanted to demonstrate how you could do that so I had magnetic sensors in my clothing as I moved a life-size realistic real-time animation pretty photo-realistic of Ramona moved exactly the way I did my voice was changed into her voice using some other computer technology and that drove her lips and so it looked like she was giving the presentation but I was actually being transformed into her and the audience could see me and her and ten actually we have a demonstration to show the folks at home but virtual reality you can be who you want to be [Music] and you can even try to express what's most deeply on virtual reality with your bodies real reality so basically most people just some people don't actually keep any of their personalities which reminds me some of my old boyfriends but that's another story mr. Kurzweil so this is actually a serious project that I intend to continue with and actually make Ramona more realistic and actually more independent I have this bet with Mitch kapor that a computer will pass the Turing test with 2029 and I intend that to be Ramona actually in an independent version of Ramona who would because some and then a computer that passes chanc test is not some so dry lifeless box it'll have a personality and an appearance and will be just like just like a human and so this is actually a project that I intend to continue with to make Ramon a more lifelike and more realistic over time if you're interested in finding out more a sample of Ramona's available on the website that is Kurzweil AI dot net if you want to go to that website and check it out for yourself Terre Haute Indiana good morning or good afternoon hi just want to say my big fan of yours and I appreciate what you're doing thank you um I was curious I know that you your ideas have been met with a lot of skepticism from those and the scientific community as well as various scholars I'm wondering if you're noticing more of an absurdist in the acceptance of your ideas such as particularly the law of accelerating returns if it's being more accepted overall since they just when you publish the spiritual machines in 99 just the past six or seven years have you noticed more more of an acceptance overall of ideas you're trying to get out there yes definitely and I think the acceleration of the pace of paradigm shift is becoming quite noticeable we now see dramatic changes in just a few years time and that wasn't so noticeable ten years ago and this exponential explosion of electronics and information technology is now apparent to the common person because we're all using these devices from digital cameras to iPods to social networks and so and people see how their capabilities change and today's limitations become again overcome and short period of time and also the various predictions or I made in in Aegis virtual machines which was 1999 have really tracked quite accurately in terms of the power of computation that the power of the internet the power of communication technology progress are making nanotechnology and I've had the opportunity to share these ideas with leadership scientific communities I was recently invited to give a keynote at the off-site meeting of the directors of National Institutes of Health and their chief scientists and we were able to talk for actually a couple hours about these kinds of ideas and I would say they're very much on the same page because they are experiencing this exponential growth for example the first genome cost a billion dollars they're not talking about collecting a million genomes at $1,000 each cost $10 for base fare 19 it's a penny today's I mean they're experiencing this exponential progression in price performance and capacity and every other aspect of information technology and it's not just electronics it's every aspect of information whether it's brain data or the resolution of brain scanners or the general project was controversial in 1990 it was not a mainstream project the mainstream skeptics said this isn't gonna work we collected 110 thousands of the genome in 1989 and where we doubled the amount of genetic data we've sequence every year that's continued past the end of the genome project we're gonna be able to collect everyone's genome so I mean things that were unheard of just a few years ago and now becoming commonplace when you say the law of accelerating returns does that mean in essence that technology is getting smaller and cheaper more efficient to operate the law of accelerating returns deals with measurable attributes of information technology basically says that the power of information technology measured in many different ways price performance capacity bandwidth of information technology not just in computers but in all these different fields doubles every year now depending on what you're measuring the doubling time every 12 months or 11 months or 13 months but it's exponential and people think in linear terms they think that the current pace will we'll just continue at the at the rate that it's going now and they don't take into consideration this exponential explosion exponential growth is seductive but when you start doubling big numbers it becomes quite explosive we have two hours with our guests with you're more of your calls to talk with Ray Kurzweil we're going to take a look at some of the technology that he employs in his lap when he comes back more of your calls and questions for him so what is kurtzweil technologies well my field is pattern recognition teaching computers to recognize patterns and that's actually in my opinion the bulk of human intelligence that's what humans do well but computers are mastering that as well so my first project was character recognition teaching computer recognize any type style that was actually the first time that was done then I did knowledge vocabulary speech recognition and we've applied pattern recognition to other types of patterns eat EKG heart signals financial data we have a company that looks at that and that's really I think the most important area of artificial intelligence and ultimately when we create a machine that will be at human levels it'll be because computers have mastered human levels of pattern recognition but that's been my interest so I've started about 10 companies commercializing and developing different aspects of pattern recognition right behind you we can see over your shoulder is is a screen that is doing artwork as you talk what is that well that was actually created by another computer scientist Harold Cohen who's worked for 30 years I'm actually mastering at least one style of human an art is thousands of rules about how to create a painting and this is a technology we've sponsored and you can download it it Kurzweil cyber art comm for free every painting is different and it's actually won awards and in museums but every few every two minutes it's creating a different picture in the corner you have an Edison voice writer yes well Edison is actually a good model for what we're trying to do because he was continually coming up with creative ideas thinking about what technology could do in the future and working on lots of different inventions really to recreate sound and visual visual world using the technology at that time and created the first motion picture and first phonograph record this is actually an early phonograph record where you could actually record and play both music and it was also used for business correspondence you could do dictation on it and over here there's a something that looks like a human being but is not a human being well it's sort of symbolic of what we ultimately are trying to do which is to recreate human performance so it's by looking somewhat realistic is a symbol of that and so we've worked on trying to recreate human speech recognition different aspects of human vision and our reading machines were actually going to be adding not just ability to read print but actually recognize objects to our reading machine so a blind person can just hold the camera until pointed at a room and it'll actually tell him or her what's in the room identify the objects and the people so we're trying to recreate human skills there's a metal down on a table here in a picture of you with President Clinton you tell that story well it's not much of a story it's that's when I got the National Medal of Technology from from the president but that was that was a nice experience this is actually a cartoon I commissioned in 1965 40 years ago and I had an interest in artificial intelligence at that time and so this is a cartoon I designed it was implemented by an artist friend of mine and it pokes fun at or at least it comments on the nature of human experience that brain is obviously having experiences in a virtual reality environment it doesn't look like he's having much fun but we live inside our brains and ultimately we will it will actually be able to have our brain feel like it's in some other environment rather were in for example the not about nanobots could shut down the signals coming from our real senses replace them with the signals that we would be receiving if we were in a virtual environment and then our brain will actually feel like it's not in the environment there it's really in but it would be in some virtual world and will be just as convincing it's real reality and we'll have a virtual body you've got to move your hand it'll move your virtual hand and it will feel very real so that's actually enough that'll be feasible in 20 years or so and that'll actually be a realization of this cartoon which I designed 40 years ago [Music] it Kurzweil on those stills was listed your junior high and high school teachers is anything that they taught you back when you were in school relevant to what you do today is something that you remember that that still sticks with you I think they were encouraging me to pursue my own ideas I mean that's why I put them down there and they gave me the idea that I could they empowered me to just go off and spend most of my time doing my own projects which I did on my spare time and while I was in school I mean under my textbook which would be open I'd be actually working on some some project in junior high school in high school my parents think we're very encouraging well my father was a musician my mother is an artist but they very much encouraged me to pursue my own ideas in computers and I decided I'd be an inventor when I was five and how did you know that well that's a good question maybe a few more years of analysis will reveal that I just had this fascination that you could put things together and create some kind of transcendence I didn't have that word back then but that you could create some kind of powerful effect I've started building a rocket ship and but actually quickly got into virtual reality when I was seven or eight I created a mechanical virtual reality a puppet theater and I had this command station where I could control the world and move scenery and bring the moon down or bring a character on stage from from this one command station so that was kind of my first virtual reality project but I had this conceit I knew what I was going to be other kids are wondering well should they be a fireman or nurse and I said well I know what I'm gonna be and I never wavered in that confidence and your parents were once they knew were they are okay with that they were more than okay they were very enthusiastic and there was this idea that science was important I was just emerging back then but this was actually before is charged the nation with science but and you know they were struggling artists but they always provided me the resources to create my own inventions which actually got to be somewhat expensive one of the openings of the books you said that you were influenced by Tom Swift books who's Tom Swift yeah well I read all the Tom's have junior books when I was 8 9 and 10 I just recently discovered there was actually Tom Swift senior books are written around 1900 but the plots were always the same Tom Swift would get into trouble and usually the future of the human race hung in the balance also and he would retire to his lair his basement and come up with some invention some idea that would save the day and the the moral was that no matter what kind of problem you face there's an idea that can overcome it and you can find that idea and that was actually very much almost a religion in my household I remember my grandfather coming back from Europe talking about how he had had the opportunity to handle some documents by Leonardo da Vinci with his own hands and he talked about it with reverence that really the power of human ideas to change the world was very much a mantra in my family and then and that that has impressed me and that that is my view that if you encounter problems any kind of problems you can find the idea to overcome that problem and and that's really our mission here as part of the human civilization to to address the problems that we face and find the ideas to overcome them and it's really as I mentioned earlier only technology that has the scale to overcome problems if we find the right set of ideas we looked a little bit your company during the break but part of the history of your company includes the artist Stevie Wonder right well my first major invention was a Princess Peach reading machine for the blind he was actually our first customer he caught me on The Today Show and actually called called us up said he wanted to drop over and get one we were just finishing one up so he came over we saw today showing him how to use it and he left with it in his taxi it was pretty big was almost as big as he was but he was our first customer and so I became friends with him this was 1976 so this was 30 years ago and in 1982 we had a conversation about the world of music you show me around his new studio Wonderland and lamenting that there were these two disconnected worlds of musical instruments it was the acoustic world with these beautiful sounds like piano and guitar and violin but you couldn't control those sounds in fact most musicians couldn't even play them at all and if you could play a violin you can only play one note at a time and so on and then there was this electronic world where you could play polyphonic Li and you could have the computer remember what you played and play it back and play another line over it you could modify the sounds but the sounds you had to work with a very thin electrical sounding sounds back in 82 there wouldn't it be great if we can combine these powerful computer control methods with these beautiful sounds of choice of acoustic instruments and so that was the goal of Kurzweil music I felt using pattern recognition signal processing that was feasible and with Stevie Wonder as our musical adviser we created crystal music in 84 we introduced the Kurzweil 250 which has been recognized as the first electronic musical instrument that could realistically recreate the grand piano and other acoustic instruments because we really modeled the ability of those instruments to create sounds Cary North Carolina hi this great program I'm very interested in the concept of calendar reform and I wonder if mr. Kurzweil has studied that we use a very antiquated a model of calendar on the internet there are many very good scientific proposals to replace it and the the Catholic Church has approved this innovation if it's ever passed by the world what do you think well we are actually stuck with a lot of antiquated ideas like the layout of typewriter keys the QWERTY keyboard that was actually designed to prevent keys from interlocking because of the specific limitations of mechanical typewriters not because it's an efficient way to type and there's been lots of proposals to change that these ideas gather momentum I mean that's why certain companies or technical standards continue because people learn how to use them and then it's very hard to to change those things so what does he mean by calendar reform I think he's talking about like January and February that February is 28 days except when it doesn't and is that what you mean he's he's no longer house I assume that's what he means so we have certain traditions for measuring things or for laying out information like on a typewriter keyboard they that go back and are based on realities that are no longer with us but we're stuck with those those traditions and very hard to change those traditions but we have technology that can keep track of our calendar pretty well and we're used to it so I don't see it changing very quickly Baltimore Maryland go ahead hi mr. Kurzweil my name is Darryl Nazareth and I'm a physicist doing research in radiation oncology I'm a fan of yours and I look at your website every day now my question is when I talk to people about the upcoming technological revolution then they typically have the same question which is if machines are going to perform more and more human tasks than won't that result in massive human unemployment so my thoughts are that as the need for human labor goes down then the cost of living will also decrease and therefore humans multi need to work as hard in order to maintain a high standard of living I'd like to know what your thoughts are on that well suppose we were sitting here a hundred years ago let's say around 1900 and let's say I were a prescient futurist and I told you well today 30% of the population work in factories and 30% work on farms but I I predict that within a century around the year 2030 that thing we'll be 3% in factories and 3% on farms and the casual observer would say my god it's gonna lead to massive unemployment and I probably wouldn't be able to say well don't worry they'll get jobs as web designers and Internet technicians because we didn't understand those professions like most jobs today didn't exist those job categories didn't exist a hundred years ago we actually have a higher percentage of the population working today there's about 30% of the population working in 1870 that figure has it's gone up to about 50% and jobs pay six times as much in constant dollars as they did 120 years ago so so what what has happened we've been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder both physical and mental and creating new jobs at the top of the skill ladder so the skill ladder has moved up and in fact a lot of the new employments in education we had 50,000 college students in 1870 the six or seven million today we spend far more per capita in constant dollars on K through 12 education to provide this higher level of skills and that that process is going to continue and we're actually going to make ourselves smarter now you could say we're doing that already in fact if people weren't if we didn't have this sort of mind amplifier in terms of our technology and search engines and the internet most people couldn't do their jobs today so we're very much already extending our intellectual reach with our technology which enables us to keep up with this ever higher skill ladder and we're gonna literally make ourselves smarter as these machines you know move from our pockets into our clothing into our bodies and brains and actually extend human intellectual reach further we have been an email or who asked and he asked that I embrace the progress of technology wholeheartedly but at some point don't we run the risk of technology becoming too human and realizing that they are modern slaves and face a possible revolt well he brings up an interesting issue regarding the legal rights of machines and nobody worries that about that much today but it's not going to be a clear distinction between human and machine we get to the 2030 and 2040 in fact even a biological human that was born in the in the ordinary chorus will have their brains enhanced with non-biological intelligence and ultimately that non-biological component our portion of intelligence will be far more capable than the biological portion and so you know is that a machine is that a human will have machines where there's no biological component but they're very precise copies of biological people and they're gonna act in exactly the same way it's gonna be all mixed up you're not gonna be able to walk in the room and say okay humans on the left side of room machines on the right it's it's gonna be very much an integration of non biological and non-biological telogen just as it is today except that the non-biological portion is going to get a lot more capable and ultimately they're gonna press for their own legal rights and there's already a lot of interesting discussion about that and you know I think that that will happen you know particularly when you can have an entity that's completely non-biological that's just as convincing in terms of their sophistication complexity of their emotions as humans and emotional intelligence is not some little sideshow to our intelligence it's actually the cutting edge because in terms of the logical analytical things we do machines can already do a pretty good job of that very few mathematicians could hold up to its let's say Mathematica and recently mathematical theorems have been done as a collaboration between the human mathematician and the machine but emotion is actually the most complicated and sophisticated thing we do but ultimately we will understand that as well these future machines will have emotional intelligence one of the arguments or things you bring out in your books the fact that the ability for a brain to be downloaded into a synthetic body or a version2 body as you call it what do you mean by that well as I mentioned we're going to be merging with non-biological intelligence we will have nanobots go inside our bodies and brains and ultimately we'll have billions of nanobots in other ways in which we're gonna be in very direct touch with non-biological intelligence so then my intelligence is a combination of both my biological Intel jinsol the ion channels and neurotransmitters in my brain and all of this non-biological machine intelligence now the machine part of the intelligence can clearly doubt we can clearly download the contents of that easily we do that all the time with our machines machines can share their knowledge that their states at electronic speeds which is actually a million times faster than human brains can can share knowledge but ultimately we will be able to tap into the biological patterns as well we'll be able to have these nanobots can the state of our ion channels neurotransmitter concentrations into the neuronal connection patterns and extract that information but principally I don't see that as the the real quintessential scenario I see us becoming essentially more and more non-biological and that non-biological intelligence can download knowledge and skills as we saw in the matrix we do that all the time with our with our computers I'm we spent years training one research computer to understand human speech we trained it like a child we patiently corrected its errors we exposed to thousands of hours of speech and over years it did a better and better job and finally it was commercially viable now if you want your computer to understand human speech you don't have to go through those years of training like we do have to do with every human child you can just don't load the evolved patterns of this one research computer that learned it's lessons it's called loading the software machines can take their learning their scales and share them in electronic speeds which is a million times faster than we can share our knowledge with language although the fact that we can share it at all it gives us one up gives us a leg up on other species when you consider the future of how manna machine will be together and and theatrical dilemmas where does the U the government come in because do you see more oversight for these technologies as they progress well it's a complex issue sometimes people say well look at the stem cell issue and there isn't the government's going to stop progress and for example biotechnology but we actually see that issues like that and stem cells is a good example are really just a stone in the river that the progress flows around it and even within stem cells there's this very active stem cell research I mean I support stem cell research I don't thing we should have restrictions on it but even with the restrictions the real holy grail of stem cell therapies which is be able to take my own skin cells and create an adult stem cell that's pluripotent is making substantial progress and it's certainly not slowing down working biotechnology but there is actually a role for government in in containing the dangers of these technologies because we haven't really touched on that yet but these technologies is a double-edged sword and you don't have to look very far to see that in 20th century there are 180 million people killed in wars the words weren't necessarily created by technology but certainly the destructive impact was exacerbated and we see now we have this asymmetric warfare where an individual can be empowered to be destructive and the quintessential threat we face right now is in biotechnology you know on the one hand biotechnology is empowering us to reprogram biology to overcome disease like cancer and heart disease and there's already in the pipeline very dramatic new tools new drugs that really reprogram biology away from disease you know positive things but it could also empower bioterrorist to reprogram the biological virus to be more deadly or more communicable or more stealthy and the tools to do that and then I'll to do that is pretty widespread and so how do we deal with that well some people say well let's just not go down this path it's too dangerous let's relinquish the whole field that's a bad idea for three reasons number one it would deprive us of these profound benefits like overcoming suffering and eliminating disease and so on secondly it would require two talent Arian government I mean that's that was the the moral and brave in the world and thirdly it wouldn't work it would just drive these technologies underground where they'd be less stable and the responsible scientists who are trying to defend us from these dangers wouldn't have easy access to the tools to do that and that's really the moral or the that is really the strategy that we need to follow which is to develop these defenses and the good news is we actually have the tools and the knowledge to create defenses against for example new biological viruses RNA interference which I mentioned earlier can turn genes off while viruses are genes and RNA interference can turn off viruses and I proposed in fact Bill joy and I had an op-ed piece in New York Times awhile back calling for a Manhattan style project to create a rapid response system that could in a week sequence a new virus and that's accelerating it took us five years to sequence HIV 31 days for SARS we can sequence a virus now in one or two days develop an RNAi eye medication and gear up manufacturing you could do that very quickly and that's really the strategy we need to deploy and I'll give you an example where we've actually done that and we have a new danger which emerged 30 years ago the software virus and they've actually become very sophisticated and actually quite dangerous because we have a lot of important systems that run on computers like 911 response systems and we fly airplanes by software and and we've actually contained this danger quite well if a new software virus is identified it is reverse-engineered an antidote is created spread virally on the internet and in 24 hours we have an automatic response to a new software virus and nobody has taken the internet down or even a portion of it for even a second in ten years it's been a very successful track record now it's not our software protection is not perfect by any means but that's really the model we need to follow to develop a rapid response system to combat these particular dangers and that's where the government comes in in terms of enforcing certain ethical guidelines for example we shouldn't put particularly dangerous information on the web like you wouldn't want to put the design of let's say the 1918 flu virus on the web because that's dangerous information but actually the US government has done that exactly that you can download the design of the 1918 flu virus from the US government's website and they'll join I in the south end piece criticized that so that's a role I mean in fact just recently there was some information how to build an atomic bomb from these Iraqi papers on the web and everybody and that was inadvertent I guess and everyone agreed that was not a good idea there's no controversy about that but for some reason in the biological realm there's controversy about it because this in this dangerous information is still up there so we need to actually have some guidelines to prevent clearly dangerous information from being widely disseminated some people do need that that information they could be given to given to the information in confidence with classified you know agreements and so on Jacksonville Florida my question deals with technology and behavior I would define physical technological versus behavioral being emotional let me give you a quick example all the cars here in Jacksonville seem to be equipped with turn signals which are technological yet only one in three people seem to use them which to me is behavioral they have the technology but they don't behave with the technology we pass laws give them driving tests you know pretty much do everything we do and yet can't get people to behave with the technology now you've had a good lead-in to my question here speaking about destructive technology which is to say technology is a two-edged sword can be used for good or bad my question for you is when you've got six billion people on the planet or six-and-a-half billion people on the planet that already have this ability to do what these machines are going to be able to do that you're talking about and yet all these people are the vast majority of them don't seem to be behaving as well with the technology that the boss truth all night he's already given I'm kind of like one in three or two other three drivers in Jacksonville not using their turn signal where do you see that this technology is going I don't quite understand how this technology is going to be that that boom to humanity when we already don't behave with the technology that we're given which let me put it in Mesa we're not being it doesn't seem we're being faithful with a little bit that we're already being given so why are we going to be any more faithful with even more developing it from a technological pimp caller thank you well it's a good question and actually to reinforce your question give you another example which is people don't take advantage of all the health knowledge we have there's actually a lot of knowledge we have already to dramatically reduce the likelihood of disease you can reduce your likelihood of getting cancer or heart disease by or diabetes by more than 90% we can slow down the aging process and many people I'd say most people don't take full advantage of this knowledge some people are health conscious but even people consider themselves health conscious don't take advantage of all the knowledge that is out there the the thrust though of the technology is to make this easier and actually overcome this tendency that you articulated quite well of humans not to take advantage of all the knowledge in their vicinity I mean we know that you shouldn't tailgate but you know most people do that and we should take care of ourselves and most a lot of people don't do that these future technologies will take that into account I mean for example in car in the case of cars which you mentioned their collision avoidance systems that are gonna actually take over the car if it senses that you're getting too close to another vehicle and maybe not perfectly prevent accidents but substantially to reduce them even if you're not doing all the things that you should do as a safe driver similarly in health while there's a lot that you should do to stay healthy we're gonna have drugs that actually turn off athletes Gross's I mean Pfizer store satrapy which is going through the approval mechanism turns off one enzyme that destroys HDL in the blood by inhibiting that enzyme HDL levels soar and the Phase two trials showed that this dramatically reduced ethis kosis and Pfizer spending a record 1 billion dollars on the Phase three trials that will actually if it meets its promise and if not that drug there'll be many others will actually compensate for bad behavior and keep people healthy and reverse south of sclerosis at least eventually we'll be able to actually do that overcome cancer even if people are you know not taking the steps to and cancer so these technologies ultimately will step in to compensate for sort of you know the inability of humans to you know be perfect in their behavior our guest is also written a few books on dealing with health issues this is the 10% solution for a healthy life and Fantastic Voyage the science behind radical life extension why are you interested in this topic it used to be a separate interest I had this interest being an inventor principally with information technology and pattern recognition as we discussed and it had the separate interest in health it started with the untimely death of my father when I was 22 he was 58 I'm actually 58 now and then in my mid-30s I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and tried the conventional approach that actually made things worse so I wrote the 10% solution which was a successful health book really sharing the program I developed it overcame my own diabetes and have had no type-2 diabetes for the last 20 years what kind of program was that basically a nutrition exercise some supplements but mostly lifestyle and natural means although there's some good drugs like metformin I believe is actually an anti-aging drug but also combats type-2 diabetes then I confronted another health challenge which was middle-aged and actually been addressing the aging process and do a lot to slow down aging and I believe we can do that according to biological aging tests I was about thirty eight biologically when I was 40 and going to these tests I'm come out at 40 even though I'm 58 and these tests this controversy about to miss that whether they're perfect I think they're just you know one piece of information but terms of the way I feel I feel that I have slowed down the aging process and there's really a lot of knowledge to do that in this latest book which came out two years ago which I co-authored with dr. Terry Grossman the leading longevity expert in Denver articulates three bridges to radical life extension and it's really a wake-up call for baby boomers because bridge one is what you can do right now to slow the aging process and disease process so that and that that by itself will not enable us to live hundreds of years that will just keep us in good shape for another 10 15 20 years until we get to bridge 2 and bridge 2 is the full flowering this biotechnology revolution we've been talking about which is proceeding exponentially because we're doubling the amount of genetic data we sequence each year and the amount of proteomic data and now all these different aspects of biology are progressing exponentially in 15 years from now it's gonna be a very different world where we can really reprogram the information processes underlying biology and they fundamentally are information processes and we're getting the tools to reprogram our bodies just like we would program our computers and that will bring us to the third revolution say 25 years from now the nanotechnology revolution the nanobots we talked about earlier which can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy from inside I mentioned there's already very interesting experiments along those lines and animals but 25 years from now we'll have very powerful nanobots that can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy at the cellular level so it's a bridge to a bridge to a bridge and you can get on bridge one now and and therefore be healthy and in good shape when bridge 2 comes around that'll keep us - bridge 3 so even baby boomers people in there if these 60s and even 70s and if you're really diligent 80s can stay in good shape for another 10 years 15 years when it's really will be a different world that's why the subtitle is live long enough to live forever now I mentioned these have been two separate interests and I got interested in this because of my own health challenges and having had the experience of my father and realizing that as an inventor I can find the ideas to overcome challenges even if they're outside of my computer interest but actually now these two areas have merged they're now the same field because biology medicine health is undergoing a grand transformation from what used to not be an information technology was hit or miss we just find something oh here's something lowers blood pressure we don't know why this works - we're biology and medicine is becoming in information technology where we can actually understand it as information processes and reprogram those information processes and the exciting thing about that is now that we can do that we can actually it's actually subject to this law of accelerating returns this doubling of the power of these technologies every year that didn't used to be the case before medicine was an information technology but now that it is it's subject to this inherent acceleration San Francisco California we've had Sherwin Nuland on this program and when he talks about what you're talking about as far as extension of life and things he was quoted as saying this he says people like Ray Kurzweil have forgotten their acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction and it distorts their rational approach to the human condition are you afraid of death I think we should be I think death is a great tragedy and I think that's a very common view we really haven't had much we could do about death and aging up until recently so the response of the human civilization has been to rationalize Oh death which is obviously a tragedy it's a profound loss of knowledge and skill and personality and relationships and love and all kinds of things oh that's really a good thing that's really ennobling in some abstract sense not that that these people actually want to die in fact people don't want to die unless they're in some profound pain is what we've found but we've rationalized it as a good thing and a lot of our philosophies and religions have been been geared towards that and in my view what's it what's ennobling of this you know grand human project is his expansion of knowledge and not as dusty information but as music and art and all the things that that enrich our lives relationships and all of that is robbed by by disease by aging by death and we're gaining the tools to overcome that it'll be a very different world according to my models in 15 years we'll be adding more than a year every year to your remaining life expectancy not just infant life expectancy so as you go forward by phix pregnancy we'll move on away from you that's not a guarantee but that does give us the ability then to live forever and/or live indefinitely because people say well these changes how many more years will it provide us well a particular change may add five years or ten years but then you go another five ten years and there's more changes that come and you get to a point where there's a positive slope to the equation and as you go forward in time this it's more progress enables you to go even further and I think that's a positive thing I think death is a great robber of what's what's meaningful to us but this philosophy the death is a noble thing and the death gives meaning to life and death is the purpose of life is a very deeply rooted philosophy that that we really had no choice but to adopt because we had no alternative do you think it's an underlying Drive of what you do the reason you created technologies you read and you think about the technology in the future of it and life extension well a life extension is one interest I mean you know I started this forecasting of technology trends for a practical reason because I realized that timing was key to being in it successful as inventor and most inventions are most inventors fail not because they can't get the thing to work but because the timing is wrong and the market isn't ready that not not all the enabling factors are in place when they need to be and realizing that 30 years ago I began as an engineer to collect a lot of data and build mathematical models and I saw they were tracking quite accurately and I developed this whole theory and it's I'm not just saying this now looking backwards and overfitting to past day and I've been making these forward-looking predictions for a long time and what Falls and I use this actually time my inventions this pocket-sized reading machine for the blind I had a conversation with the National Federation of blind four years ago and projected that this would be feasible in four years and would take four years to develop and therefore we should get started back then whereas other companies are starting now because I realized it's feasible so anticipating where technology will be is it's important to being successful as an inventor but it does enable us to look out 10 years or 20 years and see what the world will be like and what I see is actually quite attractive we'll be able to greatly expand our appreciation and creation of knowledge and overcome profound problems and it's a future I want to see so that actually motivates me to want to stay in good shape to get there so I'm not just interested in hanging on I'm not just interested in radical life extension I'm also interested in radical life expansion as we continue to expand our physical and mental capabilities by enhancing them with our creations before we leave this about your program you talked about I read about the number of supplements you take on a daily basis how many are those running right now about 250 and that's the current state of the technology I mean I'm really reprogramming my biochemistry and I'm not flying without an instrument panel I mean I take 5060 different blood tests periodically to see you know aside from just things like cholesterol and homocysteine and triglycerides I mean I measure a lot of different things and constantly adjusting the program but you know according to every possible way we can measure these things I'm staying quite healthy and and not aging significantly in all these different ways hormone levels and nutrient levels and and so on but we have to be aggressive today to reprogram a biochemistry this is the state of the art right now I mean we weren't evolved to live at our ages I mean human life expectancy was 25 a thousand years ago it was not in the interest of species for people to live past childbearing and that meant like age 25 was as I mentioned was 37 and 1800 so we really need to reprogram our biochemistry to slow down and turn off these aging disease processes and this is the way we can do it today it's an individualized program you see what your issues are and how aggressive you want to be and how many different types of body systems you want to enhance and and keep it peak performance and so I'm trying to do that for myself it will get easier 15 years from now we really will have much more powerful drugs that can reprogram biology at a fundamental level and so relatively easily we'll be able to slow down these aging disease processes but bridge 1 if you want to apply it aggressively it's not a one-trick pony first ray kurzweil san diego yes i have a traumatic brain injury that severely affects short-term memory and frontal lobe executive functions which speak to your pattern recognition I had a thought I agree I sort of ennoble the rationalization that it's character-building for me to you know learn from suffering and I've personally gotten over suffering from suffering from but I thought with your work with Stevie Wonder and I look at movies like Forrest Gump and Rain Man where the people around the supposedly disabled person are transformed out of their relationship with someone and like with stem cells and stuff you can see the temptation for genetic engineering to eliminate abnormalities out of society and I wonder is it a total rationalization that something we call being human would be lost if we use nano technology and that stuff to perfect humans and to eliminate all suffering color Thanks well I think you make for a good point its distinguishing between a defect and a quote abnormality that route might really be a different way of relating to the world that is profound and creative in its own way and we do find for example in autism that people have limitations in certain types of communication but these individuals can pursue knowledge and have skills and other people can't have and are really relating through the world in a different way I agree that there are different ways to relate to the world and we're not all the same and you know there's no such thing as normal human behavior what's normally human musical ability was the guy in my hotel room this morning who was whistling a song or is it Beethoven or the Beatles there's a broad range and as we get to the higher ranges of human capability to become quite unique perhaps kind of classic as you point out I actually think as we enhance our our minds by getting closer to our technology we're not going to become all the same we could actually become more different we're actually fairly similar today there's less genetic diversity among all humans and in one troop of baboons we all have a brain that's organized the same way with the same regions and the same kinds of basic architecture and it's constrained by a skull and we can change our brain in certain ways and certain lot of plasticity but there's limitations on how far we can go with it when we can actually break out of our skulls conceptually by enhancing our tech our thinking beyond a hundred billion slow neurons will actually be able to pursue different ways of thinking different ways of creating that are very unique and someone could really pursue you know profound new forms of music in ways that wouldn't be feasible before and someone else might you know pursue history and get new insights it would be impossible today because they could master a lot more knowledge and will actually become more different and I think that actually would be a good thing an email ask if our technology keeps advancing isn't the real problem in distributing it effectively and making it cost reasonable ok another good question and one implication of the law of accelerating returns is a 50 percent deflation rate and you can see that clearly in electronics you can get the same capability for half the money a year later and generally technology particularly the kinds of technology that individuals use follow it's a certain path and when it comes out it's unaffordable only their wealthy can afford it but at that point it actually doesn't work very well and a few years later it works a little bit and it's merely expensive and then it becomes inexpensive and actually it's perfected and has a lot of new features and is very capable and then ultimately it's almost free and it's very ubiquitous and you can see that with the cell phone you know take societies in Asia where 15 years ago their primitive agrarian economies and most people pushing a plough and today they have thriving information economies that lag from early adoption of extremely expensive technologies to a version that's very inexpensive from very ubiquitous and very almost free is 10 years but that's going to accelerate there's a paradigm shift rate that doubles every decade so 10 years from now that'll be a five year lag and 20 years from now that'll be a two or three year lag so these technologies ultimately become very ubiquitous when we have full scale nanotechnology molecular nanotechnology assembly in tabletop replicators that can use massively parallel information processes to create macro objects but building them at the molecular level by reorganizing very inexpensive input materials will be able to create really from just information and very inexpensive input materials most of the things we need from clothing and food to computers and basically information will be the only thing that has value we're moving you know gradually to where the information component of the value of products and services is asymptoting to 100% so the point is that these technologies ultimately become very widespread I mean think back 15 years ago someone took out a mobile phone and a movie that was your signal from the director that this was a very important person because only the wealthy and powerful could have a mobile phone and they didn't work very well and you don't have to be a powerful person now to have a mobile phone consider the consider making intellectual creations you just used to have to be a big Hollywood studio to create a movie well now with your $500 camera and your PC you can actually create a full quality Hollywood motion picture and six motion pictures have been done that way or recorded album you don't have to be a big recording label or a couple of kids at Stanford they were just with their thousand dollar pcs or a piece of software today it's worth a hundred billion dollars and you use it to search the internet so that tools of creativity are now widely now very widespread they cost hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars not millions of dollars you don't have to be a big you know organization to to make these intellectual creations anymore Scranton Pennsylvania yeah doctor a few years back I asked you in a radio show whether there was a device that you could hook up to a synthesizer and where you could whistle or hum or a melody and have that device transferred to the synthesizer to have it play it out through the synthesis synthesizer and you put me onto a device called a pitch tracker now I wonder is there any this was a few years back I wonder is there anything out there that may be beyond the pitch tracker that you're aware of her is the pitch pitch cracker is still the way to go well a pitch tracker is a way to go if you're trying to do what you described of sync turning your own voice and singing into another type of instrument although that'll just track the pitch in this little clip that was played about 45 minutes ago of my Ramona project we transferred my voice into another voice in to Ramona's voice and that was more than just changing the pitch because a woman's voice has completely different characteristics and if you just change the pitch it would I would you know would have the Munchkin effect it sound like a little chipmunk and not like a woman so that actually was more complex of breaking that down into its components and changing each one of the components separately and that gets into multi pitch trackers where let's say somebody's playing a piano or a guitar which has many notes at the same time being able to track all of those at the same time and that's a more complicated problem and they're making advances on that hi unday the big Korean car company just sport Kerswell music systems and I'll be working with them on a new generation of musical instruments they will use some new advanced synthesis techniques so that we can create if we want to just greet create the piano or the violin or kecil instruments we can do that but that's already well established but it will be able to create instruments that are just as satisfying and complex and rich and deep as these acoustic instruments but that have no related but are things that we've never heard before so there's many different ways in which we can use our understanding of the psychology of music and our our pattern recognition is applied to musical sound to create a whole new world of very musically satisfying sounds and sound responses but that are our synthetic and and things that we've never heard before email ask who are your favorite songwriters and composers and what do you consider the best piece of music ever written well my favorite classical composers made joven actually if you listen to his late sonatas like 31st and 32nd Sonata which is well past the point when he was deaf they're very jazzy and they really reminded me of contemporary jazz they're not played that often but I suggest people listen to them so he really went off in his mind in a very futuristic way and anticipated a lot of trends in music it really has a modern 20th century after American sound to it it's um it's pretty remarkable contemporary music the groups that are still popular or popular when I was a college student so these these sixties groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones are are still quite remarkable the Rolling Stones are remarkable because they've stayed together for 40 years the Beatles are interesting and that now usually creativity is one person maybe there's other people supporting them but here you actually have a group that was brilliant as a foursome and not even a twosome but a foursome and all those individuals when they went off on their own made interesting music but nothing like the brilliance of of that collaboration so there's a lot about creativity we don't yet understand particularly when you have a collaborative process where it wasn't just one person's brilliance that created the music I also like female artists like Alanis Morissette that's why I wanted to be a successful female singer and I do plan it for a motive to continue her career how do you see as the future of man and machine progresses how we entertain ourselves well actually computer games has been a cutting edge of computer technology in fact game machines are actually more powerful than PCs and their little super computers in their own right and we are creating virtual reality in these game worlds and ultimately they were actually will put us in a full immersion 3-dimensional world they're getting very realistic but they're still on this two-dimensional screen with defined edges eventually they'll actually take over our whole visual field of view that's actually feasible one of the reasons and one of the things they're struggling with because I've talked to some of the people in the game industry is the liability issue we've got a ten-year-old kid who's lost in a virtual world and is in this three-dimensional world that's in the game it's gonna lose track of real reality and it's gonna be knocking down lamps and starting fires and so exactly how to deal with that is something that's under discussion but the technology is actually becoming available to do that our next call from Detroit Michigan Detroit go ahead please hello Thank You c-span and thank you mr. Kurtz well for your obvious contributions I have a question and in regard to the virtual reality and whether or not you see a capability for perhaps some sort of 3d projection via satellite without to necessarily have a hardware so there could be a function for diplomacy or just an people to express ideas in that function whether it would be a one-way dictation or even potentially some some way of having a two-way conversation well I think the Internet is becoming our global nervous system and communication backbone and does it does allow virtual worlds or you already have things like Second Life and so on where you can enter a virtual reality world with other people and you might say well the Second Life isn't it's realistic it's real reality that's true today but I mean look at how video games went from you know pong which was a you know very unrealistic representation of ping pong or tennis to the very highly realistic you know animations and virtual reality you have now in games and that will take the leap to full immersion three-dimensional virtual reality so these virtual reality environments that exist on our computers empowered by the internet where we can communicate with anyone is ultimately gonna become full immersion we're virtual reality we don't actually have to go inside the nervous system to do that we can have images written directly to our retina from our eyeglasses the systems will detect our head motion and will actually put us into a full immersion virtual reality environment this technology already exists it's expensive today but it will be ubiquitous and inexpensive in the future and so then even if you and I be hundreds of miles apart we could enter a virtual reality environment and it would seem just like we're there we can look around each other at least visually and auditorily which is how most of our meetings are conducted we can be in a virtual reality environment if so if you want have a diplomatic conversation we could create a virtual Hall of Versailles and and have a meeting just like we're together and of course we use the current state of the technology to create virtual communication all the time this will be very realistic got 10 years this is you know how most meetings will take place you know the whole technology of buildings classrooms lecture halls cities is really for aggregating people so we could get together and communicate we're gonna be increasingly doing that in virtual environments as these virtual environments get more and more realistic to the point where they're indistinguishable from real reality and when we can go inside the nervous system and do that from inside the nervous system and also include the tactile and other senses and really be just like me together we have one more hour with our guests very kurzweil as we go to break we're going to look at one of the machines that he has developed especially one that helps them or helps blind people help them to read we'll see that and then we'll come right back so this is actually the original Curzon reading machine and it was actually the first CCD flatbed scanner the imaging device can only see about an inch so it actually scans each line individually but this is the first scanner flatbed scanner which is now ubiquitous and I developed the first Omni fire character recognition the first packet recognition that could recognize any type style and that was sort of a solution in search of a problem and I happened to sit next to a blind guy in a play and have said he can do anything it's quite independent but he can't read ordinary printed material so that really from that point on I devoted the character recognition software to the blind reading problem when we developed the scanner we actually developed the first Texas speech synthesis those are three distinct technologies and we put them together in the first parenthesis reading machine yes this is from the 70s ok Matt in the night in 1976 but you can see it's the size of a dishwasher and it's looking for the first page of print four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal now we are engaged in a great Civil War testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure when this came out character recognition at that time could only deal in a single type style it had to be units spaced letters could not touch one another it couldn't deal with any kind of printing errors if people actually read type documents using a special type all but the Selective typewriter before they would scan them in using character recognition so this is the first really intelligent character recognition and a version of this was actually used to create the these big databases in the 1970's and early 80's like Lexus and Nexus so that was a commercial application but this was the first parenthesis between a machine for the blind and since it was expensive and large it was used in institutions like libraries and schools and over the years it's come down in size up until recently the Kurzweil 1000 was a small desk based system a little scanner with a with your personal computer but it was still a desk based system you had to bring material back to your desk and this long material you can't bring back to your desk like sign on a wall or Bank ATM display you could bring a menu back to your desk but you'd rather read it in the restaurant labels in your clothing remainders that a book sale and outs in a meeting so the Holy Grail has always been device that a blind person can take in their pocket and just take out a read material as you go through the day so it took 30 years because this was 1976 and actually this year 2006 30 years later we introduced the first pocket-sized machine so this is the curse of all National Federation of the blind reader we developed it with the National Federation of the blind actually worked with them on the first reading machine in 1976 this is a thousand times smaller than that first reading machine a thousand times lighter and the computer is actually a thousand times as powerful so it gives you some idea that's a million to one ratio in terms of the power of computation black person could just hold it up to a wall and it'll tell them where the print is if it's cutting off the right or left edges so it sees most of the edges we take a picture here and it's going to give us progress reports this page could be rotated any amount in fact it agrees with three different degrees of freedom of tilts and rotation and so you can really hold the camera any which way and it'll actually correct the image I got it right on page 189 the a is long since over we are well into the strain of narrow AI most of the examples above the research projects just 10 to 15 years ago in all the AI systems in the world suddenly stopped functioning economic infrastructure with running to a halt pages can be curved in a book and thus often here actually straightens out the image cleans it up and enhances it and then does the recognition of the letters and then figures out the pronunciation and so although that's being done in the computer inside this device it's actually a good example of my models of predicting technology trends because in 2002 four years ago I had a conversation with the National Federation of the blind they said well when do you think these portable reading machines would be feasible and I said according to our models the requisite digital camera and pocket computer technology will be feasible in four years by 2006 and that actually turned out to be exactly correct and I also felt it would take four years to develop the software so we started 2002 and the software got done the hardware became available right on schedule and we introduced in 2006 other people are not waking up the fact though you the cameras and oxygen Peters are powerful enough to do this and they're starting the research now it's going to take them a few years to develop the software so we have a jump on the market because of our to predict where technology will be in the future and this is something I've been doing for thirty years and my books are based on the same technology models so we can forecast where technology will be in four years or 10 years or 20 years here are the 10 best-selling hardcover nonfiction books from the New York Times for the week ending October 21st for the second week in a row the innocent man tops the list John Grisham chronicles the convicted man's near execution for murder and his subsequent exoneration Senator Barack Obama premieres on the list at number 2 his book is The Audacity of Hope at number 3 is Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's third book about the Bush administration state of denial next is culture warrior Bill O'Reilly describes an American culture war defined by religion race and other issues fifth is a collection of essays on aging by screenwriter Nora Ephron I feel bad about my neck in his memoir the life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid Bill Bryson describes growing up in Des Moines in the 1950s it premieres on the list this week at number six seventh is John Grogan's tribute to his labrador retriever Marley and me that's followed by The God Delusion evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argues against the existence of God Fox News anchor Steve Doocy presents observations on marriage and family life at number nine the mr. and mrs. happy handbook and rounding out the top ten is I like you Amy Sedaris is humorous guide to throwing parties for more information visit the New York Times website at nytimes.com IR we are back with our guest ray kurzweil who was written amongst many books the singularity is near when humans transcend biology he has also written the age of spiritual machines and could you tell us a little about how you write books what goes into how you do it well I actually start by writing an essay what I want to accomplish in the book and it'll be maybe a chapter length essay and then I expand that rather than just writing the book from start to finish I'll expand the essay make you know developing this part and that part and develop it into a book I get feedback from my research group and advisers as to ideas about you know what should be expanded and questions it should be a rest I have a research team that gathers data for me so if I want to cover certain area they'll send me books and articles and on our website for example on singularity dot-com we have all the lists of actually all the books and articles I read to write the book and then as I write the material actually write the citations with it there's about 2000 scientific citations in singularities NIR and also Fantastic Voyage that I co-authored with Terry Grossman because I'm making claims that run counter to some conventional wisdom and so they need to be backed up by strong evidence and then I go through a rewriting process like any other author of getting feedback from my editor at the publisher and and other people I list all the people that gave me advice good or bad actually like criticism because that's the way to improve something and finally when I feel I can't improve it anymore ship it out the door but actually I never get to that point at some point you have to declare it a moment in time and this is the best I can do for the moment until the next book now because you have technology that distinguishes human voice do you dictate books or do you type well actually I dictated most of the age of spiritual machines really is an exercise to show use of that technology I can dictate at 50 or 60 words a minute that that is actually what you can do with speech recognition I happen to take typing in high school there was one useful course I took so I have very good typing skills I can type ninety or a hundred words a minute so speech recognition actually slows me down but most people type 15 or 20 words a minute so speech recognition actually would speed up most people but actually type pretty fast in the age of spiritual machines and your acknowledgments you amongst many lists a gentleman named David hi for actually devising a spiritual machine for the cover what did you mean by that well it's kind of a holographic image there and so we were trying to figure out you know what would be a symbol for something so abstract is to be a spiritual machine we're gonna just put a picture of a machine of some conventional high-tech image so he created this just silver but holographic image that reflects the light in different ways depending on what visual can condition you're in so I thought it was kind of a cool way to symbolize a very abstract notion how long does it take you to write a book typically well singularity is near and Fantastic Voyage I really wrote at the same time the latter co-authored with Terry Grossman although that didn't save time because we both really poured over every sentence and we both feel passionately about every idea in there and if we weren't already 99% on the same page it would have been impossible because it wasn't like okay you do this and I'll do that and we don't really care about the other sections were you really cared about every sentence we would have 50 emails about one of the citations back and forth but it came out a much better book because we really if we had it came out initially with a different perspective on an issue we would run it down and look at all the research until we really had enough in-depth knowledge to come to a better position that we both felt comfortable with so it's a much better book for that process but it definitely took as long as either one of writing it ourselves but I wrote both of these books over two year period tell us about your family my wife is a psychologist she's whenever interest actually is is reading but also just child development both intellectually and emotionally we have a lot of interesting discussions because she's understanding human development in the psychological realm and I'm trying to study the same topic but to understand it in quantifiable terms so that we can recreate aspects of human intelligence but she's a wonderful child therapist and has done a number of creative projects in that area she my daughter actually wrote a book together which you holding my daughter's avid dancer choreographer a sophomore at Stanford and writer and she my daughter my wife and my daughter wrote this book forever poems for now and then together and then my son is a student at Harvard Business School he went to Stanford also worked in McKinsey for a few years and it's quite passionate about technology business do they share your beliefs about the future technology I would say yes Mike my kids definitely have their outlook shaped by this perspective you commonly run into this very common paradigm of well human life is only you know threescore and 20 and we're gonna slow down at 65 and the there's a common conception of the life cycle of humans and I would say that's not my kids perspective at all so that my wife and my kids definitely are immersed in my ideas my wife is fortunately very healthy but she's also conscious about her health Manhattan Beach California good morning good afternoon good morning good afternoon thank you c-span and thank you dr. Kurzweil I have several questions I'll read them off quickly do you believe in God or do you think man is God and if man is God what happened before the Big Bang or possibly is man part of God and beyond that what do you think is string theory and do you think what do you think of parallel universes that'll do it for now okay actually talk about those topics quite a bit in chapter 6 and 7 of my book 6 on string theory and parallel universes in Chapter 7 on philosophy spirituality God and so on I mentioned earlier a conception of evolution as a spiritual process at least that's what we see in in evolution as entities evolve as they evolve through biological evolution and we see this not continuing and technological evolution they become more complicated more complex more more creative and actually more beautiful more capable of expressing higher-level emotions we don't see that for example and lower animals so expressions like love and or even being funny and things that are uniquely human are things that happen more and more as as entities evolve and we're gonna actually expand that through this expansion of human intelligence with our technology so through evolution we're becoming more godlike never really reaching that ideal because God is expressed as infinite all-knowing infinitely intelligent well we're not going to become infinite evolution stays finite but it explodes exponentially so it's moving in that direction that's as close as I can get to to this conception I think though that we will saturate the matter and energy in our in our part of the universe our solar system actually not it won't take that long and take about a century for us to saturate the ability of matter and energy to support computation and communication in our little part of the universe and then spread out to the rest of the universe and I see ultimately the universe being transformed into an intelligent civilization that spans a galaxy and and multiple galaxies and ultimately the whole universe and this actually and so the whole universe will wake up that'll seem pretty godlike from our very limited perspective today so you could say that the universe will wake up will become conscious there will be a god at least that satisfies my need for God to have the entire universe wake up I'd like to be around to see that that's one reason I'm interested in bridge one on this road to radical life extension and this does get to the parallel universes because you might ask how did our universe be so bio-friendly I just wrote a foreword to Jim Gardner's new book intelligent universes where he spends a whole book addressing this and I talked about it in chapter 6 of singularity is near if you look at the standard model of physics is about 50 different constants and values that is percept very precisely two values to allow atoms to exist in molecules and therefore stars and planets and that allowed biological evolution to take place and if certain constants the Planck constant and other constants in the standard model of physics were set just slightly differently there would have been no evolution and no biology and no intelligence so how did that happen that's an interesting question some people say well it's an intelligent design the must of an intelligent designer that may be the case the intelligent designer though could be an intelligent entity in some other universe string theory does allow multiple universes because there are multiple solutions to the formulas of string theory that that does allow for multiple universes each actually with different laws of physics and it maybe have been an evolutionary process that the universes get better and better designed as one universe baguettes another and it could have been just a been a national evolutionary process or it could actually be an intelligent entity some evolved intelligence in another universe actually creates using some of our advanced technology a new universe and perhaps it created our universe I speculated in the foreword to this book that maybe our universe is a junior high school science experiment of some adolescent super intelligence in another universe but we are left with the fact that our universe has a set of physical laws which are remarkably fine-tuned to allow this evolution of complexity that we saw in biological and technological evolution we have our emailer who ask could you speak to the political and religious anti reactions to science well there is this accelerating pace of change I mean I mentioned that information technology is growing exponentially doubling in his power every year the paradigm shift rate the rate of progress is also accelerating basically doubling every decade and you can really feel that now you go back five years and there was no social networks no blogs no podcasts people were just starting to use search engines that sounds like ancient history and that's only five years ago and so things are happening fast and fast and by the way that's not intuitive when I gave a presentation at Time Magazine's future of Life conference on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of structure of DNA all of us speakers are asked well the next 50 years bring and all the speakers there except actually for Bill join myself use the last 50 years as a model for the next 50 years but that's not accurate because we'll see 32 times more progress in the next 50 years because of this acceleration and this backlash actually I think is from the increased anxiety that this accelerating pace of change Fosters I think this rise of fundamentalism is a reaction to this accelerating pace of change and it is a fundamentally a fundamental problem because of the increasing potential for asymmetric warfare this empowerment of the individual which can empower an individual to be creative so one you know kid at Stanford can create something that's worth billions of dollars and you know a couple of kids can create a movie that rivals Hollywood studios a bioterrorist can also create a very dangerous you know buy a weapon with these same tools and same knowledge and if you have a rise of fundamentalism defining humans the way they were in the 7th century the 3rd centuries 13th century and having a you know violent reaction to trying to continue the advance of progress combined with these potential phases of metric warfare that that's a serious challenge and I think that's actually the fundamental the primary challenge that we face as we go forward what do you think about the president's approach to science funding well I mean I I said before that I support unrestricted pursuit of stem-cell research and I think that's a very unfortunate that we have these restrictions I don't think however it's having a huge effect because stem cell research is is progressing quite rapidly and in fact we really want to do is take my skin cells and turn them into pluripotent cells that could create any organ or type of cell with my own DNA it's called transdifferentiation that's really the holy grail of cell engineering these opposition's tend to be stones in the river but they're unfortunate stones and and it does slow certain things down which I think overall science funding has not gone down I mean if you look at the statistics funding of science through the government and and through the corporate sectors it's you know continued its historical growth rates we don't and and it's doing remarkable things but that's not a really a policy of a democratic or republican administration I mean has kind of a life of its own and when I was at any National Institutes of Health a few weeks ago and Shang ideas with the directors and their chief scientists there's some very remarkable things happening now that we have these you know increasingly powerful tools remarkable databases very powerful tools to be able to reverse engineer genes and see their impact as proteins and be able to relate gene States to disease states with this million genome project that's coming and many other things so I'm not dissatisfied over all the science funding I think we should keep politics out of it however I'm not alarmed that it's significantly distorting progress and progress isn't just from the government I mean we have many billions of dollars of corporate funding and we get from here to there not with some grand leap to let's say create human level intelligence we get there actually a hundred steps through a hundred steps each one is small market driven the market wants a little bit more intelligent search engine more flexible operating system and all these little steps if you add them all up and they can they get to be faster and faster end up getting us to very remarkable places and fairly short order Idaho Falls Idaho good go ahead cartoon shown a couple segments ago about the brain and the tank is presaged by John her C's book the child buyer back in the sixties sometime if you're familiar with that book I'd like you to comment about it and I'd like you also to comment about the chances of the folks who want to bring back the eighth century of actually succeeding and I chose the eighth century because the Battle of Tours was actually a pretty close run thing and I'd like to listen on the air if you please thank you very much actually missed the beginning of your question but I'll content comment on the eighth century I don't think fundamentalist views particularly ones I want to turn the clock back are likely to succeed our belief in progress in technology and finding solutions to problems is pretty deeply rooted and the world has actually moved very much in this direction if you go back fifty years ago there were actually were there many democracies they weren't there many countries that practice free enterprise and so we've actually moved quite a bit even though there are notable handout holdouts if you look at the sweep of human history so I don't think that the clock is gonna be turned back I am concerned though about the potential for individuals who have certain ideas to translate those into destructive impact because of the empowerment of the individual both creatively and destructively I'm also concerned about fundamentalist humanism people that feel that humans should not be enhanced not eighth-century but take you know our current state I think it's actually not a new idea we've been enhancing humanity for for a long time as I mentioned life expectancy was twenty five thousand years ago thirty seven two hundred years ago so we weren't you know it's unnatural to take antibiotics why not that's a natural course of things you'd get it back to your affection why not just why intervene in an unnatural way well so but there is this idea that we should not go beyond quote normal human ability but what's normal I mean look at the range of quote normal human ability in music or science or anything else it's a vast range and I think really going beyond our limitations enhancing ourselves is really the story of humanity that's what we do uniquely and we should continue that we see the same thing in terms of not changing biology at all that we shouldn't enhance biology but you know care we have to be mindful of dangers and downsides and we have to test things to make sure they're safe but going beyond the natural abilities of biology whether it's in a tomato or a human I think it's something that we do well and biology is not perfect it's very intricate it's very clever but as we actually learn how it works we find that it's very suboptimal this is a design for example for robotic red blood cells by Rob Freitas analysis of those indicates if you replace 10% of your red blood cells with these robotic wrestler sites you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours but aside from those interesting things it actually would be dramatically beneficial for your health I would keep it going if your heart stopped with better oxygenate your tissues we can actually do a good job of extending human biology and biology in general as we learn its secrets reverse-engineer it simulate it and then extend it by merging it with our technology what companies are at the forefront of your future as you see it what companies should we be looking to her - as far as current experimentation going on well I think an interesting phenomena is that individuals are very small teams can do quite revolutionary work we do a certain amount of mentoring in the early stage investing and I'm very impressed with the very exciting technology that comes from little teams and there's just thousands of these entrepreneurs and they're not just in Silicon Valley and Massachusetts and they're cropping up in the middle of the United States and South America Africa Asia I mean the internet now is everywhere and the tools for creation are everywhere and very creative people are are making contributions for example well just I mean a company that recently got involved in has created some molecules that actually controlled gene expression because we're actually learning that short RNA strands and other molecules controlled where the genes are expressed or not expressed whether they're enhanced or suppressed and so you can take these molecules and actually turn genes off or turn genes on they have one product that turns on the genes that create some super antioxidants superoxide dismutase and catalase which are very our anti-aging molecule so I mean this there's a lot of interesting ways of reprogramming biology that are emerging from a lot of little companies Microsoft and Google are very creative companies they actually believe in fostering this kind of innovation from inside their their companies and Google has a well-publicized model of having actually all their people spend a fraction of their time just inventing on their own so that ideas can bubble up and Microsoft has a different approach to it but it similarly has a way of creating ideas from the sort of ferment of many individuals we really have a a period now where the individual is empowered with the tools to create very revolutionary ideas and Google is a good example and there's two kids students at Stanford and they created a revolution in search engines and the opportunity to do that is even in search engines is becoming more and more possible do you think that as we look to the future Microsoft and Google will still be at the forefront of what you see yeah well I think those companies will be successful 10-15 years from now it it's very hard to predict individual companies and I can give you predictions about the course of computation of communication if you ask me that you know the cost of a MIPS of computing in 2014 I can give you a figure and it's likely to be accurate I can just give you an educated guess when it comes to an individual company but I know Microsoft and Google quite well and the the key competitive advantage they have is they have a very good way of attracting really creative and brilliant people and ultimately that's you know it's not some lock on the market or some monopoly on something or some very clever technology all of that will be worthless you know in a fairly short period of time it's really the ability of the people there to keep reinventing and be creative and those those two companies are have shown the ability to reinvent themselves well Google hasn't had to reinvent itself yet but although they've come up with some very creative new things beyond search and of course Microsoft has reinvented itself already several times and it's working on doing that again so I have a lot of confidence in those two companies for Ray Kurzweil Dayton Ohio of computer and aviation I had gifted hundreds of hundreds of your books really five books to friends and customers and loved the book TV I'm 58 a technologist my name is sue Harris and I'm founder of founder and CEO of a software company and jet engine component business anyway I have followed your regime of nutrients from Fantastic Voyage for last year a month and have seen tangible great results like high-energy creative crisp use of mind and also my sweetheart is thrilled however I had a follower dr. Linus Pauling's regime several decades ago on vitamin C and found that it did not give me such pleasant results in the past my question to you sir is doctor is that do you have any concern or sense of potentially adverse impact of your daily regime and also do you have broader base good sample number of your regime followers and what is their consensus incidentally I consider you a great gift to human well thanks for your comments my program the program that dr. Grossman and I devised it's not one size fits all and it's not okay do these five things and just follow it and everybody should do the same thing and and and that's it the most important part of the program is actually to quote the Bible know thyself and learn about your own body take take a lot of tests we describe that in the book to find out you know how's your atherosclerosis going how's your insulin resistance how's your detoxification system there's many different ways to measure this do you have early detectable forms of cancer and and that it's a fair amount of effort but it really is worthwhile to know your own health situation many people when they do this discover they have some chronic conditions maybe they have metabolic syndrome a third of the adult population has that it's kind of precursor to type-2 diabetes insulin resistance that really speeds up aging and can lead to full-blown diabetes and so on so I can't describe all the issues but it's important to really test yourself and then as you adopt you find out well maybe your insulin resistance so you take some supplements for that you don't you know just adopted and that's the end you keep testing yourself seeing if it actually works see if there are adverse reactions because people sometimes people have reactions to certain supplements so it is it's really a period of exploration we give a lot of ideas in the book originally the publisher said well where's the sort of one-trick pony here but then they actually got on our bandwagon and appreciated the fact that we give a lot of ideas because our bodies are complex we don't have some system yet they can just do it all for you you have to learn about yourself and adopt a personalized program and keep tracking your own health but if you do that and armed with the kind of knowledge we provide in Fantastic Voyage you really can dramatically slow down disease and aging processes so that even people I think you said you were 58 I'm 58 we baby boomers can in 10-15 years when we have the full flowering of this biotechnology revolution where we'll have very powerful tools to reprogram biology can still be in good shape so you know I'm delighted to hear that you've had a good experience and you know keep keep it up keep testing yourself keep you know keep assessing how how are you reacting you know I spend a lot of my time keeping abreast of new health information about new therapies or new research about old therapies or even information about my own body I didn't realize before it's a constant period of exploration and refinement well pharmacy companies move from medic medic reading medicine to creating nanobots if that's the way that you see as far as the human body being re-engineered well one one trend that we will see is personalized medicine we're learning for example cancer is very personalized and this idea of just okay you get this kind of cancer you take these chemotherapy drugs it's not a good approach and we actually find that certain chemotherapy drugs worked very well for certain people and not for other people and we need to figure that out before we give the treatment or actually create a treatment that's actually designed and works just for the antigens on your cancer cells and those kinds of therapies are coming and in fact we're gonna have to redesign FDA approval mechanisms because they're not well designed for this kind of personalized medicine but that's actually a very powerful development but yes I mean there's already lots of medical devices and systems where we put computerized devices in your body you can swallow a little tiny little pill that actually takes all kinds of measurements and photographs as it goes through your digestive system and Bluetooth that information to a computer you're carrying your belt and then disintegrates and I mean I can give you 20 other examples of where we have already maybe you're not yet blood cell size devices but tiny devices that are computerized and programmable this implant this computer you can put inside your brain or place the biological neurons destroyed by Parkinson's disease it's programmable you can download new software to the computer in your brain from outside of the patient so there's many exciting examples already and as these devices get smaller as I said we're shrinking them by a factor of 100 per decade and 3d volume and more powerful multiplying their power by a thousand every decade that's gonna become more and more ubiquitous we have an email who's asking from some career advice he's an aircraft pilot and he read your book and he said that until reading your book I assumed that I was in a good career but and I'm not so sure now am i in a dead-end job well our aircraft fly themselves can you discuss some of the impacts of the singularity on transportation I think the way to approach careers is to not worry that much about whether particular types of jobs are gonna become obsolete but be open to learning and keeping abreast of the world and and following your passion and if you're passionate about flying I think by all means do it I think the world would be a different place and you know most jobs that exist today will at least be significantly transformed in the years ahead so this model where you go to school and then you learn a trade and that's your ticket to employment and productivity for the rest of your life until you retire I mean that model already doesn't exist by and large people really have to change what they're doing and I think people should have the attitude to keep learning and to follow your passion because it's not you don't have to be it even though we're talking about a technological future you don't have to be a technologist or an engineer to thrive because it's really knowledge and information that'll have value but that includes music and art and I mean look at how artists have been empowered I mean artists used to you know have a difficult time making a living unless they were very well known but now there's an explosion of need for art and graphics on the web and artists are doing very well particularly if they have computer skills and same thing for music musicians and so any kind of knowledge if you have a passion for it that's what you should pursue and keep abreast of how different type of different professions change I think ultimately transportation will become more automated you know certainly if you go out 15 20 years flying devices will be personalized using nanotechnology and they'll fly themselves but flying devices cars or something along that line as we as we know it yeah I think in 20 years we'll have nanotechnology-based flying devices an Arbor Michigan high biological components are replaced by technological ones and the rift between humanity and technology becomes more narrow what do you think the possible effects will be on the human psyche especially the way in which we define humanity and differentiate between it and technology well I think I think it's gonna change and you can see already you know movements like body modification tattoos and piercings and so on which go back in our 15 years there was a pretty fringe phenomena is now very mainstream and people walk around with devices on their eyeglasses and in their ears and even five years ago if you had a little microphone in your ear with an antenna that would seem pretty weird now we routinely accept that so conventions actually change pretty quickly particularly when technologies become viable and we we adjust quite rapidly I mean look at how rapidly we've become wired and online you walk around a college campus and everybody is online with their computers and their things in their hands and in their ears and they're in some virtual environment while they're walking across campus and that that didn't look like that even five years ago so as these technologies become perfected I think we we accept them more and more and I think we will accept the idea of enhancing human ability with our technology because it's the slippery slope from just correcting problems that occur from disease or disability to actually being able to go beyond quote normal and one reason this would be slope is there's no such thing as normal human beings have a broad range of abilities but really it's a thrust of technology in general that's why we started creating tools was to extend our reach and we started out with the Industrial Revolution extending our physical and we've already you know have a half-century of extending our mental reach and our ability to do that it's gonna become more more powerful as these tools become more intelligent lansing michigan afternoon so a pleasure to talk to you sir i do it one-man show about thomas jefferson that i take to school and in my research I came across a quote that our third president would supports you and I wondered if I could have told you for a second to read that say it's the quote goes like this I am NOT an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of a human mind as they become more developed more enlightened and as new discoveries are made new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with a change of circumstance institutions must advance also to keep pace with the time thank you very much well thanks for that I think I will actually use that in a future book and actually if we can get your name outside you in a footnote that's a very modern quote that could have been said today and it's interesting that the the pace of change and technical progress was noticed back then most people did not notice in I mean 200 years ago people's grandparents by enlarge lived the same lives they did and they expected their grandchildren to do the same it was perhaps 200 years ago that we just started or at least thoughtful prescient people like Thomas Jefferson noticed that things were changing and that there was such a thing as progress because you go back hundreds of years the idea of progress people never heard of it they just thought things stayed the same there was progress but it was at such a slow pace it was not noticeable now you'd have to be you know pretty asleep not to notice the rapid pace of change but that's a very up-to-date quote appreciated is there any form of a modern day Luddite still in the world oh absolutely I mean there's very strong Luddite movements I may take the anti-gmo movement genetically modified now I'm not saying that GMOs are inherently safe I think they need to be tested like any other new food or or you know invention that affects our biosphere but it's been just a reflexive anti GMO movement that if something is generally modified it's absolutely wrong which i think it's just a inherently anti-technology stance golden rice it's now been approved but it was held up for five or six years it could have saved hundreds of thousands of kids from going blind in Africa because of a genetic modification that would provide the right vitamins for these kids in in their foods to stave off this type of blindness African countries have been lobbied not to accept certain grains certain seeds that would overcome the natural blights that wipe out their their livelihood that's changing now but that that was an example of I think a reflexive anti technology movement and there there's a strong anti technology movement Bill McKibben who who I respect has actually brought global warming to our attention or the book called enough where he says we have enough technology at least enough advanced technology now it's his position is actually more sophisticated he said certain types of advancements we should continue and it's a complex discussion as to exactly what we should do and what we shouldn't do but it's an example of an opposition to a certain type of advancement that we shouldn't for example it's a radically extend human longevity which I think we've been in the process of doing for a thousand years but now we're getting to a point where we can do it much more rapidly but there's definitely strong anti technology movements they claim some academic circles Los Angeles California I'm extremely impressed and have not had much exposure to you aside from your phenomenal keyboards and music programs I'm actually a nutritionist myself and also I'm extremely impressed with your knowledge of my field and I actually have a question more about the implications of nanos in the human brain and the basically tendency of governments especially democracies to lean towards and eventually turn into what becomes almost monarchy and the likelihood of nanos being used to control the populace and how we would avoid that in the future well you know when we have software running in our bodies and brains all kinds of issues that we now actually struggle with already even though most of the computers are not yet inside our bodies and brains will become even more important privacy well we already do very private things and in our computers and and we realize that people can easily put a spy program on our computer and report back to somebody we don't know everything they were doing so this is already a concern software viruses and other type of malware is an issue given all the important things to do in our personal computers for when those computers are inside our bodies and brains that's going to be more of an issue we're concerned about security and privacy of health data well if we've got all these computers with that health data inside our bodies and brains and people hack into it put spyware there that's going to be a big concern and potentially people could send software viruses into the into the nanobots inside our brain and actually influence our thoughts I mean that that potential is there that's one of the downsides of these technologies software security therefore becomes more and more important an issue technical issues like encryption which get very technical but are actually pretty fundamental I think to the future of humanity being able to maintain privacy is very important and actually a lot of advances being made in encryption encryption actually tends to stay ahead of the decription technology to the dismay of intelligence agencies but to the delight of privacy people are concerned about privacy so yes this will be an issue I think you know overall we get a lot more benefit from our personal computers in the internet today then we are harmed by this kind of malware and software viruses and we actually have a pretty good system for protecting ourselves from software viruses that we've invested in new sort of virus is discovered and it's reverse engineered and a protection that's created and distributed virally to the Internet generally within 24 hours so we've done a pretty good job of actually defending ourselves from software viruses we actually should learn from that as to how we should deal with biological viruses but this is a whole area that actually will be getting more and more concerned as the technology gets more and more intimate and it's already pretty intimate as far as the advances are concerned is that the United States that's leading those advances are there other countries involved I think we're already very close to a worldwide system of worldwide economy you know you buy a product and you know might have software done in Silicon Valley and certain mathematical problems were solved in India and it was constructed in China and with just-in-time inventory systems designed in New York I mean it we're typical products which have sophisticated software and hardware already quite complex and involve people all over the world and most products are intellectual and that the intellectual part of products like product designs can just circulate the globe in seconds on the internet and this is actually empowered China and India to become successful but I don't see it's not a global race as if there's a fixed size pie and if China and India get more we're gonna get a smaller slice it's really a positive sum game that Chinese engineer is creating value for his or her company but also for us because we all benefit from all of these products and this is actually leading in my opinion to to the economic growth we see the information you might expect that the information detector would shrink because it's 50 percent deflation factor and some economist actually worried about that that if you can get the same stuff for half the money a year later that the size of the economy as it has to do with information would shrink but we actually see that this the opposite the case we more than double our consumption when price performance reaches certain levels whole new applications explode on the landscape and we have had 18 percent growth in information technology in every area in constant dollars for the last 50 years despite the fact that we have a 50 percent deflation rate and in fact that is what is driving economic growth there's more the economy is comprised of this information technology which is growing 18 percent a year and less of it is comprised of these non information the industries which are shrinking the growth rates are increasing and we see that with these fantastic growth rates in China and India and even sub-saharan Africa because of technology at a 5% growth rate last year about eight more minutes with our guests Miami Florida hi am I on yes go ahead hi Bri I have to say that I'm a great fan of yours but that being said I have a question about one time you talked about you your utopian future that the future would not be in utopian despite the fact of a growth of Technology and I'd like you to explain that for me please well I learned earlier to technology being a double-edged sword so take biotechnology I mean that's I think actually a great revolution that's happening now they were going from a pre information error where we just happen to find something and we don't really know why it works to where we can actually reprogram biology as an information technology and that's a great that's a grand transformation but it has positive and negative consequences a positive is that I believe we will be able to reprogram biology away from cancer and heart disease and and these other diseases that kill us 15-20 years from now I think we will really overcome these diseases at least make them manageable chronic conditions if not eliminate them altogether through the power of biotechnology but the downside is that also empowers a bioterrorist occur to program a biological virus to make it more deadly or stealthy or communicable and that's an existential specter that we face right now and we really need to be doing more about it but these technologies can be used for creativity or destruction I think the problems that we've been focused on that humanity has struggled with for eons we will ultimately over the next several decades get the tools to overcome those problems but we will still be struggling then with new problems that these technologies introduce well the companies that develop them themselves be able to give proper oversight well I mean we have a regulatory system I think it needs to be reformed in in many ways both to protect ourselves more from these types of dangers on the one hand and on the other hand accelerate the approval of life-saving protocols and medications that take too long to be developed and this is actually an issue in defending ourselves against the dangers because I mentioned how well we're doing with software viruses and we can in one day capture a virus a software virus reverse-engineered created an antidote and spread it virally around the internet and that system actually works extremely well not perfect but one of reasons we can't do that in bio in biology is because of this regulatory system we have you can't create something let's say in RN ain't I medication and put it out in a day I mean a typical approval time is measured in years not days and this is actually concerned with with bioterrorism how do you how do you test these things all together when nobody has these diseases it would be unethical to actually test them because you can't give people these diseases in order to test them so we need to do some more creative thinking I've written about how to approach this problem but yes we I mean regulations gonna be very important we're gonna have to reform it in light of these new opportunities and dangers Kingsport Tennessee go ahead please Ron with Ray Kurzweil demonstration mr. Kurzweil concerning the handheld scanner to convert print speech does that work on most print fonts where can we get more information and what's its approximate cost yes that we just introduced the Kurzweil National Federation of the blind reader in July it's on the order of a thousand blind guys and gals going around reading everything from the labels and their clothing to signs on the wall in the back of cereal boxes and menus and handouts of meetings and so on it cost $3500 it does reads all common fonts it's it won't read on work on handwriting yet but it works on all fonts different sizes it's really quite flexible if you if there's print in its field of view which generally does a good job reading it and you can get information that's knfbreader.com knfb reader comm we have about two minutes left but this final email should we fear computers and machines as they begin to equal us in intelligence well we do fear other humans right and you know we have one human civilization but it's not been free from conflict and we had 180 million people die in wars in the 20th century maybe as we reverse engineer the human brain we'll have more insight as to the sources of human conflict but I'm not predicting that that was gonna lead us to eliminate human conflict and I think it's still going to be one integrated human civilization even more integrated because of this pervasive internet that we have and that's gonna grow in power but but we're not gonna lymon eight human conflict in fact we're empowering individuals to be more destructive with the same technology they were empowering individuals to be creative so I would fear the aspects of humanity that we don't understand that allow us to be destructive and deploy technologies in ways that are inimicable to who I think are better values I'm hopeful we can do a better job in the 21st century than we did in the 20th century I buy old feeling as we will but that's the optimist in me talking but we fear human hatred and that unfortunately is also amplified by these technologies and hopefully we can take that into account I've written a lot about how we might do that but that is that is something to be feared do you have a new book that you're working on well my next book is tentatively titled how the human brain works and how to build one but that's a number of years off I've got a number of other irons in the fire before I get to that but I am cut I'm doing now what I do in the early stages which is gathering information so as I see interesting articles and books that pertain to this topic I'm gathering them and

Channel: The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Views: 59,880

Rating: 4.77665 out of 5

Keywords: singularity, transhumanism, ai, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, immortality, anti aging, Ray Kurzweil

Id: S5tFJ_iTcmo

Length: 178min 47sec (10727 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CrimsonSmear]

Recorded in 2006.