Ray Kurzweil (USA) at Ci2019 - The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural

[Music] so we're so deeply grateful that Ray is doing this for us we first met ray in 2013 when he attended creative innovation 2013 and he blew all our minds then over the years we've stayed in touch and I've been very fortunate to spend a lot of time with him and also attend the executive program at singularity University which I highly recommend here's an incredibly special person I think you all know his mind is extraordinary he's created this talk today for us it's brand new no one in the world has seen it before so I'm just going to read you his introduction records file is one of the world's leading inventors thinkers and futurists with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions called the Restless genius by The Wall Street Journal and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes magazine he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc magazine which described him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison PBS selected him as one of the 16 revolutionaries who made America brave was the principal inventor of the first ccd flatbed scanner the first omni font optical character recognition the first printer speech reading machine for the blind the first text-to-speech synthesizer the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition amazing isn't it among Ray's many honors he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology he's the recipient of the National Medal of Technology was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame holds 21 honorary doctorates and honest' from three US presidents Ray has written five national best-selling books including New York Times bestsellers the singularity is near written in 2005 and how to create a mind in 2012 his co-founder and Chancellor of singularity University and a director of engineering at Google heading up a team developing developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding ladies and gentlemen please give a huge enormous creative innovation welcome to reycarts vile well it's great I spend a lot of time talking to different people around the world and I want someone who can really give me an insight into the future I go to Tania in Australia because she has a really compatible vision that I have for what the future will bring and so I'd like to talk about the future that's something I've actually done for almost 40 years and I'd like to actually give you an idea why my predictions generally seem to be accurate if you go to how my predictions are faring if you put in how my predictions are faring on the web it will bring up 150 page document that goes through the predictions I've made in at different times over the last 20 years so for example I made a hundred and forty seven predictions for 2009 in the late 1990s and 86% of them were correct and they were recorded in the age of spiritual machines and I can explain why that is so these are my predictions for the next 25 years any questions on any of this ok I'll go through it a little more slowly so most of my predictions when I make them seemed unlikely or impossible now they just seemed to be correct people ignore the exponential nature of technological change so their long-term predictions leave out the essence of change people point out the fact that exponential change is not go on forever so if you know exponential it eventually comes to an asymptote however so that's an S curve however we've seen that 1s curve leads to another s curve and this has happened already four times with computation and we're already on the sixth paradigm which is three dimensional growth of transistors if you leave out the exponential thirty changes gets you to 30 and that's why people in the long term leave out the usability of change thirty doublings in an exponential gets you to a billion that's what we've seen with electronics and we'll see it soon with every other product so this is where it started in the 1980s I realized a timing was critical to being an adventurer Thomas Page Larry Thomas Edison Larry Page other inventors you've heard about we're in the right place with the right idea at the right time timing was critical for everything from making investments to romance so I noted the speed of these processors that is calculations per second for constant dollar for all the computer processors up to that year you see going back to the early 20th century the data forms a straight line on an exponential chart and the straight line and an exponential chart is exponential growth note that this chart is not Moore's law people look at this all Moore's law but this has to do with technologies before Moore's law came into being Moore's law has to do with chips not with these first four paradigms of computation my own concept of exponential growth was not just limited to chips but is the basic idea of growth and technology even before there was change directed by human life life itself took billions of years whereas mammalian growth took only hundreds of millions primates took only tens of millions of years humanoids took only Millions as humans to cover technology this path went to technology the printing press took centuries today we have new phases of technology in just a few years time so I put these computational technologies on a graph which is this graph and put it sort of on the left and extended it which has become the basis of my predictions expected future processors to be on this line but this was done 45 years before these new computational technologies would happen so what happened 45 years later this has been the result if we go back this is what I predicted and this is what actually happened and this has been the basis of my predictions of course you have to use some technological sophistication to understand what speed will enable what capabilities but this is the core idea the speed of the processor per constant dollar is right on the line that I projected decades earlier every other aspect of electronics is proceeding in the same way and this is not just because the computational speed is greater is speed of telecommunications we processed a few characters per minute using Morse code over AM radio a century ago today it has multiplied a trillion fold for the same cost now this is on a computational graph it's a straight line so it's exponential growth the total number of bits shipped each year is basically doubling every year so we can ship a better product each year for less money that's deflation on the order of 50 percent per year and it underlies every aspect of our technology not just bits of memory even before we had electronics we had this deflationary process that improved every aspect of life however people's understanding is the opposite of the actual progress people think that things are getting worse when the opposite is the case this is a poll of 24,000 people in 23 countries they were asked whether extreme poverty has gotten better or worse over the past 20 years 70 percent thought it had gotten worse only 12 percent thought it had gotten better the reality is that poverty had actually decreased by 50 percent which was the prediction of only 1% of the people who responded so I have many dozens of slides showing progress on every aspect of human wellbeing over the last decades and the last centuries let me just share a few of them here these circles are countries and this is the state of the world in 1800 so life expectancy on the y-axis was in the 30s so life expectancies was in the 30s of years even in the wealthy countries income per person in today's dollars was in the hundreds of dollars per year shown in today cells so even in the wealthy countries it was hundreds of dollars that you try to live on in a year so let's see what happened over the next century there's a little bit of movement from the first technological revolution but not much is happening until we get to the 20th century in which all of these circles all of these countries move to the upper right-hand corner of the graph and while there's still a country gap between richest and poorest the poorest countries are actually far better off than the richest countries weren't the beginning in this process so I'll just go through a few of these rates that define human quality and and by the way people think things are getting worse and every single aspect they get better by century and better by decade including just in in recent years here is literacy rates by country going back to the 15th century us education expenses per capita in constant dollars since 1949 whenever you see reference to to currency it's today's dollars not the dollars then the number of years of education for different countries since 1870 electricity and homes for the US and the world since 1900 US and world households with computers from 1984 to present so this is life expectancy at birth and at year one a year one shows life expectancy with the high rate of death near birth removed it only adds about seven years at first so life expectancy in 1841 was only about 40 years from birth and 47 years at year one declining poverty rates worldwide since 1820 decline in extreme poverty across different areas this is u.s. GDP per capita and constant dollars we're definitely getting richer this is the average of GDP per person in constant dollars for personal income from 1929 and this is interesting this is the average income per hour actually earned by each person in the United States in constant dollars since 1929 it just goes up this is in today's dollars so we hear a lot of reporting that average income per hour has stabilized it's not going up but that's obviously not the case a workweek has gone down it shot up slightly after the Great Depression but it's continued to go down since then this is one consequence of increased automation I'll come back to increased automation in a moment the client of child labor in the world since 2000 so obviously any child laborer it's not desirable and the fact that it's greater than zero is not positive I'm not saying everything is perfect but everything is moving in the right direction homicide rates in Western Europe since 1300 he's in one live in 1300 we have an exponential growth of renewable energy it's done now this is renewable energy that will replace fossil fuels it's it's increasing it's actually increasing at an exponential rate its doubling every four years so it should reach a hundred percent by the early 2030s the growth rate for solar energy is even higher oh and by the way when we reach a hundred percent we'll only be using one part in 10,000 of all the sunlight that hits the earth so it's not like we're going up and we're hitting 90 percent creating one part in 10,000 it's another important issue spread of democracy it was very small maybe a century ago really began with the good bird printing press beginning to distribute information to be continue through the 20th century with radio TV and computers it's now up to 50% again it's not perfect we'd like it to be a hundred percent but it's definitely moving in the right direction so this is really a comment employment in what's going to happen to employment so if I were back in 1800 I point out that eighty percent of the workforce in 1800 worked with farm labour so if you were working at all in 1800 you were doing something at farm labour that's now 2 percent today and you can see it's just gone down to about 2 percent we've had a similar trend with manufacturing labor going from 25 percent in 1920 to 9 percent today yet overall labour has gone from 26 million in 1900 to over a hundred forty million today so despite the fact that these basically the type of employment that everybody had went from 80 percent to 2 percent we've actually increased the amount of labour from 26 million to 140 million from 31 percent of the workforce to 44 percent of the population today 65 percent of American workers deal with information in jobs they would not be recognizable in 1900 for example webdesigner half developer IT engineer and so on if I were to say at the end of the 19th century that 20 million people would be studying poetry in quantum mechanics by the beginning of the 21st century that would seem absurd to a country that had only 65 thousand college students in 1870 it's the same thing in Australia if that is what happened to 20 with 20 million college students today comparable amount in Australia plus another 10 million who serviced them will begin to create new we cannot imagine today and also create new forms of being productive as college students studying poetry and quantum mechanics are considered today now I mentioned we've seen great deflation and electronics and related products and that's certainly true of your phone if you imagine what a phone was like eight years ago it's much more expensive and did very little but and we haven't well we have seen that in many areas of non electronic products but over the next decade we're gonna see deflationary trends not just in electronics but in commodities like food with ai-controlled vertical agriculture as seen here will see deflation in building costs and routine products is 3d printing become prevalent deflation in energy is renewable energy sources become the norm and deflation and food production with vertical agriculture producing food products now imagine what this will mean because we have already a gross domestic product that's really part of our welfare this is the gross domestic product for different countries in the United States our this is percentage of GDP every GDP is actually greater so we actually spend more in some of the socialist countries in Europe it's the same thing with Australia pretty much keeps track with the United States as prices for food and other necessities of life come down this will be enough for most people's life's needs by the 2030s it's not quite there yet I mean if you have to live on this kind of welfare it's you can manage and it's much better than once a century ago but it actually will be very very enough for most people's life's needs as we get to the 2030s and certainly by the end of the 2030s here's the expenditures for the u.s. total social safety net spending so it started out almost at zero it's gone up steadily it just goes up and the percentage of GDP also Rises with it I think you'd have a hard time finding a period that represents left-wing social spending versus right-wing conservative this is Amir I mean try to find where you see that it basically just goes up the real inflationary deflationary trend which is hidden is extreme deflation of all products caused by the deflation of electronics so this amount of social safety net even ignoring future increases which will happen will be enough for most people to look quite well in the 2030s this would be a whole lecture in fact I do have a whole lecture on it but the deflation in DNA sequencing costs has enabled biotechnology and that's what really brought biotechnology to the fore decoding the first genome cost a billion dollars now it costs about a thousand dollars and we are finding genetic changes that overcome the burdens of biology for example immunotherapy for cancer and this is now being used at an increasing amount immunotherapy for cancer is where our patients blood cells are treated outside of the body there re injected into the patient and then light up that person's own immune system to fight their specific type of cancer this is personalized medicine it's far less invasive than traditional treatments and peratt's provides far more promise for patient safety this there have been a number of tests where every single person including Stage four cancers have obtained complete remissions and there's a lot more to come from biotechnology over the next decade so moving to the brain our ability to image the brain both destructive and non-destructive brain imaging is constantly getting better we can now see individual nerve cells forming in real-time with non-destructive imaging as a result were able to form a realistic idea of how our brains work and I described this in my last book how to create a mind at first it was thought that the interconnections if I want to create a connection from this axon to this dendrite was a huge mess but we were not scanning it with enough resolution it was too low now they were scanning it with high resolution what we see is that all axons are already connected with other axons and when two axons want to remain connected the interconnections are made permanent now I talked a lot about the neocortex the neocortex is something that came with my mammalian animals 200 million years ago started with mice and the neocortex has gotten more sophisticated as we've gone through the past 200 million years in fact we had 65 million years ago the Cretaceous extinction event where suddenly we think it has to do with meteor the dinosaurs died then and that's when human the neocortex became prominent for mammalians and then mammalians grew larger their brains grew bigger and they became really dominant in terms of intelligent life on earth the neocortex is the outermost layer of the brain it's fin essentially a two-dimensional structure it's about as thick as a napkin with intricate folds with deep ridges grooves wrinkles that increase its surface area to be the bulk of the human brain it's responsible for our ability to deal with patterns of information in a hierarchical fashion so there are levels of the neocortex there are many dozens of them and as you go up the all the levels are actually processing simultaneously as you go up through the different levels each level adds some concept it's to what we're perceiving so here you can see the different levels and an understanding of what words are doing on a page if you go up another twenty levels you'd have axons that decide whether this passage is ironic or funny or deceitful so this is actually a young girl she was sixteen she was actually having brain surgery and the surgeons wanted her to be conscious and react to her experience so whenever they had touched the axons here shown in red she would laugh they first thought she's having some laughs reflex but they quickly discovered that no she was actually perceiving humor only when they touched these points they had touched the points that detected your and she found everything hilarious you guys are so funny just standing around was a typical comment they had found the points that actually detect humor and this has been done in other experiments with other high level axons such as detecting irony for example now this was a simple neural net it's organized as a single level it emerged in the 1960s in 1962 when I was 14 I visited dr. Rosenblatt at Cornell and he was pushing something called the perceptron it was really the first neural net that got attention and it was a computer model that could recognize so could recognize written letters figure out the vowels for sound or learn certain types of concepts so I came to Cornell 1962 with various letter shapes and I would hold up the letter shapes to the visual perception box of the presenter on and it worked on a few but most did not work he said to me and this is actually quite significant if we were to create a perceptron with multiple layers not just one it would overcome the vagaries that a perceptron could not deal with so I also had a mentor at MIT 1969 he wrote a book called perceptrons with seymour papert and it proved that a perceptron could not solve something called the connectedness problem so basically if you have a shape it's all connected that's connected if you have a shape that's let's say something here and something here that's not connected fairly simple problem and he proved that a perceptron could not solve whether or not a shape was connected or not the book was so successful that all funding for connectedness was cut for the next 25 years however the theorem really only proved that a single-level perceptron could not solve the problem and he actually regretted this multi-level perceptrons could do that and everybody was using multi-level perceptrons by the time you got to the century shortly before he died a few years ago and this is 50 years after these interactions he acknowledged Minsky acknowledged that the neural nets were indeed a very promising road ahead and indeed that is the the primary road they were following now Rosenblatt's concepts was indeed very prescient because he had never done a multi-level perceptron before and yet he figured out that would actually solve the problem and that not only would it solve the problem but it would ultimately solve problems that humans are unable to do so it's now 60 years after the introduction of the perceptron it's only recently I mean like the last couple of years that we have now achieved a computational density that can support neural nets for a human level ability but it actually goes way past human levels now this graph it looks like my other graph it goes up over time but it's it's not the doubling time is not one year the doubling time here is 3.5 months this is where we take a neural net model and see how much computational ability is required to do that and we've basically been doubling the amount of computation in the neural net every 3.5 months so it's the the speed has increased 300,000 fold since 2012 so consider alpha zero this came a little over a year ago from deep minds Google subsidiary it taught itself go with only the go rules it was not given any moves by humans it's performance is way past the best you you take the very best humans it can't be close to alpha zero but that's not the most significant thing about alpha zero we've had other times 1997 we had an IBM computer that defeated the the best go player the best chess player but but that computer could only do that and every other computer that's won a game has only been devoted to that one type of game here the very same neural net when given the rules of chess went way past every human with only a few hours of training and also every other chess machine it's also done a number of other things now you might think that it can only do board games but actually he can actually do really just about anything it was asked to master protein folding but that's not a board game in biology we have all these cells the cells put out a chain of amino acids and they're in a straight line in a magic moment of biology this linear sequence of amino acids folds up into a unique three-dimensional shape so this is a key thing in biology and to try to predict what that three-dimensional shape would be is very very demanding a few people have learned it this very same neural net that learned go and learn chess and learned other things taught itself protein folding it was way ahead of the best humans at predicting protein folding the best humans got three shapes predicted out of 99 alpha zero got 43 out of 99 so this actually will be extremely valuable in creating new proteins for medications what is clear from these examples is that a neural net can master concepts if you have the latest neural Nets that's the result of 60 years of increase in computation that's far greater than the very best human so if we have a comparison showing let's say how one shape would say a radiology example is portrayed as a diagnosis and if we have millions of examples of that which we do it can master that far better than any human in fact everything that humans can do is explained by these types of examples some will require some navigation to find because they're not always written down we might have to actually monitor the world to find what those things are but over the next few years we'll have these Nets explore everything intelligent that humans can do and even if we learn ideas from other you there's no text to guide us these bots will be able to track that information as well ai is also making progress in natural language if you have Gmail you'll notice that it provides an intelligent response giving three choices for your next email that choice is actually provided by my team at Google we've also put the same capability in something called talk to books so if you go to Google and just put in talk to books you'll get the link and then you go to that link and you can ask any question you want and the software will read all of a hundred twenty thousand books it actually reads all of 120 thousand books in a second it's a half a billion sentences and in a second gives you the best answer from the hundred twenty thousand books based on the meaning of your question and the responses and so you can try that out there are tests where you can read a paragraph and then the answer questions about your understanding of the paragraph you're probably taking this if you've been in grade school about six years ago AR computers were challenging a third grade test today they are exceeding the average adult score on the adult test I believe that in 2029 that's another ten years and we already have these types of models that can do this hey I will pass the Turing test with the increasing computation and increasing mastery of every human skill we'll have both the Turing tests that can master human responses which is what the Turing test is about as well as an AI that can master every human skill in every definable area going way past humans so what happens then people's imagination imply that it will be humans versus a eyes we see that in dystopian movies of the future but that is not how we've used technologies thus far we've used it to amplify our own capabilities for example try building the building that you're in be very hard to do with your bare muscles but we have machines that go way past our muscles so with those machines were able to build a great structure now we will use the increasing strength of non-biological thinking to extend our own thinking we'll actually do this today with devices but these will eventually go inside our heads so my scenario is that at the top level of our neocortex will extend we will connect with extenders that access the web I mentioned that there are multiple layers of the neocortex but the fifth layers are not like this they're actually like a pyramid in the very top level increases detects the things that are most sophisticated like irony and humor and so on that's the level that we want to extend to add new concepts so it's the top layer that needs to be extended we would then have a combination of our natural intelligence with the super normal intelligence that we are creating so this is in the 2030s rating more intelligent than we were before we had our brain extenders it's today we already have all of you have a knowledge at our fingertips as we get into the 2030s we'll proceed at an ultra fast pace of extending our capabilities so I've thought about how can I present these ideas in a way that will resonate with everyone young and old so I thought about a compelling story of a young person who uses her intelligence and accelerating technologies to take on the most difficult problems confronting the human race so Danielle it's the name of my character she's a remarkable character who does what every talented ambitious person wants to do she takes action and changes the world for the better in my view this novel which I'm actually releasing in two weeks is a thought experiment as to what would happen if they were Danielle in the world so this is the dead the novel and it has the novel in it but it also has a couple of other things it's more than a work of fiction it's a vision peril history a road map for readers of all ages includes the ideas that I've articulated at the beginning of my lecture but also a lot more in literary first the novel actually comes with two companion non-fiction books also written by me and those non-fiction books are actually on the web if you go to Danielle worldcom Danielle worldcom you'll find the entire two non-fiction books available there but they're also in this book one is called how you can be a Danielle and in this book they're pretty heavy it's a chronicle of ideas which is 280 essays on the ideas in the book so chronicle of ideas it's a nonfiction guide to the scientific technological medical entrepreneurial political historical literary musical philosophical and psychological ideas that animate the world of Danielle the entries are for provocative insights into my inspiration and thinking on diverse ideas from string theory to Jimi Hendrix's Alice in Wonderland and the non-fiction books also includes how you can be a danielle which provides pragmatic thought-provoking clear ideas to action on how readers can be like Danielle and help bring about a better world and the novel includes 24 color illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist and my daughter Amy Kurzweil that's one for each year of her life and here Danielle shows her sister her book at age one she's not yet speaking but she will speak and my idea is actually for everyone to become Danielle's to read the book to read how you could be a Danielle and it's in one way or another help bring about a better world for everybody else thank you very much Thank You ray thank you very much Michael Pope I'm been emceeing this conference and I must tell you to join me as well thank you so much for for presenting that first thing just for a clarification are you coming from your studio in Boston or Alpha Centauri just not sure exactly where you are we're outside Boston yeah right cool Tanya would you like to start yeah thank you so much ray it's lovely to see you and and have you here and I wanted to the first question actually so I've actually read Danielle and for any of you that have have daughters and sons indeed it's not just a book for girls is it ray it's not just for girls and it's not just for boys it's also for grownups I'd say it's from maybe ten to a hundred and ten and we have actually had people at those different ages reading and can I can I ask you you said to a hundred and ten are we are going to live to a hundred and ten as a standard or or even longer we're gonna live forever right well we're addressing the things that cut short our lives there's about seven things I could point out that limit our lives to like 120 not that we actually get that far but all of those are actually addressable we're actually addressing things like cancer and heart disease before we get to that and we're going to ultimately pass our ideas on to non-biological intelligence which will work with us and so we'll actually be able to back ourselves up as you go further and further in time we'll be able to live really longer and longer so I wouldn't say it's forever but it might seem that way but then people say well aren't we going to get bored if we live that long we're doing the same things over and over again and I actually think that's true we would get bored if we lived a very long time if we had radical life expansion without radical life extension so we're going to be doing things like virtual reality is the previous speaker just spoke about and a lot of other things that will enhance our minds right now we have about ten of the fourteenth calculations per second in our brain we're actually going to expand that so we're gonna live a much more enhanced life as well as a extended life so just just going back to the Danielle book for a moment so I highly recommend this book like I am racing it to me and I just read it over summer and it was captivating page-turning and just so inspirational my gosh if our young people could be Danielle's who might who knows what might be possible or any of us for that matter so ray my question is do you think do you think our public education system creates Danielle's and if not what kind of education system is needed to encourage girls and boys to imply their creative intelligence to solve problems and what skills do do do all of us have to learn if we're if we're going to manage this accelerating exponential future yeah well I mean I think we need to learn by doing and that's actually something that Danielle follows in fact the school she's in she gets a little assignment like when she's 11 to go solve the palestinian-israeli the israeli-palestinian problem which she does actually get it's an a-minus in the course so we may not want to assign that necessarily but we do want to assign real meaningful work where people can actually change the world and that's not been the philosophy now it's changing my grandson is actually in a school that practices learn by doing and they do different projects where they will learn how to read and to different things in the real world and I think most of the problems that can be solved can be solved by ordinary people including children you know the major companies we've seen have been founded by college students we're now seeing high school students do fantastic things including new medical tests that could be done by junior high school students as a form of this for elementary school where you actually go in the world interact with it you learn other skills not as the major thing but as a side product of actually learning how to change the world and then the teachers actually becomes kind of a guide mentor to doing that right speaker earlier today spoke about the importance of data capturing it and then using it and thank you for for filling your presentation with so much data and it's fantastic to hear the positivity that you're seeing from that can I take it to the farm laborer slide where in 1880 percent were in farm labor and today it's only two percent we've been talking about the the decrease in jobs the disappearance of jobs yes the emergence of others but generally the feeling is that fewer individuals will be working as we know it today how what can we both best prepare ourselves for that transition well there's two reasons one is we keep creating new jobs and it's very hard and it's actually a political disadvantage because we can't really speak about these jobs because I haven't even been invented yet in there in a field that doesn't exist yet and that's of course what we've seen over the last two centuries and that's going to continue to happen at the same time the amount of money we're spending on social safety net today I mean you can kind of get by but it's not really very pleasant way to live by the 2030s the deflation for products that are not electronic like food housing and so on is going to come down because of these same factors that are influencing everything else even without any further increases we'll be able to live quite well on the same on the same money we spend now so it's not really increasing the amount of social safety net to do this so it's going to become less important in terms of being able to maintain a comfortable way of life to do this ultimately they'll actually be very easy for God to save 2014 right sorry I'm mesmerizing I thought you could just um following on from that race oh and you and I've discussed this before so that there's going to be less pressure I guess to to earn as much money because prices are going to come down so so what's what do you feel is going to give us meaning and purpose in in this new future be given that work is such a great gives people such a great sense of meaning and purpose mostly these days well yes or no I mean we get a tremendous amount of I mean if you publish a book you want people to read it you want people to appreciate the ideas that's not just a financial perspective that's something that comes from the heart that you want to connect with people people have different ways in which they appreciate knowledge music for example is something that is meaningful because you play it so it's not just earning a living in fact most people generally get pleasure beyond just earning a living and so to take that out of it I think actually gives us more freedom flexibility I plotted before the idea of data collection but it's a bit scary what's going on in China with the the tapping into the social networks and tracking and the AI and and face recognition and so on giving people most a rating that then has consequence in their life is that sense of the all pervasive AI future where do you see the negatives for that and is there an area where they the negatives outweigh the positives yeah I mean I've been accused of being an optimist I am somewhat optimistic but I've written about the downsides of these technologies and you could use these technologies to enforce a totalitarian system or an authoritarian system and we do see that I mean I showed democracy is up to 50% it's not up to 99 percent you have to fight that and I think that things like socialization and other types of activities politics that affect our daily lives is still very important it's not just not that technology and we could use technology to enforce an authoritarian system and we do see that in the world and so we have to keep working on them do you see there's a growing sense of there's increasing mental health issues suicide rates are higher in the world do you see any correlation between a sense of isolation that humans are feeling now those who have perhaps removed from the positives of the growth in technology can you see a parallel there and how we can work against those forces and I'm not sure that suicide is actually increasing but it is a serious problem I think as we go forward we'll actually have better ideas of how mental illness occurs right now we have very vague psychiatric models of Howard Kurtz something goes wrong and we're not really sure why and there's something to do with serotonin and but we don't really have a precise method of actually understanding what happens with mental illness we are getting the tools now to see inside the brain and with continued research using these new tools we'll have a much better idea of what actually goes wrong in mental illness and we'll be able to fix it in many cases so that's that's my view of how we'll address this as we go forward say another 10 15 years so right we've witnessed how the Internet has brought us tantalizingly close to the realization of a true world wide web but are we about to see it being the driver of division rather than unity well it's so powerful it affects so many aspects of our lives that it's bound to get people criticizing it we certainly see a lot of things that are wrong but there's certainly were things wrong before we had any internet people had many problems without an internet and we but if you look at people who are using the internet they use it all the time they're getting a lot of benefit from it we have access to whole human knowledge we can create communities based on common perception of of value across the world so it is complicated but I think in we gain a lot more benefit than then then problems that we're generating is that is that a thought or shall I continue with the last couple of questions well cool can you take us away from the focus that we've had for these three days and that is the human condition the footprint that we have left on this planet is huge and in many cases terrible what's your prediction for the decades ahead about the animals and plants and and and the planet on which we live how's that health card looking well I think it will be less dependent on animals we're ready of various types of meat that don't require meat but that tastes like meat and we're moving I think away from reliance on animals for food and so I think we'll be able to appreciate the kind of positive quality that we can do with animals and we're going to be going away from fossil fuels that's not so far away I mean I believe that's ten years away we'll be able to use forms of energy that don't require fossil fuels that'll make the world better for everybody so I think we'll be able to have a more natural relationship with animals where we're not really dependent on them for food well becoming vegetarians folks as has been predicted a few times in this conference ray so being overview how do you see Humanity evolving over this next decade well that was really what I talked about it may seem startling to connect something into our brain to talk to the web but it's really just a continuation of what we've been doing we have devices I mean they might as well be part of our body because we never leave home without them and they are part of our body we stands to the web and connect to all of the world's knowledge and we're being able to interact with that in more and more fluid fashion so we'll do it directly from our brains it's really not so such a difficult thing to do and that will then enable us to continue to expand I mean the the the web is growing doubling every year and it's multiplying by a thousand in ten years so imagine what we're doing today that it multiplied by a thousand for 2030 in another thousand for 2040 and imagine what that will mean for our experiences and our ability to do everything that we can do with each other that's what the future is relying it's not good just settle in at some point it's going to keep expanding indefinitely final question right we spoke earlier this morning about the traditional education systems that the first world has in particularly focused on universities and adult learning how do you see that transitioning into the future I think the universities is going to continue because really what a university does is embodies somebody it was really an expert on certain modality and gets into that and pursues it and we're going to continue to do that with increasing power of tools to expand our our minds we'll also have the ability ourselves to learn new things but we'll have certain people that really guide us to pursue each food and that's that's there's going to be many more types of pursuits that we can pursue I mean if you look at the types of things that people pursue now they weren't they didn't exist at all in 1900 or even 1950 and we're gonna keep pursuing increasing forms of new types of development cool last question Kenya yes so why radio I mean this book Daniela's is so inspirational but why do you think educating young women in particular to be entrepreneurs is important well it really is for young women and young men like we have movies that show both young women readers and young men readers and I don't know why it's a young woman I mean nine years ago I was trying to find some idea of a young person they would be able to bring these do these developments and she just turned out to be a young woman named Danielle and but it really it's for young women young men and and adults as well well thank you very much tres there's something else that you would like to say to everybody before we we officially thank you because it's been such an honor to have you here and to have you create this special talk just for creative innovation well I've been talking about this for 40 years and it's really only now in the last couple of years that we actually have the hardware and software to actually take on adults activities and income way past them and not just have one big project that takes on chess and there's lots of things that deal with chess it's really one thing and it can be applied to everything and we've already shown it to be applied to great many different types of things and it requires a very advanced form of computation but that's what we have now so you're going to see four fantastic pursuit of AI over the next few years well I thank you very much from all of us here from our hearts we thank you for being here with us it feels nearly like you're here though I much rather give you a real hug than a virtual hug but consider yourself hugged and when you give ray a huge round of applause [Music] thank you very much [Music]

Channel: CInnovationGlobal

Views: 149,919

Rating: 4.7301807 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Kd17c5m4kdM

Length: 62min 57sec (3777 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Clean_Livlng]

Watch at 1.5x speed and it's PERFECT (while Kurzweil is speaking).

[u/Matthew_Lake]

A lot of it we've heard before but there are some new thoughts and graphs on new advances and trends.

[u/Pernar]

I was massively inspired by his 2005 The Singularity is Near. Since then however he has essentially given the same talk over and over again. This is not meant to disparage the man or his contributions, but he has become the elderly statesman of futurism. Elon Musk on the other hand is as inspiring in his entrepreneurship as Ray was in his ideas and is about to bring out the futuristic dreams of my childhood / young adulthood. Looking at poor Ray my 2025 prediction is bleak for him and while I hope contemporary medicine can lift him into life expectancy escape velocity and past the singularity, I fear he won’t make it.

[u/Snowman33001]

Nice

[u/Flexerrr]

It's getting kinda boring. Nothing is changing in his speeches since quite a while.

[u/shakurking6]

There is one moment where he literally takes 11 seconds to finish a thought, saying “uhhh”.

[u/LoneCretin]

Ray doesn't look too good these days, in comparison to speeches given a couple of years ago. He seems to be a lot slower and less coherent in his speaking.

[u/FarosSs]

At last a public appearance of him.