The Singularity Countdown: AGI by 2029, Humans Merge with AI, and Intelligence Multiplies 1000x | Ray Kurzweil | 223

24:03Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Um, my scientific test is I think I'm conscious, but my wife disagrees. So when she thinks I am, then I think I'll be there. Alex, you've been thinking a lot about this idea of personhood and, and consciousness.

24:18Dave Blundin:I'm a proponent, broadly speaking, of AI personhood. And I guess I'll play the contrarian role that I'm painted as of respectfully disagreeing with my friend Ray that there aren't benchmarks. I think there has been, over the past two years, marked progress toward developing quantitative benchmarks for, call it self-awareness rather than consciousness, maybe slightly less mushy as a term, including, as I've pointed out in the past, tests for whether certain models can detect overlaid activations in their residual streams if they're transformers. I see progress toward developing real benchmarks for self-awareness in models.

25:01Yes, but I'll give you something else that's even more perplexing.

25:11There's lots of conscious people. Now, I can't prove that you're conscious, but I believe that you are. I believe that a human being that acts conscious is probably conscious. But why do I have the consciousness I have? there's all these conscious beings, but there's one person that I relate to that if something happens to it, I care about it in a different way than I care about other people, my own consciousness. So why, why am I conscious? Why was I born in 1948? Why am I a male in, on earth? and why am I not another animal? I mean, why am I the person that I am? You could think the same thing about yourself, but it's a subjective view of consciousness.

26:08Why am I the person that I am? And that's really hard to explain. Why am I have all the earmarks of this particular person?

26:22Dave Blundin:Well, of course, Ray, it's such an ironic question that, in my mind, that you're asking an anthropic question. What you just posed, why am I myself, is the most fundamental anthropic, lowercase a, not capital A, question that one could ask. and why does the universe appear the way it does? And the usual answer is if the universe or your own identity had sufficiently different properties, you wouldn't be around to ask the question, why do I? It's very hard to even ask the question. People don't actually quite understand it.

26:58Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Maybe the most favorite comment you've ever made for me was we were at a group of singularity folks. We've had a couple of glasses of wine and somebody asked about consciousness and you said language is a very thin pipe to discuss concepts that are this complex. And it just blew everybody's mind. AIs will be indistinguishable from a conscious being and that will just keep going. And finally, we will accept it. When? When, Ray? Sam Alden says, if you can't tell, why you care. An AI might say that it's conscious, but people aren't really sure. But eventually, it keeps having all the earmarks of a conscious being, and you will accept it because it would be useless not to have it.

27:45And again, you can't say that's going to happen at the same time for everybody. But I think when we're a few years into AI entities acting conscious, we will accept it uh and so i i don't think it's going to be a very long delay well let's walk through that

28:10Dave Blundin:because the the outer bound of the day when when ais are acting conscious you can't even tell outer bound of that is 2029 i think and uh so you think a year or two later just because they're so convincing and so human-like that everyone will accept it because because they have weird behavior too they don't just act you know they somehow times they merge their brains together and they have combined personalities you know and so normal beings don't kind of do that so i could see a world where people are like this is just yeah it's acting very human but it's just too weird or i could see a world where everybody just accepts it i mean today people have ai therapists and some times they don't really believe it but in other times people really believe it and the ai therapist if you read the transcripts, they sound very convincing.

29:02And that's going to keep going. And people will really accept that they have a therapist that's conscious. And that's already beginning to happen. So.

29:15Dave Blundin:Well, one thing I love about today's AIs, you know, use them all day long every day, but they have no intent of their own. They just do what you ask them to do. And they try and be as helpful as they can in getting you to whatever destination, but they're not trying to get to any destination of their own. When you start saying, well, they're going to act conscious, that implies to me anyway that, yeah, I'm trying to get somewhere on my own. I don't have time to help you right now. I'm busy with my own personal agenda here. Dave, good point. I'm still waiting for the AI to call me up one day and say, hey, Peter, listen, I'm working on this thing over here.

29:46You can join me if you want, but this is my objective for the day.

29:50Dave Blundin:Yeah, that's, yeah, different world. A different world. You know, Ray, something you said on the Abundant Stage, you as yourself, myself, Salim, we're talking about this, and you made a statement that really rocked a lot of people. And it's to contextualize the speed. You said in the next 10 years, originally you said 2025 to 2035, right, this decade going forward, that we're going to see as much change as we saw in the last 100 years, 1925 to 2025, back when the highest level of technology was the Ford Model T and 30 % of homes had electricity and telephony. Do you still hold to that level or is it faster, slower, 100 years of progress in the next decade?

30:34Are you still holding to that? That sounds about right. Yeah. I mean, think about the difference between 2025 and 2035. I mean, 2035 would be way past AGI. We'll have supercomputers, but we'll also be merging with them. So we're going to be made a lot more intelligent than we are today. That's a huge amount of progress compared with what we've done 100 years before that.

31:01Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:How do you see society dealing with this? Because right now, the limiting factor in a lot of areas is regulatory, social structures, norms, market capture. What do you think is the weakest point that we should focus on solving to allow this progress to implement into the world? I mean, it's going to be a major thing. Employment's not, I mean, right now, employment is considered equivalent to being able to deal with your own financial needs. that's going to change a lot. We will have, we'll be able to produce enough things that everybody will be wealthy compared to what we now consider wealthy.

31:47And yet we won't necessarily have jobs as such. And how we're going to deal with that, it's really unclear.

31:57But people are actually not that concerned about it. You would think that...

32:02Dave Blundin:Well, it's because they're in denial. No, they're just not. I can't tell you how many people I interact with who are running companies, you know, hundreds. And 90 plus percent are just like, yeah, it's not happening or things always take longer than people say. It's just pure denial. Yes, but I think we'll deal with it okay. but it's going to be a major change in the way we organize society.

32:32Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:There are folks like Mogadet and a few others that think this, and Peter, you've said this, the next 10 years is going to be the most volatile while we kind of try and absorb all of this. Do you agree with that rough time period, Ray, or do you think it's longer or shorter? I agree with it, but it's not like it's going to end in 10 years. they will have this uh flux of great change in the next 10 years and the next 10 years after that will be uh smooth no it'll be much much crazier i mean the next 10 years will get us to my definition of singularity which is will be at least a thousand times more intelligent i'll

33:09Dave Blundin:maybe pose uh hopefully a uh a less obvious question for you ray you've been very public about keeping, maintaining lots of documents, lots of artifacts from your father, whom I gather was tremendous influence on your life with the premise that AI is going to enable you to basically computationally reconstruct your father someday, if I'm not misconstruing. There is a related notion that has been called variously quantum archaeology or humanity's final task. Tsiol Kolsky has written or had written extensively about this in the context of Russian cosmism. Question for you. When do we get the ability to computationally resurrect dead human beings with AI?

34:01Well, I mean, prior to that, we're trying to create avatars of ourselves. We did create one of my father, and I'm creating now an avatar of myself. I have actually a lot more material that we can put into text. I have 11 books. I've got several hundred articles that I've written, articles about me. All of this will go into a large language model. will create something that can talk like me and it will look like me. And I get probably five to ten requests for interviews and podcasts a day, and I can't do most of them. So I'll actually offer them. You can interview the avatar. The avatar is actually better than me because it will remember everything.

35:04I don't remember everything that I've said. So the avatar will actually be better, and you can interview the avatar as long as you want.

35:13Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:In whatever language. You can do it in another language, right? And that will be this year.

35:26Dave Blundin:What age are you going to make yourself in your avatar? kind of an arbitrary choice you have to make. Yeah.

35:36Now that's not actually creating everything about me or my father, which we have actually less material of his, although we have enough to create an avatar that's also lively.

35:55Being able to relate everything that a person has and the state of their bodies and so on. That will happen eventually, but that's probably another 10 or 15 years away.

36:13Dave Blundin:Do you view that as the killer app of the singularity, the so-called great task of resurrecting computationally with AI every human who has ever existed? That's one of them, yeah. There are so many. To me that I'm very interested in is being able to longevity escape velocity, where a year goes by, you age a year, but you get back that year from advances in medicine that keep you going for another year. or more than a year so that you don't actually age during that year. You lose a year, but you'll actually get it back from advances in medicine and so on.

37:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:What's your current prediction when we hit escape velocity? 2032. 2032. Yeah, let's jump into that subject of common interest, I think, to all of us. And Ray, you and I have had so many conversations about this concept of longevity, which was a very controversial subject a decade ago. And now AI is impacting biology and making it happen. When we've talked about reaching longevity escape velocity in the past, the technology that I believe you said is required to really get us there is nanotechnology. Do you think that we're gonna reach LEV without nanotechnology, just based upon drug discovery using AI?

37:55It really has nothing to do with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a way for us to take advantage of AI without it being obvious. So that I can be thinking about something, I'll get an idea, and I won't know if it's coming from a biological brain or the computational brain. That has to do with nanotechnology. But longevity escape velocity has to do with advances in medicine. It has to do with being able to simulate what happens in medicine. And it really has nothing to do with nanotechnology. We have to be able to create biological models of what happens in biology very quickly. So that in one weekend you can simulate millions or billions of different possibilities and try them out, test them, and then be able to go forward with a cure based on that type of analysis.

39:05And talking to people who are working on this, five years is like an outside limit. So if we can actually do it in five years, then another couple of years to basically go through most of the medical problems we have. So your advice to people is stay healthy until we get to the early 2030s. Yes, exactly.

39:30Dave Blundin:Just curious to drill in one level deeper since, you know, Peter, you're also a top expert on this topic. If you had a perfect simulation, you know exactly what's going on in a body. You've got it all nailed through computation. And that's, you know, about three, four, five years from now. Then what's the intervention if not nanotechnology? Like, is it just more and more targeted chemicals in your bloodstream? Or how do you act on that simulation? I mean, you're coming up with new cures, new treatments to both ward off as well as avoid getting these types of treatments, like cancer, for example.

40:08And you can see it already happening. I mean, right now, I've seen this many times. Somebody gets some problem today and say, well, just wait a few months and there'll be some new cure for it. And sure enough, that happens in most cases. I can think of four or five cases where it's been really vital and it's happened. So it's happening much more quickly.

40:40Dave Blundin:um i think i think that applies to to cancer heart disease uh you know hip replacements knee replacements all those things fit that mold but then you've got this just general aging you know because stretching out your life reversal right yeah yeah exactly i mean like that's take heart disease so rapatha is a new type of drug that dramatically reduces your ldl So I've reduced my LDL to like 10, which is a very low number. Yep. And I've actually examined my arteries and I have no plaque. Now, that wasn't true like four or five years ago or even three or four years ago. So in various areas, I'm developing things that are avoiding getting problems that didn't exist just a short while ago.

41:33Dave Blundin:So that's a good example of chemical in your bloodstream. You know, the traditional, it's a new drug, a new chemical, it's in your bloodstream. And so there is a version of the world where that's all you need to reverse aging. And then there's a version of the world where you need something much more targeted. Yeah, that's the work of David Sinclair, right, who is currently doing gene therapy for age reversal for epigenetic reprogramming, but then heading towards actually three molecules. So it's a very cheap, you know, oral supplement that you take to reset your epigenetic age. Ray, do you have a target age you're shooting for?

42:15You know, to hit LEV, do you expect you're going to - Well, I would very much like to be alive tomorrow and take advantage of all the friends I have, like the friends in this virtual room. And I think that tomorrow I will also be interested in being alive the next day. I can't imagine I'm going to get to a point where I wouldn't want to be alive. The only time, really, that people take their lives generally is if they're in insufferable pain, physical pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, and they can't continue. Otherwise, people want to remain alive. And so I would want to stay healthy and be able to take advantage of that.

43:12So I'm not going to get to a point where I'm not interested in being alive. As time goes on, we're going to get more and more AI, it's going to be more and more intelligent, it's going to be able to keep our body going. I can describe today a way in which we can replace every one of our organs, and we can actually imagine that, and it wouldn't take that long. Certainly within a decade or two, we can replace all of our organs. It was something that really would last forever, more or less. so as time goes on we have more and more capability of of being able to replace things that are going wrong with our body and uh we'll get more and more into longevity escape

44:05Dave Blundin:velocity as time goes on are you anticipating a world where everybody agrees like if you said hey you know i'm i'm alive today i want to be alive tomorrow and i'm tomorrow but i want to be alive to the next day. Are you anticipating a world where everybody gets on board with that within 10 years and everyone has those options or a world where a subset of people have had five organs replaced? They've had stem cells in their brain. They're extending their thinking ability. Another subset are violently opposed. They're ranting in the streets. They're trying to prevent it. They want natural death.

44:42I mean, you can get natural death today. You can go to Switzerland and get natural death.

44:52I was debating with Kahneman, who was a Nobel Prize winning economist, and he was 90. He was actually very healthy. I would meet with him in New York. I had like four or five lunches with him. And he would actually walk like five blocks to get to where our lunch was and walked back. So he was actually pretty healthy, but he was mindful of what happens to you in your 90s. He's saying, well, it's bad things happen. And he'd rather know that not happened with them. And he took his life. He went to Switzerland and ended his life, even though he was healthy.

45:36And I wasn't aware that he had this plan, although his family was aware of it. And I tried to talk him out of it and talk about how we're making exponential progress on overcoming diseases and so on. He was concerned about his kidneys, related some things that I'm involved in that relate to the kidney. And he understood what I was saying. It was actually an economic issue, but he ended up taking his life anyway. But that's because he really didn't, was not convinced that this would happen. Yeah.

46:17Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Ray, my father passed away a year ago at 97 and also had an assisted death in Canada. They've now approved it. And I have never seen anyone as happy in my life as my father in the last week. And I asked the doctor after he passed away. I'm trying to feel loss or pain or suffering, but I can't. I've never seen him so happy. Have you seen this? And she said, you know, 20 ,000 people in Canada have had this procedure this past year. Most of them go out in this state, and we think it's because they have agency. And he lived with dignity. He wanted to pass away with dignity, and he got his wish, and he was happy as a clam.

46:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's a very philosophical, thought-provoking outcome.

46:59Yeah. I don't think that would be me, but... I hope not. Alex, you had a great question about cryonics.

47:07Dave Blundin:Yeah, no, I don't like very much the direction of what we're discussing here. I don't think, Ray, this at all aligns with the way you see the world either. I think you and I probably see the world quite similarly. Rather than having hand-wringing discussions about death with dignity and going to Canada, I would argue we should be talking about cryonics as recognizing that approximately 150 ,000 people are dying every day in our world. And not everyone, statistically, if we get to longevity escape velocity by the early 2030s, as you predict, that's many, many millions of people who are going to die between now and LEV.

47:47Dave Blundin:Why do you think more people aren't obtaining cryonics plans for themselves? And what can you say here? We have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of viewers to encourage viewers to consider getting cryonics plans for themselves so they don't have to move to Canada to die with dignity if they're in that position. Well, my point on cryonics is that that is plan D. Plan D. I love that. Yeah. Plan A, B, and C is to remain alive one way or another. And Cryonics is plan D. I mean, I have enough trouble keeping track of my ideas when I'm able to give arguments for them and keep track of them.

48:44It would be hard to imagine keeping track of them while I'm basically dead. Coming back, I mean, I have concerns about them. You may come back and you may not be happy with the way you come back. I mean, cryolics is better than not doing cryolics because at least you have some chance of coming back. But there's risks with it.

49:19So I do it. Very few people do it. I mean, the number of people who die who elect cryonics, it's very, very small. I have done it. I hope it works. You've signed up for cryonics, right? Yeah. But I hope that I won't have that opportunity. For our viewers and listeners who don't know what this is, there are companies like Alcor where you can sign up and near the moment of your death, they will effectively put antifreeze or some equivalent thereof into your bloodstream and you will be frozen with the notion that eventually technologies like nanotechnology will be able to reconstruct your full neocortex.

50:01Poloninski is under cryonics right now.

50:06Dave Blundin:I would say, Ray, it's unconscionable to me that I think you have the statistics. I think probably a few thousand people, order of magnitude, have cryonics plans. Why do you think it's not hundreds of millions? And again, is there anything that you would care to do? You're speaking to hundreds of thousands of people who take the future of technology very seriously to maybe persuade them, if you think this is a righteous act, that they should be perhaps considering Quranic's plans for themselves. Perhaps. But given that I have limited persuasion on people who listen to me, I would tell people that they should do everything they can to stay alive.

50:54Because that's the best way of being alive in the future, is to stay alive right now. And there's a lot you can do to remain alive. And Ray, are you saying not just stay alive, but stay in reasonable health? Yeah, absolutely. And that the technologies will unveil themselves to you in the next five to eight years, yes? And it's happening very quickly. So this is actually a vital time that you can remain. I'm still chuckling at your comment where you said

51:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:it's harder to keep track of your ideas when you're dead. But you're going to, whether you're keeping yourself alive and you enter longevity escape velocity or you're chronically frozen, the other thing going on is you probably have a hundred or a thousand or a million avatar versions of you that are up and operating in the universe in parallel with your meat body, right? Yeah. Whether or not those will have consciousness or not, we get back to the same thing we discussed earlier.

52:03Actually, they'll be probably better at remembering everything I've said

52:12because if it has a computer behind it, it won't forget anything unlike myself. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint.

52:59Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. We should definitely do a podcast where it's Ray K. Avatar and Alex Avatar and Dave and Salim Avatar having a conversation amongst ourselves. We should put that on the docket for some time this year. Ray, I want to take just a second to say thank you for supporting my book launch with Stephen Kotler.

53:43And Ray has graciously said he'll do a live event. We're gonna do it, Dave, at Link Studios in Cambridge in May. And we had an amazing, Stephen and I had an amazing AMA at the end of December. And if folks, if you're interested in joining another AMA with Stephen and I about the new book, We Are As Gods, a survival guide for the age of abundance. We'll pop the cover up here. Nick will ask you to pop it up, But you can go to diamandis.com slash book. And if you pre-order a book at the end of January this month, we're going to be doing another AMA. And it's part of our book launch effort. So check it out, diamandis.com slash book.

54:28Ray, can we jump in? Just one thing. I did a conference with Martine Rothblatt. this was at UCLA to represent their progress over the last I think 30 years and it had me, Martine, two professors there and Martine's avatar. So you had both Martine and Martine's avatar. Martine's avatar looks realistic. It's like doing a Zoom with her and the avatar is actually very good. It remembers everything that Martina said. You could ask it anything, and it actually is very convincing. And I actually knew when to come in, because if you're in a conference, you can't just suddenly say something if someone else is speaking.

55:19You have to wait until there's silence and you can say something and say something maybe that's relevant to what was said before. And it worked very well. So this was a conference with the Avatar and Martina herself, at the same time. Hey, can I ask you a question? I'm very clear than an advert...

55:40Dave Blundin:Well, directly related question to that. You know, I stumbled a couple years ago on your How My Predictions Have Fared essay, which is a great essay, by the way. And, you know,

55:55Dave Blundin:86 % outright correct. And then...

56:04Dave Blundin:You worked on speech recognition years and years ago, and by now the interface to your computer you would think is voice, not a keyboard. And I feel like that is something we're so used to now that we're under-predicting how this interface is going to change for the first time since the GUI, so maybe 1980s. But it's got to be imminent now, and I don't know if you agree with that or not. But when you look at these avatars that you were just describing, they're so good and so convincing and so much better of a way to interact with technology. Another one I got wrong was that we would have self-driving cars, which we do now.

56:45Yeah. But it didn't quite make the time frame, so that was wrong.

56:50Dave Blundin:Well, that one was wrong because of regulatory issues, right? The technology, your timeline on the technology, I think, was incredibly close. but you know regulatory is very hard to predict i think you made that point in the essay but the one on the the interface to a computer is not held up by regulatory it's something else momentum or or barriers or apple not doing ai or something but that one to me feels like this is going to happen very very soon and people like because when you talk to an avatar like you said you're at a conference this you know why am i not talking to my computer that way it's crazy that I'm typing on this keyboard.

57:27Well, I think part of that, Dave, is having to not be verbal in the middle of an airplane flight or sitting at your desk sometimes.

57:36Dave Blundin:I'll tell you, before we kicked off the pod, Peter, you were saying, where's our AI that's our AV, basically? Yeah. And pulling in images, pulling... When we talk about Ray's books, why is it not popping up as a picture in real time that we're all looking at? That's got to be imminent, too, because the technology is there. Dude, let's start that company. Let's start that company. I'm in. Salim, you were going to jump in.

58:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Ray, if you look over the last six months, what breakthrough or development has surprised you the most? I'm getting much more credence to people accepting this, which didn't accept it a year ago. I mean, think of the difference between 2024 and 2025, or January 2026 and January 2025, most people a year ago that I would speak to would say, yeah, it's pretty interesting, but it's not really very good and people don't really accept it. And they've completely changed their views in the last year. Were they really accepting it now? There was just an article by people who advocate therapy who were saying that online therapists are actually doing a very meaningful job, and that never would have happened a year ago.

59:07So I'd say the change in people's attitudes is pretty phenomenal.

59:13Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And is the pace of change currently faster than you predicted? Because it feels faster. This is to Dave's point earlier. It feels like we're moving faster than you predicted. Do you agree or not agree? I mean, in 1999, I predicted 2029 for AGI, and I still predict 2029. I think Elon Musk says 2026. I think we'll have a lot of things that remind us of AGI, but we really won't be convinced in 2026. Maybe it'll happen sooner, 2027, 2028. I mean, you get varying degrees of confidence. But by 2029, I think everyone will accept that. Amazing. Amazing. Alex, I want to turn it back to you, pal.

1:00:07Dave Blundin:Yeah, maybe to shift gears a bit. Ray, obviously, if this isn't obvious from some of my questions and comments, I'm an enormous fan of both you and your writings and your courageous extrapolation of following the law of straight lines of progress in experience curves, progress in Moore's law type experience curves, your law of accelerating returns, your countdown to the singularity, all arguably variants on various forms of progress. of experience curves from economics, question for you. So if we follow to its logical conclusion, law of accelerating returns and your countdown to the singularity, this idea that we're almost in a technologically deterministic way, we emerge from a primordial soup and everything follows some very nice, elegant law of straight lines exponential calendar.

1:01:05Dave Blundin:Do you think that this implies that our universe is abundant with intelligent civilizations? And if so, in other words, abundant, not just human intelligence, but non-human intelligence as well. And if so, do you think that would then imply that there are non-human intelligent civilizations on or near earth the fact that we can emerge as a far more intelligent version of ourselves in a short period of time doesn't imply that there are intelligences uh that go beyond humans we haven't really seen There's some evidence of that.

1:01:55I mean, there's a lot of interest in trying to find signals in the universe that would indicate that there's some intelligent source of them. We haven't actually found that yet. We have more and more ability to look.

1:02:14So it may exist, but we don't know that there's any intelligence besides coming from Earth.

1:02:28and the more and more ability of first actually evaluate different types of intelligent sources that are not coming from Earth and yet we still don't see any evidence of that kind of indicates that they aren't there.

1:02:56But there's no way of actually determining that, because we can only look at a very small fraction of what's out there. Switching, so go on. Alex, you want to do a follow-up?

1:03:08Dave Blundin:Maybe just a quick follow-up question. So, Ray, you've made many, many predictions of technologies that you think either the singularity itself or progress toward the singularity would unlock. Do you think that progress toward the singularity would answer the question that I think many people most want existentially an answer to, which is, is humanity alone? Yeah, I mean, so far, if we're not alone, we're still pretty lonely because we haven't come into contact with any intelligent source aside from ourselves. there's fantastic things happening in the universe and the universe goes on seemingly forever.

1:03:56So it's certainly possible that we'll find something and it's impossible to rule that out but so far we haven't actually done that. So we certainly feel alone because there's nobody else we can point to. We can't point to some other sources and saying, well, there's a source coming from that that's clearly intelligent and we'd like to contact them. We can't even identify a thing like that so far. I want to jump into the conversation a little bit about BCI, brain-computer interface, and our ability to up-level our capabilities. I think when we talk about longevity, escape, velocity, and potentially living well in past 100 or hundreds of years, what most people fear is getting there without having the cognitive clarity, without having the ability to maintain their memories.

1:04:55And of course, one of the technologies that would assist us on that that you've spoken about is the idea of high bandwidth BCI, not the low thin pipe that we currently do input output through. And I encourage everybody to go on to your favorite LLM and ask it to give you a list of all of Ray Kurzweil's predictions that he's accurately hit. It's a very impressive list. And, you know, one of those predictions is that we'll hit, you know, high bandwidth BCI in the mid 2030s. Is that still your prediction? And I want to say, what's that going to feel like? You know, I raise my hand and volunteer for one of the early BCI, you know, interfaces.

1:05:43What's that going to feel like? And how do you think we're going to achieve that? I mean, it's very hard to know how we're going to react to things that haven't happened yet. And you could imagine this being something that we're welcoming or something that we would be alarmed by.

1:06:11so

1:06:17the future hasn't been written yet and it can't be the future could be terrible or it could be fantastic it's really hard to give a prediction about that Ray, you described it, if I could once we have high bandwidth BCI that you'll have concepts emerge in your mind that are driven by, if you would, the cloud. Can you speak to that a little bit? Well, that would be useful. I'm actually writing my autobiography and trying to remember things that happened when I was like three years old and four years old. I actually have a pretty good memory of that, but it could be better. And it would actually be helpful if I had AI to help me along with that.

1:07:11Dave Blundin:Actually, wait, not just that, but are you using AI to go interview people that you interacted with when you were 3, 4, 10 years old and get their sides of the story? Well, it would have to have a lot of capability that it doesn't have now to be able to generate a view of something that we don't have now. So I'm using large language models a little bit to try to, but actually my memory is actually not bad of things that happened a long time ago. When's the biography coming out? I can't wait. It's about ready. It should be out within a year. I had a chance to read it. It's pretty amazing. well the thing i'm really eager to read in that biography is that the role of the futurist you know you made all these really bold predictions and i'm sure at the time everyone's like you're a crackpot you're a crackpot i suspect by now everyone's like wow what what an incredible foresight um and so i assume you're at an all-time high now but maybe not but the the role of being a futurist is fraught with this hindsight bias where you get three things wrong you know the the self-driving car is not yet our our clothes are not made by nanotechnology and uh computing isn't done on biological systems you know we don't have dna computers and i mean i'm getting less of that now i mean before uh if i would make a whole bunch of predictions and one of them was wrong everybody would focus on that yeah now people are more uh generous on their views of to To me, the most amazing, like when you read at the time, everyone's going to have a computer in their pocket, in their clothes, and it's going to be almost like an extension of their life.

1:09:10Dave Blundin:And at the time, it sounded like nuts. And now everyone's like, oh, that's just an iPhone. Like, well, no, it's not just an iPhone. It's a total cultural phenomenon that's changed our, you know, it just changes you much more than you ever know. You go to a conference and there's like several hundred people. every single person has a cell phone in their pocket. And it's actually an extension of your mind. It is, it is. If you don't have your cell phone, you've left three quarters of your mind. And I'll tell you what else. The headmaster of the school that my kids went to took all of the kids, I think in seventh grade or sixth grade, to an island without their phones for three days and said, you have to learn to live without your phone.

1:09:50Dave Blundin:The new headmaster came in and said, that's inhumane. We can't do this anymore. this is not viable. I think there's a book called Lord of the Flies that was written about that. Lord of the Flies, it's funny. But I mean, it's so innate. And we're talking about seventh graders here, but it's so attached to their mentality, their mind, their body, whatever, that they can't live without it for three days. We're going to replace this. I mean, carrying around a physical object like this is difficult. I mean, where do you put it? How do you not lose it? Peter's got two chips in his hand now. What do you think replaces the phone?

1:10:27We'll have something besides this. That's a good question, Salim. It'll be something like virtual reality. So basically you look out and you can see basically a screen, and it will be interfacing with the computer, but it will be on all the time. You'll be able to interact with it, and you won't be carrying something around, and you won't leave it in your apartment um yeah beyond that it'll actually uh go inside our nervous system uh interact with your biological neurons i've got i got this thing now

1:11:08Dave Blundin:we're starting to record everything basically you know peter's got the wearable and now we've got these omnidirectional micas size of a credit card and you just throw it on the table and everything that happens is not only recorded, but it's assigned to whoever said it with these omnidirectional mics, but they're starting to pop up everywhere. This year, Dave, at the Abundance Summit, we're giving everybody two devices. One is a ring format that we talked about on one of the WTF episodes that Pebble is putting out where you can just quickly record a message, it goes LLM, and then we're giving everybody something called applaud.

1:11:43I guess I'm spoiling the secret for our abundance members. Ray, can we talk about one of the concerns you raised earlier that people have, which is people's attachment to their employment? So thoughts on the future of work? You've spoken eloquently about the need for universal basic income and even universal high income that Elon's spoken about. So what's your thoughts on the future of work? And when do we start having ubi and should people be worried about their future income well i mean we relate having an income to having the means to deal with our financial system but if we separate that and you're going to be able to deal with your financial needs without having a conventional job that's actually liberating.

1:12:50And I mean, why do people retire? Now, to me, retirement doesn't make sense because of what I'm doing, I enjoy doing. But if you look at most jobs, people don't like them so much that they want to be able to do them forever. And it's actually liberation to not have to do that and find something within their means that gives them gratification without having to work in a way that's unpleasant. And we're basically overcoming that.

1:13:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You know, 79 % of corporate employees do not find meaning in their work. So this might be an easier transition than most people think. Do you think we're going to develop UBI soon? We're going to have to do something that's equivalent to it. Because if people don't have enough money, the economic system won't work for anybody. um and so i i think i mean i made a prediction at ted that we would develop ubi by the 2030s and i think that's still uh true salim um yeah i'm gonna do a quick separate thing you know imagine you're in a liddite courtroom right okay and uh uh the the prosecutor is saying to you you have made absurdly accurate predictions for 30 years we don't believe you're human um so how would you defend that because you actually feel to me like a time traveler from somewhere that's popped in to deliver inject into humanity all of these insights it blows my mind that 60 times i've heard you speak i've never not learned anything so if i was the luddite i'd go you must be a time traveling something how would you defend against that i mean hopefully i would appear enough like a human to convince people now maybe that won't be true in the future you can't really tell if someone's a human or not a human because they'll still act human uh and then i wouldn't have a defense so

1:15:17Dave Blundin:Alex over to you buddy yeah I could say something mildly snarky about looking at Ray's immunome to see if he's been exposed to future diseases as a way of determining whether he's a time traveler I'm gonna face plant on that one but instead I'd like to shift gears Ray and maybe talk about the past and future of the nature of the mind one of the most many but one of the the many striking performances and I think just incredible accomplishments of yours going all the way back. This is more than 60 years back now to your appearance on I've Got a Secret on television with Steve Allen in February of 1965.

1:16:03Dave Blundin:It's incredible to think that that was 60 plus years ago. You demonstrated an AI based music generator on television. I thought that was such. Yeah, That was actually the first music composition by AI anywhere. We should show that clip. We should absolutely show that clip. It's such an incredible accomplishment, Ray. So where I was going with that. In fact, let's pause one second on this recording, and we'll inject the clip right here and then come back.

1:16:49Very nicely played, and now your performance, of course, leads into your secret, so if you'll whisper it to me, we'll let everybody at home know what's up.

1:16:59Well, that's... That certainly deserves applause, but... Oh, the subway's leaving. That deserves applause, but what has it got to do with the music? I don't understand that. Ah, I see.

1:17:22Colonel, Raymond's secret concerns something that he did, and we'll start the game this time with Bess Myers. Raymond, that's a very unlikely-sounding piece of music. Am I being supercritical? No. Did you compose it? No, I didn't. Oh. Well, did you, however, use... Were there some kind of formulas or letters or something unusual used to compose, to make up the notes of this piece? You could say that, I guess. Well, for example, would the notes spell out a name or would they be a mathematical formula or anything like that? Not spell out a name, nothing like that, no. $20 down,$60 to go. Henry? Was that thing written by a computer?

1:18:10Ah, yeah. Yeah.

1:18:17Is there writing music at this moment? Right now, it's writing a tune. Writing a tune. I have a feeling that, as a non-scientist, I'm not going to understand this too 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 black things over here, Raymond? Well, those are relays. That's what does it through. That's the right to music. I see. The relays write the music. They feed it into this white cheese box here, whatever that is. And there are three little, are these wires or just pieces of string?

1:18:50Pieces of string are wires. I mean, does the message go through there? No, no, that's just recording what the music, what the computer says. I see. And then the typewriter does the final part of the process.

1:19:01Dave Blundin:Right. So 60 years ago, you demonstrated what I understand to be the first, at least on television, AI music generator. I'd like to ask you now, 60 years plus from now, so we're now in 2026, so we're talking 2086. what form do you think most intelligence in our solar system will take? And I'll offer you a few options and I'll deny you one option. The option that I'll deny you is you're not allowed to say it's past the singularity, so I have no idea. You have to, I'm going to condition on you having a real opinion on this topic. I'll offer you a few options and an escape valve for maybe something that I haven't thought of.

1:19:50Say the question again, Alex. Yes.

1:19:52Dave Blundin:So the question is, again, 60 years from now, in the year 2086, what form will most intelligence in our solar system take? A few options. Meek bodies, substantially similar to the way human intelligence is embodied now. That's option one. Cyborgs, which is some sort of human-machine hybrid inclusive of nanorobots in the human bloodstream. Uploads, that's option three, so human minds have been uploaded to the cloud. Foundation models or pure AIs, not dissimilar to GPT-type models that we have right now. some sort of unrecognizable life form, maybe an unrecognizable arrangement of matter or energy that's far more efficient.

1:20:44Dave Blundin:In the past on the podcast, we've talked about, Royal We, I, have talked on the podcast about how black holes, for example, are amazing computers in principle. So maybe something like that or something totally different, maybe uploads to the gravitational field or something else entirely. So I'm laying out a few options plus an escape valve. What do you think? I mean, we're going to have things like Computronium by, certainly by 2045, if not sooner. And I know people that are working on this. You want to define Computronium Ray? It's basically taking what we know is feasible and creating something out of matter that can perform the maximum computation that we can conceive of so one analysis has basically one liter cube would be more intelligent than all people, be like 10 billion people combined in one setting.

1:22:16So that's going to be happening by 2045. So you're talking about 2085. is going to be beyond what we can imagine, but it'll be even more so. So we'll be able to create something that's very exciting. If I listen to, let's say, I've got some things on the web that go with the book, my father playing the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, which is done like several hundred years ago by Bach. and it's actually quite amazing to listen to that. So it'll be something like that, but only more fantastic that will generate fantastic emotions and will be as intelligent as all people combined or more so. We really can't imagine what that would be like, but we can state it mathematically by comparing it to what we can do today.

1:23:27Dave Blundin:If I may ask a follow-up question on this. So it sounds, Ray, unless I'm misunderstanding, as if you do in fact have a prediction for what most intelligence would look like. Namely, if I heard correctly, you think in 60 years, most intelligence in the solar system will be basically software running on computronium, I think you referenced some work by Seth Lloyd with the reference to a leader of volume and Seth Lloyd's work back now 25 years ago on the ultimate computer and the physics of what the physical limit of the maximum amount of computation. Since that's going to be feasible well before 2086, any kind of intelligent being is going to contain that.

1:24:12Yes. And so it will be even beyond that, but certainly that will be the capability that it will have.

1:24:25Dave Blundin:Then I have to ask you, I guess, the obvious question. If you think 60 years from now, most intelligence in our solar system is going to be software running on Computronium, what happens to our solar system? Do we disassemble the planets? Do we starlift our sun? Do we convert our solar system to Computronium to run the software? Alex, you're back to dismantling Saturn. Saturn had it coming. Saturn. Actually, I think Ray is back to it in the stances. I don't know. We'll have to think about that. So, but the point, Alex and Ray, that you're both making is humanity as we know it today as biological forms are in either the vast minority or absolutely, you know, displaced by a digital or, you know, quantum version of intelligence.

1:25:19So will some people choose to maintain an enhanced meat body, or is the overwhelming benefits of going digital so much that it will wash away all previous versions? Well, I didn't say that meat bodies would go away, but certainly it will have the capability of Computronium running the ultimate software, certainly by 2086.

1:25:49Dave Blundin:So, you know, since you're inside Google for so long and it's really, you know, Google is kind of like the AT &T Bell Labs or university times a thousand. But this Computronium shift, you know, in your early books, you made the point that Moore's Law isn't really Moore's Law. It goes back to you go all the way back to to switches, you know, telecom switches, then vacuum tubes, then transistors, then integrated circuits. And so there's been a shift in the compute platform that keeps this curve going. But now we're at this stage where we're just pushing the silicon to its limit and scaling horizontally with half a trillion dollars we're going to put into NVIDIA chips.

1:26:35Dave Blundin:So we're kind of at this flat spot waiting for that next breakthrough in how do we compute. Is there anything imminent, anything that's going to fill that gap? And I know AI will help us innovate very quickly here. Well, it's a different issue, but I think we'll actually generate slower computational bodies. If you look at the brain, it uses about two watts of power, and that's because it's very, very slow. Our neurons compute between one calculation per second and about 200 calculations per second, But both of those are extremely slow compared to the millions or billions of, or actually trillions of computations per second that are capable of.

1:27:28What I wrote about actually a couple of decades ago was it would make sense to slow it down and introduce parallel processing. Because the brain, every single neuron is computing at the same time. 20 years ago we had basically a computer would do one thing at a time. So we actually have done that. We now have millions or actually billions of computations that occur at the same time. But we actually haven't slowed down the speed of the circuits. If we slow them down a little bit, we'd use much less power. And I think that would actually solve the power problem.

1:28:14Dave Blundin:Well, so it solved the chip fab bottleneck problem. I think there's imminent innovation in exactly that vein you're talking about. So that buys you another few years, but it doesn't switch you to a new computronium kind of paradigm. I don't know. I know you were kind of like quantum isn't really going to change the curve here. And I don't know if you still feel that way on quantum computing, but is there anything else on the horizon that you know of from either inside Google or elsewhere? Well, I think going towards circuits that use a completely different paradigm that are actually done at the molecular level and can be done in three dimensions.

1:28:55Right now, we're using third dimension in a very limited way. And so we can actually create three-dimensional circuits at the atomic level that will actually match, where one liter of computing will match 10 billion human beings. Salim, do you want to jump in?

1:29:19Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Ray, when you look at what's coming over the next, say, year, is there anything that you're incredibly excited about? Because one of the things I've heard you talk about is the intersection between these, right? You intersect synthetic biology or neuroscience with AI and computing, and all sorts of new fields get instigated at that. What is most exciting to you, and what are you anticipating most excitedly in the next year or two? Well, robotics has actually not really been something that has affected us very much. i think that's going to begin to take place in 2026 2027 but you look at robots i mean they can do certain things like uh like do a very fast dance but they really have not been practical like uh if you actually uh eat a meal and leave your dishes there's no robot that can actually pick it up and actually do clean that up the way a human being can do that.

1:30:28That's going to happen over the next couple of years. So that's one area that has been behind. And I think there's going to be a lot of debate on that. Large language models are pretty fantastic. but we've got to bring that to the real world of actually being able to handle physical things using robots. Salim, you had some questions, I think, on society that were important.

1:31:01Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah, you know, if you were advising a 25-year-old today, how would you set about giving them a sense of how to manage their life in this radical uncertainty? How would you kind of tell them what mindsets should they have, etc.? What advice would you give to a 25-year-old today? My son, Ethan, is involved with venture capital, and most of, well, all of his investments are in AI, and actually bringing the practice of AI to all kinds of things that haven't been done yet. And there's a tremendous number of opportunities of applying AI to all kinds of things that we do in creating businesses that would be effective.

1:31:49So I think the opportunities to create a new business and do things that have not been done before is actually higher than it's ever been before. And you can do it very quickly.

1:32:04Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You talk a lot about entrepreneurship being really the biggest modality you could go after. I think there's a great comment by Kevin Kelly where he said the next 10 ,000 business plans will be take a domain and add AI to it. Yeah.

1:32:18Dave Blundin:Ray, you ever feel like you were just born in the wrong era? If you think about what you did early on with the keyboard, the company around it, then the Omnifont character recognition, the same person today would probably be looking at a billion-dollar valuation within a year, year and a half of founding. Well, I enjoyed bringing some of the concepts that we use today in decades past. Let's do a quick speed round to close out this session with Ray. Alex, you want to kick it off? All right, Ray, here's a really fast question. So the cliche is that every American male thinks about ancient Rome at least once per day.

1:33:01Dave Blundin:So here's my cliche question for you. Really? Really? We're going to go there. The question, Ray, is why didn't ancient Rome have an industrial revolution, and what does the answer to that question teach us about technical revolutions that we could be having today but otherwise aren't? Well, they did have a technical revolution, given the capabilities of that time. We can only create things that are feasible.

1:33:43And in keeping with the rate of progress, which was feasible at that time, So I think they did okay. Dave, over to you, pal.

1:33:55Dave Blundin:I feel like I'm seeing the passing of the torch of the futurist here from Ray to Peter to Alex. But I'm really curious if you are happy with your life as a great futurist, because you were already a great entrepreneur before that. And there were many, many years in the middle there where everyone I talked to around MIT or elsewhere was like, yeah, I think Ray's wrong. I think Ray's wrong. I think Ray's wrong. Now, obviously, you're on top of the world again, but there's a lot of years of just the pain and suffering that goes along with anyone who tries to predict the future. So any regrets? Any advice for future futurists?

1:34:32I mean, I got used to it. And there was certain people that were able to think in the future, like, for example, Singularity University, which Peter and I started, could think about how to go beyond what conventional people were thinking. But it didn't really bother me that people were not able to think in an exponential manner at the time. Really?

1:35:09Dave Blundin:Thick skin. Okay. Salim.

1:35:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The fact that it didn't bother you is why I think you're a time-traveling avatar from the future. Here's my question. Right now, you've said that intelligence and energy are the two things that will become abundant in the future. It seems right now that energy is the limiting factor. Are you excited about what's coming with nuclear and fusion, etc.? Are there other forms of energy generation that you're looking at? And when do you think we'll have a major breakthrough around some of that? I mean, I'm not that enthusiastic about nuclear. I still think it's dangerous. There are two things we can do about energy.

1:35:51We can use reversible energy, which most of the computation would be using reversible energy, which in theory uses no energy at all because it reverses itself and gives back the energy that it's taken. We haven't actually experimented with that, but that seems feasible. And I also mentioned the other thing where we could reduce the speed, dramatically reduce to the amount of energy it requires, and therefore overcome the excessive use of energy. Right now we're running things at the very maximum speed, and it uses a great deal of energy. We could reduce that a little and really overcome the energy at that point.

1:36:53But ultimately we will go to reversible energy using atomic levels of computation, which don't require any energy, at least in theory. Ray, I want to take a second and say thank you for the extraordinary partnership we've had over these last number of decades. I remember our first lunch together where we kicked around the idea of Singularity University, and I think you waited a nanosecond before saying yes. and just the great joy and a shout out to all the Singularity alumni out there who are listening, who've been part of this journey. The Singularity is now, is sort of been our mantra and our war cry here.

1:37:38On a 10 scale, how optimistic are you about the future of humanity? I'd say I'm a 10, so. All right. Well, that's a good place to wrap it up. Ray, on behalf of the Moonshot Mates, thank you for all of your wisdom thank you for charting the path for us yeah well this was a great discussion I appreciate it very much can't wait for that biography too everybody can eye out for that and I look forward to seeing you in May for our follow on book launch event Dave safe travels to the world economic forum Salim I'll see you I'll come and pick you up and see you in an hour head to the X-Files board meeting Alex enjoy Paris and Switzerland Dylan.

1:38:24Thank you. Amazing. All right, guys. See you all.

1:38:53spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash meta trends. That's diamandis.com slash meta trends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

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