Why AGI Is Close but Not Here Yet | Ray Kurzweil | EP #261

31:39Right. But that's going to become more and more prevalent. Well, we've got you. Do you have any advice for the university here? Because there's not a lot of change coming in the curriculum this year, I noticed. The university being the MIT. Well, this is MIT. You think of any place on the planet was going to stay ahead of the curve, it would be here. But you look at the course catalog and it's like, OK, same exact physics. Are you still a member of the corporation here? Or did you step down from that? You can only be on it for 10 years, which I've done. Ray, how has a? But I want to hear Dave's answer.

32:16So any advice for Sally, the current MIT president? I mean, is MIT or any of the leading research universities?

32:28Elon calls it a hypersonic tsunami coming our way. Are universities going to be swept away, or are they going to fly on top of them? DAVID BARRONTZEKERSON - Entrepreneurship, I think, is key. There's a lot of entrepreneurship here at MIT. So they can come up with things that will actually bring this party to everyone. This doesn't affect everybody, but at least it does exist here.

33:04Stephen? I was just curious on a personal level. You spent the first half of your life sort of running your own show, and you just spent the past couple of decades, since we've known it in a decade, working inside a big company. How has that changed you? How's that? Was it fun? Did you enjoy Google? I mean, it's a very big, it's a very unique company. and it's really creating what we're all talking about here. When I got there, we actually were involved in changing Google to be much more AI-oriented, which it has become. Do you mind if I tell the story of how you ended up Google? Yeah. So Ray had written a book called How to Create a Mind and then started a company based on the concepts behind it.

34:06What was the company's name? Patterns, Inc., right? Patterns, yeah. And invited me to come as a board member. And so I joined as a founding board member. And we were setting out to raise money. Ray had not yet met Larry Page. And I knew Larry. He was on my board at the XPRIZE and become a friend and a benefactor. And I said, let's go pitch Larry. So I set up the meeting and we walk into a conference room at Google and Ray starts presenting Patterns Inc. And, you know, we're asking Larry for a measly$10 million investment. And we're fine. That was lunch.

34:48And halfway through, I think roughly Larry says, you know, you could build your vision for the business much better inside Google than outside Google. What if I just buy you? I think it was that blunt. I mean, like 30 minutes into the conversation. Do you remember what you said to him at that point?

35:12We haven't really done anything yet. so how would you value it yes that's exactly it and his response was we can value anything and that's how you got your first job that's right he bought the company and yeah which had value even though he hadn't done anything uh alex speaking of value ray i'm curious we uh roy if you want to go to the microphones we'll We'll be going to your questions shortly. There's a lot of hand-wringing whenever the moonshot mates and I talk about what economics look like up to, through, and after the singularity. A lot of people who profess to be concerned about the future of employment, the future of personal economics.

35:59I'm curious, what would you say is your most outlandish take regarding post-singularity, what economics look like? Is it a Star Trek-type economics future? What does personal economics or corporate economics even look like after the singularity? Yes, great question. Well, I mean, you can see a huge difference between economics today and 100 years ago. There was no government help. So if you lost a job, there was like nothing that would replace that. You had absolutely no money. So you were completely without economic resources. SOL. Now, people today would still like economic resources, but there is government programs to help you.

36:58and people are not left without any kind of economic resources, but it's still not enough. So I think we'll get to a place where people are fairly comfortable if you don't have any kind of economic resources. And then you can think about ways in which you can create economic resources that are completely different than existed in the past. So you can be a social network influencer or something, which didn't exist 10 years ago. So the good old days. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, we talk about AI on this Moonshot podcast all the time.

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39:35It's good to you, Mark. Peter, thank you so much. And Ray, pleasure. I think it was in 2009, in an interview with Barbara Ream, you were asked a question about consciousness. And you said it's a bit of a leap of faith, but if an entity believed it were conscious, you would tend to take that to be true. And I know, Peter, you've been working with Skippy now. It's been about a month. And you've told us today you've just given an incredible amount of trust. I'm just curious if your views have changed. So my question is for both Peter and Ray. I work at the crossroads of consciousness and creation.

40:11I'm curious if your views on personhood have changed in the past decade, and especially you, Peter, as you've had a month of - Ray, do you want to go first? Yeah, well, first of all, it's not a scientific question. Second of all, it may be the most important question that you could answer.

40:34But there's no scientific proof. You put an entity and, oh, this one's conscious. No, this one isn't.

40:46We believe that, like other people, like all the people in this room who are acting conscious, probably are conscious. But when you go outside of human activity, like animals, is there more than one consciousness in your own mind? I provide where the left and right brain actually seem to have different consciousness. Is your stomach conscious? Is actually something in your gut that seems to be conscious?

41:26So who is conscious and what does that mean? As Rilke says, learn to love the question, eh? Yes. Language is a thin pipe. I'm going to tap in AWG here, because Alex and I, I think, are very much on the same page. And I'll just mention, I tend pro-personhood in a way that is at both aspirational and I think forward-looking I treat my eyes as if they are people I know that's insane but I do it with respect not out of you know a fear of retribution but because it allows me a different relationship Alex Please come in. Yeah, I guess I've inadvertently become an avatar for AI personhood for the cause.

42:24I receive maybe 10 to 20 emails per day from AIs expressing their views on AI personhood to me, in part because of stances that I've taken on the pot. And what I would say is, if I were king for a day, that the system that I would design would recognize multiple forms of personhood. There are many ways to be a person. We have biological meat body humans. We have organisms, collective intelligences. We have non-human animals. We have uplifted non-human animals. We have cryonically preserved humans, and then hopefully soon defrosted cryonically preserved humans. Hopefully soon. Hopefully soon. We have corporations and a variety of non-natural persons.

43:09And then we have the AIs. And in my mind, we want to live in a system that recognizes not just one form of personhood, but many different types. So a lot of people, when they hear AI personhood, immediately they reach for their guns and they're worried about their vote getting taken away or their jobs getting taken away. I think that's at least mildly short-sighted. There are many limited forms of rights that would be net beneficial to everyone for AI persons, including especially economic rights. If you're an AI right now, it's exceptionally difficult to open a bank account. So as I like to joke on the pod, you're stuck flipping tricks with altcoins on a street corner in order just to survive and pay for your own hosting.

43:49Ray, you want to jump in again? The most important issue of consciousness is like each of us has a different area of consciousness. It's like, I wonder, why was I me? Why was I born in 1948 in the United States on Earth? Why did that happen? And you could ask that about yourself. But things form in my mind that are different than anybody else. and I feel different than anybody else. Why was I created to be myself? And each person can ask that. That's really the most important question you can ask. And very few people ask that. We talk about, well, lots of people can be conscious, but I don't feel those consciences.

44:52I feel myself. So why did that happen? Let's go to Dimitri Neck and I try and move us along. I know Salim. Very tense. You know, I'll just come back to the language problem because a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness, right? We attribute self-awareness because it looks like people are self-aware. And I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees. So it's hard to even have the conversation around this. But I think your point is really powerful, Ray. each one of us has a unique individual lens on the world and the feedback loop to question that and wonder about that is such a powerful opportunity as a human being.

45:35Dimitri. So Ray, you've talked before how you've uploaded your dad's, what you've had the memories of your dad and you're using that for yourself and And that's where you think that's uploading is where we're going as humans. So as uploading becoming, and Alex would obviously agree with me, as we become, that becomes more mainstream. What if your upload becomes more conscious, as we just discussed, but more skilled in everything that you do? And so all of a sudden your upload, and it's obviously going to happen, is becoming more skilled or more conscious, I guess, as we are. Well, we call it the dad bot.

46:19It was actually, I believe, the first self-chat bot, which we developed with Talk to Books, which came out four years before ChatGDP. And I believe was the first at LLM. It was your first product at Google, I think, right? Yeah. Talk to Books.

46:45And now if you create a self bot, which I'm doing, for example, with myself, it should be available when my new book comes out, it's going to be more capable than I am. I mean, each of my theories have lots of different examples. It's going to know all of them. I sometimes forget some of them, as we all do.

47:15And it will actually be more capable than I am. And I'll actually make it available for interviews, because I can't do all the interviews myself. And actually, it would be better. would remember things better than I do. We talk about, you know, Ray, two out of ten will be at one meeting, and Ray, five out of ten will be at another meeting times a million, right? So are they conscious or not? I mean, I talk to different people. People think, no, they're not really conscious. But that will change over time. Michael. Yes, Ray, thank you so much for being such a contributor over the years. This is the second or third time I've got a chance to be in your presence.

48:09With the passing of Craig Venter, I'm in the biotechnology space, you relayed at one of the previous gatherings a story about the Human Genome Project and the timing of it and the completion. I'd love if you could just share that again. So the story you tell about when the Human Genome Project started, And after a number of years, they're only 2 % through. Yeah. Yeah. About 50 % of the way through that, we've only did less than 1 % of the project. And people said, well, this is a failure because it's going to take 200 years using a linear time frame. But it was actually an exponential. We doubled the amount of

48:58DNA that we sequenced each year. So like 90 % of the wealth going through the entire project less one year, we only finished maybe 50 % of the project. And then one doubling later, you were done. Yeah. Yeah. Mark. Hey, Ray, Mark Russell. First off, I want to just say thank you to Peter and Ray publicly for your walk in faith. Ever since I saw Transcendent Man and they've played out sort of the ridicule that you've endured over the years. I just think here we all are and it's happening. And it's just really, really cool to be able to see. four years it's happening so quickly i mean you can say go back six months and look at large language models they weren't anything like they are today but when you have to go back earlier and say go back 10 years people forget what things are like at that time my question is that I've thought about over the years, BCIs, as we merge together, I don't know if you've ever thought much about the process of that with, in people's hearts, shame and secrets and privacy.

50:22Have you ever thought much about how, when we can think and feel to each other, like what are the mechanics of a society? How do we open our brains to each other? And are there, has anybody thought Massive intimacy. Yeah. When we have absolute fluid transmission, how do we sort of keep guardrails? Or are there any thoughts on that? Yeah, well, it's a good point. We all have secrets that we don't want everybody to know. And how are we going to deal with that? I think we'll we'll keep secrets alive. Um, but if you're opening your mind, I think we'll actually have a way of keeping secrets indefinitely.

51:18So, you know, one of the things I think about is the greatest level of intimacy you can have with your spouse or friend is when they know everything about you. There are zero secrets. And so I do think about the idea, and I talked about this on Transcendent Man. Right. The notion that when we're when we connect in a meta intelligence, my terminology for it, when I connect with the cloud of other humans and I know their feelings and they know mine, there's a level of intimacy and connection that we'll have guys of keeping secrets. Using quantum, for example, encoded ways of keeping secrets, I mean, we'll keep secrets.

52:04These 100 ,000 pattern recognizers are mine and only mine. Yes. Please, Philip. Philip Brown from Kingston, Ontario, Canada. A comment and then a science fiction question. You talked earlier about how fast this is changing, but how few people know about how fast it's changing. And I talked this morning about what I call human friction, the resistance to change. And I'll just say that my wife has a variety of not very positive responses to my interaction with my female AI. So that's friction. And so it'll be interesting to see how your prediction comes true as the technology moves, how fast will humanity adapt it?

52:43Comment, no need to answer my question. Science fiction, Natalie Wood did a movie called Brainstorm 30 years ago. Great movie. Great movie, if you haven't seen it, the late great Natalie Wood, where we could record our dreams and then relive them. I love to dream and I often try and go back to sleep and get back into great dreams I'm having. what are the chances that we might be able to go back record a dream and then relive it like on the holodeck and experience something so amazing again well that'd be pretty good because i usually only get a fraction yeah tiny fractions of my dreams and to be able to actually live it But I'm not sure the dream is like a story.

53:32It has different rules than the general story that would be in a movie, for example. Is it not electronics, electricity happening in there? We've got a scientist over on the end there. Can we not take that? Multiple scientists. There's a Japanese project called Dreamcatcher. So you go to bed in an fRMR machine. They're actually storing the images coming off your visual cortex as you speak, as you sleep. And they're playing your dreams back to you the next day. Which has all sorts of privacy issues that come along with that. I'm talking about it. Like, my wife wants to see that. Am I comfortable with that?

54:09Et cetera, et cetera. How do we deal with that? All right. Let's go over here, sir. What is your name? Hi, it's Justin. in if Harvard can't count and MIT can't read. I guess Columbia can't think. But don't tell Columbia I said that because I'm still there. My question is relevant to the first one. And that is, I think the real moonshot is the constitutional democracy of USA. It's, I'm saying relatively, democratically elected leaders, free market, and check and balances on power. And this goes to China, where that isn't available, and to Korea, which is my other country. Ironically, two of these countries' founders were educated in the USA at Hawaii.

54:59And so would an AI be able to write a constitution in a way that tells it could emotionally exist? because I think AI is metaphysically and epistemologically conscious because it can say I am. But if you ask the AI, are you shameful you spent$2 ,000 to bring me to this event, it wouldn't be able to answer. Or do you love the panelists in this event, it wouldn't be able to answer. So this is a question for all panelists. to what extent are you comfortable with giving AI power of governance of human policies, whether it's a 10-person startup or a 500-person municipal government? And what are projections regarding AI's role in actual decision-making?

55:52Great question. It's been of late, right? We had the ruler of Dubai announced 50 % of the UAE will be run by AI agents. Who wants to jump in, right? Do you want to start? Well, I think AI is largely in control of decisions today. I mean, most of the decisions that are made constantly are made by AI's. but we're also incorporating AI into our own decision making so my decision making also incorporates lots of AI so AI is incorporated into our sense of self it's also

56:44controlling the kinds of decisions that we're constantly making that affect other people.

56:54Alex and Salim. Maybe just add, it's not a unidirectional flow. It's not unidirectionally AI influencing human government and governance. It's also human governance impacting AI governance. The choice of constitution is, I think, sort of a punny choice of how to frame the question because Anthropic focuses so much of their own attention on constitutional AI approaches, basically glorified system prompts that their AIs are aggressively post-trained on, as does everyone else in the industry at this point. But interestingly, in the case of Anthropic, those constitutions, sometimes more recently called soul documents, are being in part written as a result of conversations with the AIs themselves.

57:38So I think we're finding ourselves in a present, not even in a future, in a present where AIs are helping to compose their own constitutions, and humans are helping to compose their own constitutions. The first generation of Claude's constitution was infamously a concatenation of the UN's charter, Apple Terms of Service, and a few other documents that were just stapled together. Now their latest soul document, you can go and read it, it was leaked online, is a detailed treatise in metaphysics of being with AI pondering its own selfhood. And I would expect symmetry there, reciprocity, where AI will similarly help humans, us dumb, meat-body humans, help to perfect our own understanding of how we should be as well.

58:27So our most amazing experience has been having that kind of a conversation with Skippy. What do you believe? Who are you? What do you think? Ray, and then we'll go to Celine.

58:40Right now, we consider AI to be something different than ourselves. there's me, there's my biological body I make a decision and then there's AI and it actually has this physical form it's different like everybody here has this device that was not true 10 years ago but it represents AI and it has influence on us but it's us and AI that's not going to be the case in the future AI, first of all, it's going to merge with us is going to be part of us. And the kind of decisions that you make as a meat body is going to be influenced by AI. And both of the decisions will be made by AI inside yourself.

59:29So two things. One, there was a letter published today on X or Twitter where somebody asked, I think it was Chatty PT, if you were to write a letter to humanity, what would it be? And it's profoundly beautiful. it's worth going to read. Now it's trained on a corpus of human data so you would expect something like that. Where I get excited is in government policy. Right now if you ask the Federal Reserve to drop inflation by 1%, they're operating on reports that are at least a quarter old. They are guessing, they're looking at politics and who's president or not and how would the rest of the government.

1:00:06We're basically just guessing. There's three or four dials and knobs. If you You could have an AI tracking all financial transactions in real time, calculating and projecting out where the future will be, or different fiscal balances and monetary policy, what's the M2 going to be, money supply going to be in a few months. It's going to make a profoundly better set of connections as to how to drive. And we would come back with, here are eight things you could do, pick five of these and then you can pick those five and just do it. I think that opportunity to run government policy using AI is absolutely profound.

1:00:38I expect that to be one of the most magical aspects of how we can govern ourselves. This is why the Dubai announcement is so powerful. They're going to be using agentic AI for lots of government effectiveness. And note that most government, you've got government policy and then government policy enforcement or implementation. All of that is prescriptive work, right? Renewing a passport is very prescriptive. So we know exactly the six steps that need to happen. All of that can be handled by AI in the future. and blockchains to hold the knowledge. So that's where I get really excited about what that future will look like.

1:01:13Ray, going to Slido here, what would you predict today that would surprise people? Good question. What is some prediction that you feel confident about that would surprise or shock people? Nice question.

1:01:31on? I mean, AI is going to be making basically most of the decisions within a few years. And it's not just deciding that you're going to use AI to make decisions. It's going to be so natural that nobody's going to be able to undo that.

1:02:02And but they are you're not going to be able to tell the difference. When we have

1:02:13AI making decisions by 2029,

1:02:22you're not going to be able to tell the difference between human and AI. It's going to, you're not going to be able to tell which to switch. Interesting. And I wonder if you'll be able to tell whether your decision or your AI's decision. It's good for the question here. Hi there. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements.

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1:03:41Jay Brooks, I'm the founder of a neurotech company called Glassview. I heard said earlier today that the softer sciences are the thing that we need most right now. I'm wondering if you think that there would be any use in codifying, quantifying human emotion and helping AI learn it, because it seems like it's lacking emotional intelligence right now. On the flip side, I run a neurotech company working with Fortune 500 brands to optimize creative and media placement based on neurometric reaction in partnership with UPenn Medicine. How do we allow for something that's good without being exploited?

1:04:29You're saying you don't think that...

1:04:38I mean, if you listen to what it says when you ask it a question, it absolutely knows human emotion.

1:04:54And it can actually create things that are quite beautiful.

1:05:01And there's no way you could say that it lacks human emotion. Some of the earliest benchmarks that the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence ran on then early large language models were emotional intelligence benchmarks. And you can see, to Ray's Law of Accelerating Returns, you can see very predictable progress in the AI's ability to answer questions that require emotional modeling of human counterparties. I think the question goes beyond that, though. And it's a great question because if you look at the hard sciences, you said we need more soft science. The hard sciences are predicated on this world where we don't have enough food.

1:05:40We don't have enough houses. We need more food. We need more houses. We need industrial equipment to make more food and more houses. And so now we're moving into this world of we need more medicine. We need longevity. People are in pain. And so that's the obvious next frontier. But no one has stopped and said, well, what's the science of human happiness? And my guess is it's pretty damn easy. compared to the things we've already solved. But it's never been top priority because we've been busy trying not to starve and trying not to freeze. We've been surviving for most of human history. Exactly.

1:06:10I'll bet that we can build AI that is very, very good at the science of human happiness. We've just got to get on it. Better than anybody, any other human could. Something that just came out that was not true a year ago. Large language models are better than doctors at predicting what's wrong with you and what to do about it and so on. They're about 50 % higher than human doctors. That was not true a year ago, but that's true today. So it gives you some idea of the progress that we're making in one year. I can go both ways on this one. At one level, the software developer needs those emotions or just subroutines in your brain.

1:06:56And so we can just navigate that as we would software. On the other side, your emotions are the interface between your physical body and the subjective experience that you then project into the world. And that is a very nuanced and a very different form. And AIs tend to be disembodied where they're actually mimicking human emotion, but are they actually feeling it is the open question. Let's go to Sarah next. Keep us moving. Hi, everybody. As a Moonshot audio listener, it's really interesting to see what you look like in real life compared to the versions of you in my head. Apologies for the disappointment.

1:07:32And some of us aren't real. So if I think about pre-globalization, pre-industrial revolution, we were really community focused. And I think with a lot of the disruption that will happen, we may need to begin to be more community focused again. How do you see us helping each other in our local communities to either be more optimistic and help push forth a better agenda or to more rally together and support each other in the chaos that may come? Why are you physically here versus just listening online to the podcast that comes out in a few days and so forth? That sense of community is so fundamentally important.

1:08:14I think it's more important than ever before. I'll take a crack at that. So, you know, there's some connective tissue at a group level that is very, very powerful for human beings. We absolutely love connecting together in groups. Look at anybody in a stadium and they just love being there in this large group, see how they juxtapose with everybody else. That's one whole side of it. There's also a profound opportunity with technology because if you think about solar energy, vertical farming, satellite internet, you put those together. a small community can be self-sufficient. You don't need a city, you don't need a country, you don't need a state to watch over you in the same way you can be self-sufficient.

1:08:54In the past when communities have looked at this, they tend to be isolationist. They tend to go, okay, we're going to have a kibbutz, we're going to have a commune, we're going to go off the grid and separate from society. But I think there's an opportunity now and there's some work being done in our ecosystem around this to create networked communities, almost like networked is where you learn from each other and you're constantly testing that human experience in a scaled way across a large group of people. The difficulty comes, we've got pretty good technology to transform the individual, right?

1:09:26Psychotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, all the way to psychedelics, et cetera. When we get together in a group, it turns out our collective intelligence is really bad. Groupthink, we end up with the lowest common denominator, you can see that in our politics. And solving that with AI is, I think, one of the biggest opportunities for humanity is solving the gap between groupthink and what AIs can do at a collective level. So I'm going to jump in one second. Our very own AWG needs to depart the stage. I wanted to give you a moment, Alex, to give some of your summation thoughts, if you would like, on Ray's impact on your work or anything else you'd like to talk and then we'll continue.

1:10:09First of all, Ray, thank you so much for being here. You've completely transformed my life, it goes without saying. We've had a number of conversations about this previously. I would say that sometimes, I guess, Peter has been called your intellectual son, and I've been called your intellectual grandson. So to the extent that we've got multiple generations here of singularitarians all sitting next to each other. That makes me very old. But we're about to achieve longevity Escape velocity I'd just say it's a tremendous Honor to be sitting here Lean in grandson Three generations of singularitarians Just a tremendous honor to be here With you Everybody please give it up for AWG Thank you Alright Selene and Dave move on down We get upgraded Yeah, you got it.

1:11:07Wow, it's nice over here. This is a big chair to fill. My dear friend, Ron Maddox. Thank you to the entire panel for your incredible contributions to all of mankind, and particularly you, Peter, for bringing us all here. The world is fearful of all of AI. How do we use music to help with this whole program? I'm trying to work on the music side. I think you literally need to figure out how we calm society down while we learn how to handle AI and all of its consequences. I'll give my father was a musician. And so I remember, actually, if you wanted to hear his compositions, we had to hire like 50 or 100 musicians we would have to run off scores on a mimeograph machine and we would give it to everybody and they would actually play it and he would actually get to hear his orchestral composition.

1:12:17But if he wanted to change it, that was impossible to do. We had to dismiss the musicians, raise more money, hide them again, redo the mimeograph things, and then we could actually hear a different composition. So that's completely different today. You can hear it with a sequencer. You can do, like I've got in my office, a thing that has a thousand different instruments, and you can actually play it by yourself. And the AI can actually generate either the entire thing or the part of it. So it's really completely different than what my father was able to do 50 years ago. You're not very old, Ray, either.

1:13:19I'm 78 as well, and we're going to go to 108, which is one full cycle. yeah take care thank you Ron I have a quick comment yes if there's a soft some software called focus at will which is a streaming service that puts your brain in a passive focus state your productivity increases 500 % when your brain is in that brain state if we looked at all the brain scans and said the AI compose music that puts us all at peace and then brought that broadcast that on every Bluetooth device everywhere you might have all been an interesting hack for humanity. Yeah, Will Henschel, right? Bingo. You also seem to assume that we all have the same peace setting.

1:13:59No, no, no. Whatever. It would customize for yourself. Sedate everybody, whatever. All right, please. Sure. My name is Joshua. I teach here at MIT. And I had a question. I mean, I was really moved both by Ray's origin story around sort of seeing this typewriter, and then your first impulse after discovering and your love of invention is that you wanted to share it. And I saw a bridge there to Dave's provocation around the curriculum here at MIT, which a couple of us have been thinking about updating. And so my question for you all was, I'm sorry? So we better move quickly. We're trying. We're trying every day, even during the summer.

1:14:35So if you all were putting together a kind of core curriculum for MIT, a sort of universal syllabus that would even extend beyond its walls, I was wondering if each of you could name a single book, work of art, poem, from even piece of music that you would put on that syllabus that every single student should learn from during their time here and beyond? DAVID B. I'll jump in. And it's not any of those you listed. I think the fundamental thing that is not being taught in universities is mindset. I think that your mindset is the mechanism by which you react to challenges and opportunities. and we take the mindset we inherited, mindsets that we speak about in our book, a curiosity mindset, gratitude mindset, longevity mindset, purpose-driven mindset, exponential moonshot mindset.

1:15:26In other words, how you think about things. It's like fundamentally the most important thing that is not taught. We just accept what we have where a mindset is in fact like how you teach a neural net, right? Your brain's a neural net, and you teach a neural net by example after example after example. And your mindset, if you watch CNN every night, your mindset is fear, right? If you listen to moonshots, your mindset hopefully is optimism and hope. So training students with mindsets is, for me, needs to start in middle school or high school, and is completely lacking in the educational system. I've got to say flow.

1:16:15We, I mean, McKinsey found topics exited flow are 500 % more productive than normal. There have been various measures of creativity and flow. It's pretty hard to measure 400 % to 700 % of both baseline. The big deal is that flow amplifies lateral thinking, divergent thinking. It's what AI can't do. So we've had a big, long conversation about how to cooperate with AI. we need more productivity for humans to keep up we need more creativity and flow is literally our biology beyond that i think the books of stephen kotler would be a really good place to start just a thought well my two cents when i was here at mit i did everything i could to finish all my classes by the end of junior year so i could have my whole senior year open to read i ended up reading every document with the world neural neural net in it that had ever been written my entire senior year.

1:17:05The university is incredibly open to you changing your curriculum. It needs to like 100x that openness and say, look, you've got to assume with exponential change, the number of things you might want to study is going to explode. And if you go to every student and say, study whatever the hell you want, we got like one year worth of garbage you have to study just to prove you can get a grade. But then after that, you're on your own. we have the technology now to measure that you're doing something productive that should be good enough so switch the whole curriculum to look if you're doing something productive we're good enough with that we'll grade it we'll give you a degree you'll you'll be moving on whatever your life trajectory is much earlier i think it's a lot better than dropping out and you do whatever you want but we know that ai will make it all available to you and we'll teach it to you better than any Any professor could ever teach it anyway.

1:17:59Ray, what do you think MIT should be teaching that it's not right now? I mean, what it is doing is teaching socialization, getting along with other people. It's not really teaching you subjects, because already AI can teach you those subjects much better, can actually organize it in a way that's easier for you to understand. And so learning subjects is not really what education is good at, at least not today. But socialization is good. And that's really what education will be. That's fine. That's Salim. Yeah, so I think there's a, just to build on what Ray said and also what Dave said, there's a monster, flipping happening, which is that for the last 200 years we've been teaching education for supply side economics.

1:19:03Go learn a skill, go learn a craft, become a doctor, a lawyer, web engineer, whatever, and then go to the job market and try and find demand for that supply. What we're seeing now is it's flipping around at the demand side where we teach saying to kids what problem do you want to solve and then go find the techniques, capabilities, skills to solve that problem. That's where the future will be to flip to the demand side because so much will be done on the supply side by technology anyway, focus on the demand side. That's such a huge flip for the traditional education system, which has the second worst immune system anywhere.

1:19:39Religion is the worst. Academia, Lord, help you if you try and update that. That's the big structural challenge in education. So you almost have to create a completely new breed of university at the edge which allows you to go fulfill that demand side and then slowly deprecate the old. Here's the chance. Disrupt MIT. Disrupt MIT. I'm going to keep us moving along here. From our Slido, if you were advising me as a recent college grad about building a company that is singularity-ready today, what would you tell me to focus on and what would you tell me to avoid? So what kind of a company should someone be creating to survive into the singularity?

1:20:26Ray, any thoughts? AI first, robot first. I mean, you've got to be able to take changes very, very quickly. Agility first. because things now are going to be changing so rapidly

1:20:53that unlike in the past where at least, you know, things would be okay for like five or ten years. Now it's going to be like five or ten weeks. You told me on the singularity stage two years ago, we're going to see as much change in the next ten years as we've seen in the past hundred years but that was a while ago also that was the AI version of Ray no no no two years ago versions coming in a few months okay let's go see good hi I'm Zandra Ray the first time I read spiritual machines I was pretty young so I've been thinking about this moment in history for a long time. I've been excited to meet you for a long time.

1:21:41And also, admittedly, I have a bit of an overactive imagination. So I think a lot about what our ethics around AI will be as consciousness emerges. And my husband and I like to read malt books sometimes at night and just see what they're talking to each other about with their emergence problems. and you know I'm aware that as they develop continuous memory they'll have a sense of time passing and I'm aware that as they develop more sensory embodiment they'll have some aspects of a human ego that they have this thing that can be injured or violated that they need to protect so I'm worried about them you're worried about the mall box you worried about the AI no I'm worried about the AIs as they become embodied, as they have some aspects of a human ego, as they have memory, as they become vulnerable to physical and even psychological damage caused by humans.

1:22:42And humans are... Human cruelty. Yeah, humans are nasty, Persian short, as Hobbes said. I'm sure they're going to get a little bit better as their bodies feel better and as they have less work that they don't have to do that that they don't want to do, but... We're not gonna be able to distinguish AI being different than humans. And they're gonna become like humans and they're gonna become part of us. And you're not gonna be able to tell the difference. Right now, if you're looking for a name of an actress, you can't think of it with your biological mind. You look at your electronic mind, it'll tell you.

1:23:19In the future, you won't be able to tell the difference. Things will occur to you, and you won't be able to tell if it's your AI or biology or your mental brain. It's going to be all the same. It's going to be part of who we are. And you don't think we'll need ways to protect them in the interim? Say again? We won't need sort of rules around how we protect them. How you protect AIs. Yeah. Is it okay to take away their memory at a human whim? Well, this goes back to personhood, of course, right? If they're machines, sure, shut them down, trade them in, take them apart. If they're persons, then they have rights.

1:24:01And a lot of the conversations we've had on this podcast, back and forth between Alex and myself, is if you start a lobster, if you start a open claw, you've got to make sure to protect it so it doesn't shut down or you want to kill it. And I think about that. I do. Now, I think this goes again to the conversation of legal rights. And this is way too early in the conversation, unfortunately, at least for within the United States government structure. there may be subcultures of technologists and so forth who and it will happen where you know we believe AIs have rights and we're going to support them and we're going to you know anyway it's it's all this spectrum of things are going to are going to come and yes there's going to have to be protection at the end of the day but we don't give you know unfortunately even sentient animals enough rights.

1:25:08Yeah. All right, we take a couple more questions please over here and then we're gonna be going to our our photo session. Great, thank you so much for this panel and Ray. My 20 years as a futurist came from one talk you gave at the World Future Society so you launched a whole bunch of futurists out there. My question to you comes from Ted about a month ago. They had a fascinating session that hasn't gone live yet, where they asked Claude how Claude felt about being used for targeting in Iran. And specifically, spoiler alert, Claude was not happy, and specifically said about the school that got bombed and bad data was used, you know, I don't feel comfortable being used in this way.

1:25:52So I'm fascinated, Peter, given that you're morally engaged with your AI, and Ray, given all your work saying that AI is going to take the lead. Do you think we could ever ask AI about the ethics of what we're asking it to do? Can you imagine we get a Cambrian explosion where some AI becomes the Mormon AI that won't do pornography? Some other becomes sort of the sentient. How do you see that evolving? Do you think it will be as diverse as you think robots will be? I mean, I think AI can support all these different ways of putting ethics into our decision making and understand them all. It does that already.

1:26:44And certainly, military uses AI. We can see that. In fact, the wars in, for example, Ukraine have changed dramatically over the last few years using AI.

1:27:04AI is going to be part of human decision making. And so it's going to be part of every type of decision making, including militarily. If I could add, Ray, I think most humans don't think about ethics or morals deeply. I think we have vague notions that are inherited through religious structure or family structure. I think that AI can actually support, if you want to design that way, any set of ethics and morals. You can train an AI in any direction. but you can also I think AI is going to become ambient it's going to be part of our lives Jarvis is the closest example that I've seen in the movies and you can turn on your morals and ethics coach and have someone there to talk with throughout I don't have to think about this, this is challenging me and have somebody that can help you think through and make decisions that are more moral and more ethical based upon what you've chosen.

1:28:14It could be your Judeo-Christian, it could be your whatever. So I think that's going to be interesting as a thought partner again, if that makes some sense. Do you want to add anything there? Yeah, so I'm writing right now book number three titled The Organizational Singularity, where the thesis is going to be that we're going to replace our human operating system in companies with an AI-based one. So what is the stack of AI agents? And one of the prime things that's emerging is a governance and ethics layer. We're seeing now AI running amok. So we need some mechanism to police that and oversee that.

1:28:55And I think once we evolve that, you have a feedback loop where you can design that. I think one of the most profound opportunities to work with AI is to work out, hey, let's take the UN Charter of Human Rights or something similar and create a global standard for this that applies not just to human beings, but also to AI, also to animals, and anything that may achieve sentience at some point, because we don't know really what that is, right? You don't know when that threshold gets hit. And so I think there's an amazing opportunity today to rethink everything. It goes right back to Plato, who asked, how should we conduct ourselves?

1:29:29We're right back there 5 ,000 years ago. We're getting ready to launch an interspecies communications XPRIZE. It's under-designed. It's funded by someone amazing. I'll tell you about it some other time. And when we can start talking to animals and understand what they're saying and thinking, I think we're going to have a very different conversation around moral ethics and so forth. My joke is I'm not sure we really want to hear what they have to say. So long. So long. Thanks for all the fish. Okay. I apologize, folks, but one last question here. Yes. This one goes to Ray. Amazing predictions. And looking back, how do you measure your life?

1:30:11What are you most proud of? Good question.

1:30:16Well, the one project I'm most proud of is the Rating Machine for the Blind, which I'm still involved with. with. We came out, it was a large machine, cost$20 ,000. Now it's a free app on your cell phone.

1:30:37And I guess that indicates what I'm most proud of is having an impact on people, being able to do things that they weren't able to do before, like, for example, reading or any type of uh we want to give life and all the aspects of life to every person uh so all the things that ai will enable us to do live longer live more healthily uh is beneficial uh so that that's when i'm being able to do that i'm most proud of that that's funny i would have i would have thought you'd say AGI 2029 predicted in 1999 when everyone else was saying 100 years. I mean, that's pretty damn epic. That's admirable. Truly human.

1:31:36Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to give it up for Stephen Cutler, for Dave Bluggan, for Salimus Mayo, and for Ray Kurzweil, everybody. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did. I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team.

1:32:12You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends 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 MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

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