Transcription
2029 for AGI is conservative. People present problems that they will present, and they assume that all we have is the things that we can do today to modify it, without realizing that that's also going to expand.
Do you see significant job loss in 2025, 26, 27? Eighty percent of people worked in food production 200 years ago; today, it's 2%. So we've lost all those jobs and yet we have actually more people working. What are we likely to see in the next 1 to 3 years? What's really exciting to me—
Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. This is a special episode for me personally. I have my mentor, my business partner, one of the greatest thinkers in AI joining me: Ray Kurzweil. He's a computer scientist, an inventor, and a futurist. He's best known for his predictions on Artificial Intelligence, being the author of *The Singularity is Near* and *The Singularity is Nearer*. His predictions have had an 86% accuracy rate. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what his predictions are for 2025, 2026. We'll talk about longevity, escape philosophy, jobs and job loss, digital superintelligence—a lot of things that, if you're interested in AI, you're going to want to hear his thoughts and answers.
Last year, I had Ray on stage with me in Abundance 360. He is one of the co-founders of Abundance 360. I had him there along with Geoffrey Hinton, who just got the Nobel Prize, and Elon Musk, who said, "You know, Ray is one of the greatest thinkers, maybe a little bit conservative,"—that's what Elon said about Ray. The Abundance 360 membership and Summit is the program where I bring the greatest thinkers in the world together to talk about what happened in the last year and where things are going in the next two to three years, so you can sort of predict where the future is going. It's a program that's not for everybody. The 500 members in the Abundance 360 program are running 10 million to 10 billion dollar companies. I've reserved five seats for listeners of my Moonshots podcast this year. If that's you, if you're interested, please click on the link below or go to abundance360.com to apply. It's one of the most extraordinary programs, and I'm so excited. I've committed to running Abundance 360 for 25 years; we're at year 13, and it's getting harder and harder to see where things are going next. All right, enough about that. Let's jump into this podcast. And if you love conversations like this, like we're about to have with Ray, please subscribe.
All right, now, the most amazing thinker in the field of AI, Ray Kurzweil. By the way, if you're enjoying these episodes each week, I write two blogs to update you on the most important tech trends. I personally write these emails and cover topics like AI, Bitcoin, humanoid robotics, and much more, and then I share my personal thoughts on them. It's called Data-Driven Optimism, and you can find a link to the blog below. Hey Ray, good to see you, my friend. My pleasure. Always good to see you, yeah buddy. You know, I count you as my mentor, co-founder, and just partner in helping create a vision for humanity of an exponential and a positive future. Well, how long has it been since we've known each other? Yeah, I'm trying to remember that. I think Martin Rothblatt introduced us. It's got to be shortly after the Ansari X Prize was won, so I'm thinking it's about 20 years now. Okay. You know, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's it's amazing, you still look the same, so, and we still have the same mindset, which is the most important, you know, except it's actually coming true, so it is, you know, for there's a few interesting facts people should know. You and I co-founded Singularity University and Abundance 360. I got you your first job, I don't think people know that, which is kind of kind of funny. At Google, you mean? Yeah. I mean you had written this book, *How to Create a Mind*, and then you invited me to help you to join your and we introduced that to Larry Page. Yeah, you so you I came I joined your board in that company, and you were saying let's raise, I think we were trying to raise 50 million or something like that, and you had not met Larry at that point, and I said, "Listen, Larry's become a friend on my board at X Prize. I can, I'm happy to introduce you." You and so I reached out to Larry, and he said, "Yeah, I'd love to meet Ray." And we, I remember the meeting, I remember the conference room. So you and I walk in there, and you launch into presenting the company. What was the company called back then? You remember? Patterns. Yeah, Patterns Inc., that's right. Yeah. And you remember, and why don't you recount what happened when you started presenting Patterns to Larry? Well, I thought it might be useful if he made a venture investment in it, and he said, "I don't want to make a venture investment; that's ridiculous." I said, "Okay, well everybody you approach is going to be interested." He said, "I'll just buy the company." Yeah, yeah, I remember him saying, "We have so much compute and so much data here; why would you want to do Patterns Inc. outside of the company?" Right. And I said, "Okay, but we've just started two weeks ago; we haven't really done anything." And he said, "Well, is it worth anything?" I said, "Well, yeah, I wouldn't have asked you to invest if it wasn't worth anything." He said, "Okay, so I'll buy it." And yeah, and then then then you said, "Well, how would you value it?" And then I remember him saying, "We can value anything." That's right. Yeah, it was it was fun. And that's how you got your first job. That's right. So what's your, yeah, you are, what's your title at Google these days? Principal research AI visionary. Okay, that's good. I like that. So let's jump in. I'm I'm thrilled to be having this conversation, and this podcast could last a good 48 hours straight on all the subjects we have to to chat about, but we'll keep it rather succinct and brief. And I want to jump in with a question I've actually had for a bit. You know, you've talked about the singularity being in the year 2045, and you've spoken about reaching human-level AI by 2029, and I'm trying to understand if we've got human-level AI by 2029, by 2030 and 31 and 35, it doesn't mean typical of a human; it means typical of all humans. Yes. So any human that can do anything, it'll be comparable to that and better than that. So why aren't we reaching the singularity in it plays go; it can play go better than than any human, and and ET Center for every single thing that humans can do. I I I buy that, but my question is why is the singularity 44 years out if we're doubling, we've got 10 doublings. I mean, in AI, the power of AI is doubling not once every two years, but in some instances it's doubling every few months. Twenty years away, 2045 is almost 21 years from, but why is it so far out? It it seems like if I don't think it's you're able to we're able to predict anything by 2035, and the speed is going to be you know just extraordinary by then. Well, the singularity is a metaphor, and it it's something that we can't really say about like if information goes into a a physic Singularity, we can't actually access it; it's stuck in there, and things can happen in there, but we can't actually tell what's going on. So we're actually borrowing this metaphor from physics to talk about this historical Singularity. Um, and so 2030s will have things that go beyond what humans can do, and it will seem quite remarkable, but we have humans today, so having more humans amplifies us, but it's it's not the same thing as Singularity. The Singularity is when we can ourselves; we're going to merge with AI, so that's already a difference than other people. People think AI is over here; we're over here; there's a difference. We're actually going to merge the two together, and we're going to become we're going to be able to do everything that AI can do ourselves. Right now, if we use a language model, it doesn't seem like it's ourselves; it seems like it's somebody else, and we're going to do that um with things like the future version of Neuralink, sure, right now, which allows you to actually access your own brain. Um, and so Neuralink, for example, it's implemented in two paralyzed patients; they can control a computer with their brain; they can actually as good as people can access their own computer, but accessing your own computer isn't like accessing your own mind. Like if you want if I want to tell you something and you look it up on your computer, it takes you I don't know 5 seconds, 10 seconds; it doesn't just like pop up instantly. Yeah. So we're going to be able to do that in the 2030s. We're going to have nanorobots that are much more expansive than Neuralink or Synchron today, and by 2045 we're going to expand our own intelligence a millionfold. That's so remarkable that we can't really say what it's what it will be like, and that's why we're using this metaphor. Do you believe we're going to have an intelligence explosion? There's been a lot of conversation about recursive AI, self-programming, and self-improving that will lead to a hard takeoff with an extraordinary acceleration of computational right capacity. No, but it's going to be exponential, and exponential seems very fast, um but their positions once it gets established it boom; it like interacts in a fraction of a second, and we get the singularity miners; we're going to go exponentially towards that, but exponentially gets to be faster and faster, so it seems similar, but it's actually um on the slow School of the singularity; we're going to get there exponentially. One of the single greatest predictors of how long you'll live and your metabolic health is your blood glucose levels. I am constantly measuring my blood glucose day and night using the Levels app. This continuous glucose monitor, CGM, is the means by which I know what spikes my blood glucose, what causes me to spike my insulin. So, for example, I don't eat bread, but if I do, I know that if I dip it in olive oil, it blunts the glycemic response. So is a banana going to spike you? Probably. But do you know for yourself? Or dark chocolate? The way you find out is by using this type of technology. It's available, and it's one of the most important things for those who want to extend their health span. Now you can get two extra months on your annual Levels membership by going to levels.link/Peter. I hope you do it; it's an extraordinary experience to know what's truly going on inside your body. All right, let's go back to our episode. You know, it's interesting. Last year I had yourself on stage with me at the Abundance Summit, which was awesome. Jeffrey Hinton was with us; Elon Musk was with us; and I loved that, you know, Elon said, "Yes, Ray is present and he's conservative." So I think it's the first time you're being called conservative about your AGI estimates. Well, uh G, AGI is going to be, do you still believe it's 2029? Yes. And he's actually saying next year. Yeah. So I'm conservative compared to him. I think saying by the end of of the of this decade is conservative; it could happen faster. I see no reason to increase my estimate. I said 2029 in 1999. Yeah, 30 years. And people like Geoffrey Hinton were there. Stanford actually organized a conference; several hundred people came, and they consensus was 80% thought it would be 100 years, including Geoffrey Hinton. And he's saying that he was wrong; that's actually more like 30 years, like like what Kurzweil is saying in 1999, but no one was saying 30 years at that time. Yeah, no, it's you're, and for those who don't know Ray's predictive accuracy has been outstanding. If you go and you Google, there are many cases in which all of your books are documented about when you predict something is going to happen and with then you know giving a leniency of like 12 to 24 months, I think your accuracy rate is at 86%, so not too bad, not too bad at all. You know, the other thing that happened at that Summit last year at the Abundance Summit, and I hope we'll have Elon and you back next year, is that, I mean, that happened a year ago, and it seems like ancient history. Yeah, it is ancient history, but one of the things that much has happened in the last year, it's just remarkable. It it and it's going to keep happening faster and faster each year. So 2029 for AGI is conservative, and on on the predictive, you know, 12 to 24 months accurate. So one of the comments made by both Elon and Geoffrey Hinton, and congrats to him for the Nobel Prize, was that 80% chance AI is going to turn out great for humanity, 20% chance we're screwed. I'm I'm curious, you know, whether what your comments are about, say that say that again. So so Elon and and Geoffrey Hinton said that they're looking forward um on how AI will impact humanity; it's 80% probability that humanity is going to survive and thrive and AI is going to support us, and there's a 20% chance that AI is going to be you know disruptive to humanity, and so I'm curious, you know, if you feel that's correct and what do we do to minimize the downside. Yeah, well, I I deal with that a lot in my book, and you're and for those need to know Ray's most recent book is *The Singularity is Nearer*, the super imaginative title as a follow-on to *The Singularity is Near*, which really began our relationship. I read that book when I was when I was uh trekking through uh through uh where was I? I was in Chile. Um, Tre in the M, I had met you at that point? You hadn't met me. No. And I I had this hu a backpack, this huge hardcover book was a significant amount of the weight I was carrying, and when I finished reading this book, um I was like, "Okay, I know a lot of the stuff having spent you know a decade at MIT with folks like Eric Drexler and reading your previous books," but I said, "There's no place on the planet that anyone can go to get an overview of all of these topics to understand what they mean," and I wrote down at the end of the book, um you know, "International Singularity University," which became Singularity University, which I then approached you and and instantly we're having lunch I think, and that actually, yeah, go ahead. Well, I make decisions very quickly. Yeah, instantly you said, "Yeah, let's do it." Persists in my life for decades. Um, I make instantly. Um, so I said yes. Yes, you did. And we launched it at TED and at Ames, and Larry Page was there; he came on stage and said, "Yes, this should should exist," and so Singularity's done really well, and then you and I started the Abundance 360 membership, which is Singularity's highest level membership and the Abundance Summit. But going back to the 80-20 probability, what do you think? Do you give us a 20% chance of having problems? Well, we're going to have problems. I mean, we have benefits and problems already. Fire warms us, cooks our food, also burns us, and does both of those things. We can be mindful that we know that fire can burn us, so we have to avoid putting ourselves near fire. Um, we already see things. I mean, I can create you and I can have you saying things that you would never say; it looks real; that that exists today; that's affecting the election, which is a few weeks away. Um, but I don't think we would want to get rid of AI. Its benefits are already quite enormous, and it's going to get better. Literally, we talk about something a year ago; it seems like ancient history. So we're not going to want to get rid of it for sure, um, and we're going to actually want learn its problems. People present problems that they will present, and they assume that all we have is the things that we can do today to to to modify it without realizing that that's also going to expand, and we're going to be able to actually deal with problems that we can't deal with today. I mean, would this is really an increase in our intelligence, and would we want to not be intelligent? Have human beings be the intelligence of a mouse? Maybe that would be good; we wouldn't be able to develop atomic weapons that way. Um, so yes, intelligence has brought us problems that we didn't have before, but I mean, I I've given you a few charts, use personal income. Yeah, let's go ahead and put on the charts, one second. For those on YouTube, which is most of our audience, let's take a look at these charts. I mean, in constant dollars, the amount of money per person uh the that a person in the United States makes is 10 times wor was 100 years ago, um in constant dollars. So we see an ex literally an exponential curve between 1774 um up through 2022, and this is just a meteoric rise, and the important thing is that these are in constant year dollars; they're not inflated dollars. Yeah. And all this is driven by the exponential increase in computation. You actually that's my most important chart, and this is plotted on a log scale, which means a straight line; each level is 10 times the level below it. So this started with a Zuse computer; he was a German in 1939; it was shown to Hitler; he was not actually suppor of Hitler, but it got shown to him; Hitler had no interest in computation. The third computer on this chart is a Turing computer, which was shown to road to um the leader of the Allied Forces; we use it to to code the Nazi messages. Anyway, this is a straight line, which means exponential growth. Yeah. And started at 0.007 calculations per second per C dollar. In 2024, the Nvidia chip, the B200, is half a trillion calculations per second per constant dollar. So for the same price, we can now get a 75 quadrillion-fold increase in the amount of computation, and that's what's driven it; that's why we didn't have large language models in 1931 or even 3 years ago. We began to have them two years ago. We compare the things two years ago to today; it's it's remarkable. So this constant increase in the amount of computation for the same money has driven this AI revolution that started two years ago. You've you've deemed this the law of accelerating returns. Moore's Law is a is a segment of it, which involves integrated has to do with integrated circuits, but this started at relays, went to tubes, discrete transistors, integrated circuits, and now we've gone beyond integrated circuits, and you don't see any variation in this tube is you don't line you don't expect this to slow down or stop. No. In fact, I found this chart 45 years ago and felt it would continue, and it has continued exactly as I found it 45 years ago. So I had half of this chart, and it's continued onto trillions of calculations per second per constant dollar, so it's pretty amazing, and it's going to continue. We made the same progress with software as we have with hardware, so the actual value is is the amount of computations we get from software and from hardware both, so it's actually even more expansive than what you see here. Yeah. Elon was saying on on our stage last year that he's seeing 100x per year if you include computation and algorithmic efficiencies. Well, that's about what we've done with the kinds of computations we've done with the large language models, and if we compare what we have today to two years ago, it's something like that, so it's pretty extraordinary. Amazing. I believe the large language models should be called large event models because large language models, yes, they're actually pretty fantastic with language, but they're not just applied to language; they're applied to pharmaceuticals; they're applied to all kinds of things other than language, so it really should be large event models. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. 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So um I'd like to turn the conversation to a couple of uh of questions that have been on a lot of people's minds, um and I want to put them to bed because it causes fear and excitement. The first is concerns of job loss, and I think you and I I have both been consistent on our positions here, um but uh do you see uh significant job loss in 2025, 26, 27 as a result of humanoid robots, AI-driven humanoid robots coming online and large language models entering this field? Well, I mean, we have to consider what jobs uh what could are what value we get out of jobs, um and if it's actually to to explore new areas, find out new things that we didn't know before, that's very exciting; that's what I've tried to do in my life, and I can actually do that more if I actually have more intelligence. I mean, I have a certain amount of intelligence, but it's limited; I'll have a lot more if I can actually merge with the intelligence that we're creating. Um, being but people are very eager to retire because they don't really don't like their jobs; their jobs is we got the a bunch of tables that have been used; we have to clean it up; that's not the kind of jobs that the bathroom; these people these people get jobs because it's what they need to put food on the table for their kids or get insurance; it's not they dreamed of doing as a kid. And that kind of jobs we're going to be able to do for ourselves now; that's going to lead to to some kind of dislocation. Um, for example, large language models can code already; they're not quite the same level as a professional coder, but they're going to get there pretty soon, so we're going to have to relearn how to apply our new intelligence to create new kinds of capabilities uh that that'll be very good; that that's what we've done anyway. Eighty percent of people worked in food production 200 years ago; 2%. So we've lost all those jobs and yet we have actually more people working. People say, "Well, don't worry about losing a job; you'll become a social media influencer," and no one would know what you're talking about. So we're going to have new types of jobs, things that we can't even imagine today. Um, so there's going to be um problems with figuring this out, and it's going to go very very quickly, but ultimately we'll be happier for it. I think think we will. Um, give people money so they can manage while they're reconsidering what kind of work they they you think UBI will come online? UBI will come online, Universal Basic Income. Yes. I think in the 2030s. Well, that come, you know, I've heard Jeff Bezos talk about, "We're going to tax the robots and the AIs that take the jobs, and then we'll use the income from that as the tax base to then provide." People have different ideas; I'm not sure we'll follow anybody's ideas, but we'll figure that out. Um, I mean, we'll have to do that; we won't have people won't have money to to buy products. You know, one of the another question along these lines is I think humans inherently need some level of challenge and purpose in life to feel happy, and I'm curious, you know, as we get super int, you know, as we head towards digital superintelligence or artificial superintelligence, whatever name you like, the digital superintelligence is going to be within us; it's not like we're here and the AI over there. So we had that conversation on the Abundance stage last year too, and it's interesting right, because that effectively means we are going to speciate; there are going to be those who choose to merge with with AI and become enabled, empowered, and those who choose not to. And then you've got the scenario with Her, the movie *Her*, in which the AI get bored with us and just take off and go away. Um, so will we link with AI, I guess is one of the questions. Well, we will. I mean, 15 years ago I presented something like this and said, "Are you going to want to carry this around every day? You going want have it with you?" And people, "No, maybe once a day I'll look at it." Uh, recently I asked everybody who has a cell phone, literally everybody had their cell phone. Yeah, I'm sure. So it's not like that certain persons that carry their cell phone and certain people that don't like carrying a cell phone is is a problem though if you want to get information from it; it takes a few seconds; can take like 10, 15, 20 seconds; that's actually too long; you better if it just pops up in your mind, and it's like uh if you try to remember something, you remember it instantly. That's how we want this new intelligence to be. We don't want to have a separate thing; I have to carry this around all the time; what a pain in the neck, huh? Or pain in the butt; it is, but we do it. So you think so you think purpose is going to be we're going to uplevel our purpose because we're able to take on new huge aspirational goals because we're more intelligent and capable? Yes, absolutely. As you are, would we want to stay the level of of a mouse? I mean, a lot of the problems we have are because of our intelligence, like you, atomic weapons; mice didn't do that; we did that, and that's because of our added intelligence. So we've actually created problems, uh and people think of new problems uh created by the additional intelligence we'll have, um, but and I guess I'm advocating that we'll become more intelligent; I I think I think that's beneficial, and we'll be able to do things that that are aspirational. You know, today when I'm I I I'm on stages and I I speak about a future of uh connecting with the cloud of of uh of brain-computer interface, of connecting our neocortex with the cloud, and I ask people, "How many of you would like to do this?" And you know, there's always a good 20% in the audience, but it's not 100%, um because I think they fear the unknown. I think it's very similar to when you ask the question 20 years ago, "How many of you want to carry this around with you everywhere all the time?" Um, you know, Neuralink, you know, we humans connect at like 40 bits per second as we're communicating; I think is the is the appropriate uh um rate speed there, but well our thoughts actually occur to us much more quickly than that; they do internally. Sure. Yeah. And that's what we're going for; we actually be able to create internal speeds like we have with our own brain, um and that's what we'll have in the 2030s; we don't have that today. What we have today is very good for people that can't communicate. If you can't communicate and suddenly you can actually access a computer at the speed that people access computers today, that's very beneficial, but if you're talking about everybody, it's got to be even faster, um but that that will happen by the 2030s. So I think one of the things that you pin uh both longevity escape velocity and brain-computer interface on is the nanotechnology world, and uh of course um uh Feynman, Richard Feynman, spoke about nanotechnology in his very famous 1959 lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," and then a mutual friend of ours, Eric Drexler, in 1986 wrote *Engines of Creation*, and of course you've written extensively about about nanotechnology. You describe what nanotechnology is, and I am super curious, where are we today in nanotech? You know, of any companies that are making diligent progress in that area. I do. I mean, some of them are confidential. Um, we don't actually need that type of uh um capability to do what I'm saying will happen in the 2030s. It's basically the ability to communicate from our neocortex outside of our body, and that we'll go to a cloud, um and that doesn't actually require Drexlerian nanotechnology. Eric spoke about assemblers, right, which are nanomachines that can rearrange individual anything. Yeah. And we've had the description of computers that are at that level, so literally a computer of this size would have the intelligence of all human beings, you know, like 10 billion human beings together. Mhm. But we don't need that for the 2030s, um but we will be able to do what I'm saying, which is basically just have our neocortex communicate to the cloud, and it doesn't have to be the entire neocortex. Neocortex is organized like a funnel, and the once as you go up the funnel, concepts become more complex, and you really only need to interact with the last part of the the neocortex, uh that we can do in the 2030s. Um, and so if you you're thinking about something, thoughts will come to you just like it comes to you from from your own brain, and you won't actually be able to tell the difference between things coming from your own brain and things coming from the neocortex; it'll be the same. So if I want to understand Schrödinger's equation and how it applies to you know certain molecules on the surface of a cell, I will just understand it without knowing how. Yes. And computers can do that today, and you'll be able to do that as well. So I'm going back I'm going back to MIT and becoming a physics major; it's going to be so much easier. You uh physics in every other field, but I mean you can do that with a large language model today; can look up anything in physics or humanities or psychology, psychiatry, so on, and you'll be able to get a very decent description of it, but you have to read it; takes a few minutes as opposed to just instantly knowing it. I mean, that's that's really the difference, knowing it instantly like it was in your own brain. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin, and this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products; I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes; I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Yeah, we just saw we just saw two Nobel Prizes, obviously the prize that Geoffrey Hinton received and then the prize that Demis and John Jumper received, both at DeepMind, um related to AI and directly in AI, uh you know, in AlphaFold. Yes. It was very very much for AI. Yeah, it a great year. And here's the question. It seems to me like I would imagine in the next two to 10 years and then beyond, almost every Nobel Prize in chemistry, math, and physics will be enabled by or directly discovered by AI. Do you agree with that? Yes. I mean, right now 95% of the Nobel prizes in medicine go to people with MDs. I I think they should get rid of that requirement, uh because computer scientists, they may not have studied anything, but they they know computer science, and they can to develop AlphaFold, for example. We should study human beings 50 years; we get AlphaFold. Yeah. I I remember when I was in medical school, the the huge Grand Challenge was, "Can you predict the folding of a protein?" Right? It was the unknown; super some people could do that, but they didn't do it very accurately; we only did a few hundred thousand; then one year we did you know 200 million yeah um uh proteins in in one year, and then Alpha proteo, we can actually design new proteins that bind to a
Be like that, but we won't be like that. People actually say, "Well, I don't want to live past 95," but when they get to be 95, and if they have sound mind and body, and they're asked, "Do you want to die tomorrow?" the answer is no, unless they're in horrible pain. Yeah, and obviously we want to avoid that as well. Yeah, I agree.
Now, you've been very specific in your predictions, saying that we're going to reach longevity escape velocity by the end of the year 2030. I've had this conversation with George Church and David Sinclair, and they are placing it in the mid-2030s. That's still the next 6 to 10 years for anybody listening, so I think your advice is, "Don't die from something stupid between now and then." Right, exactly. We're still dependent on our own bodies, which is very problematic. We've got all these different organs; one of them doesn't function quite correctly, and it's not your choice; you could die. But if you can hold on for five, maybe ten years, we can replace all of these problems that enable us to die more quickly than we want.
Did you see the recent news that scientists have been able to create the dropa connectome? They were able to, using a scanning electron microscope, actually slice the brain of a dropa so thin and then use AI to map all the synaptic connections. It's the first full brain that was actually mapped, and I find that amazing. We're not going to use actual brain matter to expand our brain; we're going to use the kind of—I mean, already the brains of computers are much more intelligent. We can do trillions of calculations per second; our own brain does about 200 calculations per second. So we don't want to use our brain matter to expand our brain. Yes, true. But understanding how the brain functions to avoid neurological kinds of things—I mean, literally every day there's fantastic progress. A year ago seems like ancient history.
Let's go a year forward. Being the Oracle of the Singularity Ray—that's my nickname for you—what do you have for us for the year 2025, 2026, 2027? What are we likely to see in the next 1 to 3 years? Well, just based on conversations I've had in the last few days, we can already take an idea and transform it into a movie today. The movies aren't quite there; they wouldn't convince you that it's done by a person. Although Google actually has a thing where you can take anything—like I fed in my entire book—I just fed in the entire book and said, "Have a podcast between two people that talks about the summary of the book." Yeah, it's called—what's it called?—Notebook LM, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's an amazing product. It actually got the right summary because there are a lot of ideas in the book, some of which are not that important if you want to talk about the summary of the book. It actually picked the right things and had two people that sounded human interacting about a summary of the book, which was better actually than most summaries that people have created on their own. That's today. Now suppose you say, "Okay, we've got these two people, but I want to actually see them; I want them to actually be in some kind of situation." We can't quite do that today, but that will happen within a year or two. I believe that. I just saw one of the Avatar-type companies has created the ability to create your avatar and then have it join a Zoom meeting and represent you in form and voice, so you can be attending 100 or 500 meetings. You and I used to joke, "I'll have Ray 2 of 10 meet with Peter 3 of 10 in the meeting tomorrow afternoon." Being able to be in multiple places at once—that's pretty extraordinary. That's going to happen. I don't know if it's one year, two years, three years, but it's in that timeframe.
Any other fun predictions or conversations you've had in the back halls of Google? Well, all the things that we do—what's really exciting to me—when we created pharmaceuticals, we go to a person who's had some experience, and they have some idea of what might be a pharmaceutical interaction, and they work for 10 years testing on people. Maybe if they're lucky, they'll find some pharmaceuticals. Most of the pharmaceuticals on the market today were done that way. So when we wanted to find a COVID vaccine, they made a list of all the different mRNA sequences that might create COVID, and they had several billion of them. You would actually test all several billion on humans; that's impossible to do. So they actually simulated that, and they simulated—in two days—they tried all several billion in different ways they could eliminate this patch and this patch, and they found one thing that caused COVID, and they came up with a vaccine. They actually created that vaccine in two days. Now we actually then tested it on humans; it took 10 months. We'll be able to eliminate that by testing it also by using simulated biology and do that in a few days. We'll be able to actually test every kind of medication we want against cancer and so on very quickly, and it'll be millions of times faster than what we've done, especially with AlphaFold, right? That's part of the process to actually come up with proteins that can do that. Human trials are slow; they're risky; they're expensive; they take a long time. We'll be able to do this much more quickly—literally millions of times faster—over the next few years. So I think we're going to—and already there are things on the market that were done that way for cancer and so on. I've got people who've had cancer and are actually trying these new things; it's going to be really fantastic over the next few years.
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I'm going to go to a few questions from my Twitter audience in our last segment here. First question is, "Do you say 'please' and 'thank you' to your AI, to Gemini, when you're communicating with it, or with ChatGPT, or whatever you're using?" Yeah, I haven't been convinced that they're human yet. Maybe that's just an old habit of mine. I definitely say "please" and "thank you." I talk to them, and it's like—I feel like if they become conscious, I want them to know I was respectful from the beginning. Well, that's good; you're more advanced than I am. I'll get there. All right. Next question here: "Will humanity," this is from Anna Panpanart, "Will humanity split into two—an AI-merged set of humans and then the original Homo Sapien species? What do you think? Are we going to speciate?" No. I mean, I asked 10–15 years ago whether people would carry this around, and I would say maybe 80% said they would not, but that 80% is carrying this around today. I mean, how many people don't carry their cell phone around? It's approximately zero. If you actually go out and you don't have it, you've got to go back and get it. Yes, that's true. So the answer is, if you ask people today, some people would say no, but when we actually get there, the advantages are going to be so great that everybody's going to have it, and it's going to be a lot easier because you won't actually have to carry this around; it'll be inside your mind.
Next question comes from Dustin Headed. He says, "If you could upload your consciousness into a robot—and I think we will be able to—would you choose to retain your human flaws or opt to be a perfect version of right?" Well, right now we have really just one body. Virtual reality has given us a little bit of flexibility on that, but the type of bodies you can get with VR/AR aren't quite there. They will be there ultimately. We'll be able to create new types of bodies; we won't be limited to one. Different bodies for different occasions, and you can have flaws or not have flaws and so on. And what will—except for a body—won't necessarily even be a human body. You'll be able to play games and so on that way. You'll have a different type of body; you won't be limited to one body per person. I love that. Torsten HQ asks, "What are your recommendations for a teenager today for being ready for the future? Right? University, trade, travel, hard skills, soft skills." That's a question I'm often asked as well. I'm super curious. I have two 13-year-old boys. I don't think school's preparing them for the future. What's your recommendation? Well, it's not just for teenagers; I mean, it's also for young kids and also for old kids like you and me. And you want to learn the passions that come from different types of activities and what it can benefit, and then you can actually create new types of institutions with new types of intelligence that we don't have yet that we will have in the future. So you want to find out what is beneficial of everything that we put effort into. Yeah, you want to be courageous; you want to follow your dreams despite the skeptics; you want to see an exponential future. Yeah, I answer that I want my kids to find their passion and become passion-driven or purpose-driven in that regard.
Ash Stewart asks, "Will AI or ASI lead to more centralization or decentralization?" And that's a fascinating question on a government side, on an organizational side. How do you think about that? Well, what do you mean by centralization? I think what they mean is, would a government be enabled with AI—and I'm reading into their question here because I don't—this is not my question—like, you know, like China benefit more from AI, or a decentralized government be more beneficial from AI? We had the idea of communism; it never could possibly have worked in a—with humans trying to run the supply-demand curve, and capitalism was the ideal marketplace for that. But the question is, is an all-knowing AI able to do a better job moving society in a direction? I mean, I think individual people will be able to do more than they can do today, because we'll have many more skills. And you brought up certain mathematical things; a lot of people in the audience may not have actually heard that before, but we'll be able to understand that; we won't necessarily have to go to a lot of different people. We're basically taking all of the creations of every living person who's ever demonstrated and will actually have access to all of it inside our own mind. So it works both ways, but it is democratizing. And molecular assemblers—when we get to that, I think that's going to be more like the 2040s—we'll be able to build anything we want anywhere. So the ability of one person is going to become more democratic as we move forward.
Here's a two-part question: the Turing test. I feel like we passed the Turing test a while ago, and the originally described Turing test, and we just didn't notice. Do you agree with that? Yes. I said that the Turing test is going to be—we're going to hear early versions that computers are passing the Turing test, and we won't actually pay attention to that. By the time it becomes clear that computers can pass the Turing test, it'll have been said so many times that we'll dismiss it: "Oh, that's old hat" at this point. We've already gone past that first point; we've already heard that GPT-4 someone can handle the Turing test. But the time it becomes obvious, we won't—it won't be a question anymore, and it's probably like four or five years. We're in the midst of that now. You know, we saw GPT-1 score an IQ of 120 about a year ago; we saw Anthropic Claude 3 score an IQ of 101; the average human IQ by definition is 100. I know that Google has—but there's some people that have a higher IQ. Sure. So it's not—it's not equal to all people, but that's going to—the average of so-called large language models is going to increase. So it's 120 today; it'll be 130. So that's my question: Where do you think we'll be next year, or a year from now? How fast is that escalation likely to be? I mean, I'd say over the next—by 2029—is going to be far beyond what humans can do. I think that is definitely true. But I, you know, I've heard projections that will hit 150, and the question becomes, do you think that could happen by early next year or next year, which would put it in the top 0.00001% of humanity? And also it has some things that no human being can do at all. I mean, you can ask it any question, and it can actually give you a very good response, and if you don't like that response, you can ask it again; it'll say the same thing in different words, but also intelligently. No human being today can do that, so it has that advantage. It knows everything that anybody has ever dealt with.
Ray, I want to thank you for your mentorship, for your leadership, for your vision, for all that you've done. Thank you. It's been a two-way pleasure. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the next 30 years together—maybe 100, we'll see. Yes, well, the next five years is going to be pretty spectacular. So it's going to be unbelievably spectacular. And it is such a pleasure to be alive. You know, one reason I think we're living in a simulation is this is such the most extraordinary time ever to be alive, and the coincidence of being here now. Well, hey, yeah, but you talk to people that think it's a terrible time to be alive, so yeah, that's a problem they have. Children, so yeah. Well, you know, I remember it was sitting down with you and Neil Jacobstein in the early days of Singularity where the idea of my first book, *The Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think*, came into play. Because as we're sitting there talking about it, and I'm saying, "Wow, there is—technology is the force that turns everything from scarcity into abundance over and over and over again," and people's default mindset of fear and scarcity is blinding them to what's going on in the world. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. But that will continue. Well, hopefully we can help people see it a little bit differently. Ray, have a beautiful day, my friend, wherever you are in the cosmos, and thank you for spending the time with me. I hope we can do this again. Yeah, absolutely. [Music]