Kurzweil Interview: On Merging with Machines and More

8/3/2019 Kurzweil Interview: On Merging with Machines and More

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Featured Futurist

Merging With the Machines: InformationTechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and the

Law of Exponential GrowthAn interview with Ray Kurzweil

Part 2 of 2, continued from WorldFuture Review, Volume 2, #1 (February-March 2010)

WFR: W bat do you see as tbe m ost pressingenvironm ental issues tbat we sbould be concernedabout as we move forward? And in a world wberenanoeng ineered pbotovoltaic panels bave elimi-nated fossil fuels, wbat will our obligation to tbeenvironment be?

Kurzweil: Tbefirst ndustrial revolution tecb-nologies were a compromise. Tbey are barmful totbe environm ent. Take fossil fuels, for exam ple. Weare running out of energy if we limit ourselves tonineteentb century tecbnologies like fossil fuels,but obviously we don't need to d o tbat.

We bave tbe op por tun ity to move away fromfossil fuels. Solar bas tbe most bea droom but tbereare otbersfor one tbing tbere's a tremendousamount of geotbermal energyand tbere aremany more renewable, decentralized, environ-mentally friendly tecbnologies tbat ultimately willbe extremely inexpensive . Normally, tbere's a 50%deflation rate [sic] to tbe costs of informationtecbnology (tbis is an implication of tbe law ofaccelerating re turn s). But in tbe case of solar en-

ergy will be very inexpensivefar less expensivetban comparable fossil fuels. Plus it bas tbe ad dedadvantages of being environm entally friendly anddecentralized, unlike today's supertankers and nu-clear power plants, wbicb are centralized andtberefore vulnerable to catastropbic destru ction.New tecbnologies in general are decentralized,and tbat makes tbem safer. Tbe Internet is decen-tralizedif a piece of it goes down, tbe informa-tion just routes around it.

Over tbe next one or two decades, tbere willbe anotber food revolution. We'll go from bori-zontal agriculture, wbicb bas dom inated bum an-ity for tbe last several tbou san d years, to verticalfarmingbasically, computer-controlled facto-ries creating b ydrop onic plants for fi'uits and veg-etables and in vitro-cloned meat, wbicb could beengineered to be mucb bealtbier. [For example,]you could bave beef witb Om ega 3 fats ratber tbansaturated fat.

Same thing for bousing . Tbere's an em ergingindustry of tbree-dimensional printing. Rigbtnow, tbe key features are at tbe microscale, butwitbin 20 years, it will be at tbe nanoscale andwe'll be able to print out tbree-dimensional ob-


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them together Lego-style. These little moduleshave all the pipes and communication lines builtin. One of the projects at Singularity Universitywas to use three-dimensional printing to createlow-cost housing for the developing world. Wecan house people very comfortably if we convertresources in the right way. Ultimately, with nan-otechnology being able to produce inexpensivemo dules for ho uses as well as everything else weneed, w e'll be able to do th at at very low cost.

People assume that only the w ealthy will haveaccess to radical life extension and these othertechnologies, but today, 5 billion people out of6 billion have cell phones. Just 15 years ago, whatfew mobile phones existed weren't reliable, andonly the wealthy had th em . It took 10 years to putout the first billion cell phones, three years to pu tout the second billion, 14 months to put out thethird billion, eight months to put out the fourthbillion, six months to put out the fifth billion,there'll be 6 billion very soon, and within a cou-ple of years, all of them will be smart phones. Theyare causing economic wealth and redistribution.According to the W orld Bank, poverty in Asia hasbeen cut by 70% over the last 15 years because ofthe rise of the information society. Cell phonesare ubiquitous in Africa; and the internet is be-coming widely available there. At any given mo-ment, there is a have/have-no t divide, but becauseof the 50% defiation rate inherent in every formof inform ation technology, the cost of closing thisdivide ultimately becomes very inexpensive.

WFR: So, just to clarify, it sounds like you'resaying that the digital divide will be nonexistentin the post-Singularity era, that the gap won'twiden, and that people in the developing worldwon't be left behin d, as some peop le fear.

is a very good example ofthat. W hen I was in Chinarecently, I noticed that half the farmers in Chinahave digital devicesgateways to hum an knowl-edgeso these technologies are already very wide-spread. This is not just speculation.

The real problems are not the ones that thepessimists are mired in today. There are new is-sues we need to be mindful of One is the poten -tial for damageboth accidental and intentional.In 1975, the Asilomar Conference came up withstandards that responsible biotechnology practi-tioners w ould follow. They 're called the AsilomarGuidelines, they've been upd ated every few yearssince, and they've worked very well. The num berof accidents over the last 30 years has been zero.

We also need to be mindful of intentionalabuse. A very good example of how to deal withthis is the technological immu ne system we've suc-cessfully put in place for software viruses. When Isay "successfully put in place," I don't mean that wecan cross that off our concern list and say, "OK,we've done that, we don't have to w orry ab out tha tanymore." It's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game, butI do think we can take comfort from how well wehave done. Nobody has taken down even a smallportion of the Internet for even one second overthe last 10 years. It's a very robust decentralized sys-tem with a rapid response immune system. Weneed to put something in place that's comparablefor biological viruses. I've been advising the U.S.Army, which is the A merican agency responsiblefor bioterrorism p rotection on that issue. And thereis a rapid response system being pu t in place thatinvolves rapid sequencing of a new biological vi-rus, which we can do now in one dayit took fiveyears to sequence HIV, 31 days to sequence SARS,we can now do it in one day. We can create an RNAinterference-based medication that can deactivate


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WER: You recently said in a interview,"Whereas we can articulate technical solutions tothe dangers of biotech, there's no purely techni-cal solution to a so-called unfriendly AI. We can'tjust say, 'We'll just put this litde software code sub -routine in our Als, and that'll keep them safe.' Ime an, it really comes down to what the goals andintentions of that artificial inteUigence are. Weface daun ting challenges." In TheFuturist in 2006,you acknowledged that unlike nanotechnology,"superintelligence by its nature cannot be con-trolled." Can you elaborate a little more on therisks and dangers here? Also, given those risksand dangers, if there's no real way to safeguardthings from a dystopian scenario, why is strongAI desirable?

Kurzweil: I don't think we should imaginethat som eone's going to create this Strong A I in alaboratory and u nleash it on the world. That's notthe way it's going to hap pen. W e have hund redsof examples today of Narrow A Iprograms do-ing tasks that used to be done by human inteUi-gence but doing them better and less expen-sivelyand the narrowness is gradually gettingless narrow. What's more, this intelligence isdeeply integrated with our own already, even if,for the most part, it's not yet in our bodies andbrains. There's going to be a continuous exponen-tial progression of computers getting mo re pow-erful, ge tting smaller, and we're going to becom emore and more integrated with them. They'vema de us sm arter already, and I don't just m ean asmeasured by IQ tests. I mean by as measured bythe intellectual capability of our civilization,which includes all of the things we can do withbiological and non-biological inteUigence woi'k-ing together.

side, machines on the left." ft's going to be allmixed up and integratedone com plex, dynam ic,chaotic human/machine civilization. Graduallyover time, the non-biological portion of huma n-ity's intelligence is going to grow exponentially.The biological p ortio n is fixed. It's really no t go-ing to changenot to any significant degree . So,over time, non-biological technology will pre-dom inate. But it's still going to be o ne civilizationwith people having different philosophies an d ar-guing about values.

I would m aintain that we actually have muchgreater consensus on human values than m ight ap-pear. People focus on our differences and talk aboutculture wars, and yes, there are certain issues thatdivide us. But what we aU agree on is actually muchmo re pervasive than what we disagree on . This in-cludes a belief in progress. The idea of progress isa fairly recent concept in human history. Peopledidn't think in term s of progress a thousand yearsago. There actually was progress, but it was so slowas to be u nnoticeable.

And we also share a growing belief in dem oc-racy and freed om .... If you go back half a century,very little of the world was democratic. I believethat decentralized electronic comm unication hasfacilitated the democratization of the world. Inmy first book. The Age of Intelligent M achines, Iwrote tha t the Soviet Un ion w ould be swept awayby the then-rising decentralized electronic com -munication, which included email over teletypelines and early fax machines, and indeed, that'sexactly what happen ed. T he rise of the Web in the1990s led to a great rise of democrac ies. So, whatwe need to focus on is maintaining democraticvalues in our civilization. It's a civilization that isalready partly biological and partly no n-biologi-


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I do believe that if we're more intelligent thenwe're more likely to be able to enhance ourselvesmorally and ethically. However, it's not a guarantee.The history of the twenty-first century hasn't beenwritten yet. While I believe the increasing power ofthese technologies is inexorable, what we do withthem and what values our civilization deploys is stillin ou r h ands. For example, if the Nazis had wonWorld W ar II, that w ould have been a setback forhum an valuesand they were using the technolo-gies of their tim e to advance th eir "cause."

Also, certain issues become m ore complicated.W hat does "privacy" mean now in the world? Fiftyyears ago it might have been obviousnot open-ing your neighbor's mail [for example]. And it is afederal crime to open someone else's letters; bu t wedon't have com parable laws covering e-mail, de-spite the fact that most messages now are no lon-ger sent on paper throu gh the mail. So we need tofocus on translating our values into policies thatmatch how life is lived in the modern world, andthat becomes complicated.

WFR: As you know, technology is progress-ing much faster th an legislation can keep up w ithit. As technology continues progressing exponen -tially, will our ability to craft legislation arou nd itfall further and further behind?

Kurzweil: [Legislation] is not the only wayto approach these things. There was never a lawpassed that said there shou ld be an Interne t. Anda lot of the norms and regulations of the Inter-nethow Wikipedia gets reviewed, and privacyon social networksis done by group decisionmaking and by companies and their interactionwith customers w ho provide most of the content.There's the development of e-commerce, whichis now $2 trillion ... very little of this was do ne

icy maker is not so crucial in this arena.Kurzweil: There are policy makers at Face-book and Google and Twitter and Wikipedia.

Those are very important pohcies. The compa-nies that succeed are the ones th at can negotiategracefully with their users who are, in fact, pro-viding the content for these services.

WFR: Speaking of e-comm erce, you point toa future econo mic boom based on the exponen-tially increasing capability of computer ppwer,coupled with decreasing costs. Can you tell us alittle about the explosion of wealth that will fol-low the explosion of technology?

Kurzweil: We have economic growth everyyear. If there's a very slight dow nturn one year, weconsider that a disaster a nd call it a recession. Butthere is economic growth in almost every yearand all of that comes from information technol-ogy. The information industries grow 18% in constant dollars each year, despite the fact that youcan get twice as much each year for the sam e pricebecause as price performance reaches a certainlevel, whole new applications explode. Peopledidn't buy iPods for $15,000 each 15 years agowhich is what they would have cost. Social net-works weren't feasible six or seven years ago. A ndas new applications become feasible, they sud-denly take off E-books are now tak ing off becauseall the enabling factors are in place.

Every industry is gradually transforming intoan information industry. Health and medicine ismaking that transformation now. Most of theeconomy will be information technology in the2020s.. . . This is what's providing economicgrowth. The non-information technology indus-tries are shrinking.WFR: I want to talk abou t som ething a littl


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and music. What place is there in a post-Singu-larity world for tho se classic works of art and lit-e ra ture produced by non-enhanced h u m a n s -Shakespeare and DaVinci, for exampleand howwill we redefine creativity and the creative pro-cess in general? What wiU be lost if we give upthese processes to software programs?

Also, is there room in the digital future foranalog processes? There's no linear progressionwhen it comes to artistic toolsbut there are con-stellations of widely varying processes that are dif-ferent frombut not superior tothe others.Movies didn't render plays obsolete, for example.W hat will be lost if we give up these processes inour haste to embrace a fully immersive techno-logical future?

Kurzweil: WeU,firstof all, digital technologyhas already revolutionized the creation of art ineveryfield, ncluding graphic arts and music. Per-haps less so in languagealthough even there,certainly, search engines and other online toolsare certainly helpful. But I was recently at the Na-tional Association of Music Merchants show,which I've gone to since 1983, and aside from theelaborately dressed m usicians and the cacophonyof musical sounds tha t you hear on the trade showfloor, it really looks and reads like a computerconference. I mean, there are some acoustic in-struments, but for the most part, the instrumentsare very sophisticated from a technological per-spective and the users are speaking in very so-phisticated terms of single-processing and othercomp uter paradigm s. Same thing at a graphic artsconference. G raphic artists are using very soph is-ticated tools. Almost all of commercial musicat least popular musicis done by synthesizers.The digital world is doing a better and better jobof emulating specific art forms that have evolved

that in the m usical field.The ability of the digital world to emu late thereal world is advancing and getting more and more

subfle. Virtual reality today is cartoon-like, but ifyou look at Second Life, over the last 18 months,it's becom e much m ore realistic. You can see whereit's headed to being very realistic and three -dim en-sional and full-immersion. That is the goal of thedigital world: to emulate the natural world.

There are still many things that we can't do inthe digital world. You can simulate brush strokesand so on with d igital tools, but you can't yet reallyachieve the three-dimen sional effect of an oil paint-ing. But that's the direction we're headed in.

WFR: One final question: When wOl the m ovieversion of The Singularity Is Near be released?

Kurzweil: Transcendent Man, a documentaryfilm about m e, premiered a year ago at the TribecaEilm Eestival. It's going to be distributed very soon.The m ovie that I've made w ith some collab-orators. The Singularity Is Near: A True StoryAbout the Future, is an intertwined A-line docu-me ntary w ith a B-line narrative story, and in theA-line, I interview 19 big thinkerspeople likeMarvin Minsky (the father of artificial intelli-gence), Eric Drexler (the father of nanotec hno l-ogy), Alan Dershowitz, and Alvin Toffler. TheB-line narrative is a tongue-in-che ek story of mycreating an artificial intelligence-based avatarnamed Ramona who has various adventures that,in an e ntertaining way, illustrate the ideas beingtalked about in a serious way in the d ocum entary.She hires Alan Dersho witz, wh o plays himself, topress for he r legal rights to be recogn ized as a per-son. She gets coaching from Tony Robbins, whoalso plays himself, to learn the secret of what itmeans to be hum an. And that's intertwined w ith


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Kurzweil Interview: On Merging with Machines and More