The Man Who Predicted AGI Decades Ago w/ Ray Kurzweil | EP #125

2029 for AGI is conservative. People present problems that AI 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?

80% of people worked in food production 200 years ago. Today that's 2%. So we've lost all those jobs and yet we have actually more people working.

What are we likely to see the next one to three years?

I mean, 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 and inventor and a futurist. He's best known for his predictions in 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 velocity. We'll talk about jobs and job loss. We'll talk about digital superintelligence. We'll talk about a lot of the things that if you're interested in AI, you're going to want to hear his thoughts and his answers. Last year, I had Ray on stage with me in Abundance360. He's one of the co founders of Abundance360. I had him there along with Geoffrey Hinton, who just got the Nobel Prize, and Elon Musk, who said Ray is one of the greatest thinkers. Maybe a little bit conservative was what Elon said about Ray. The Abundance360 membership and summit is for me 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 predict where the future is going. Yeah, you know, it's a program that's not for Everybody. The folks 500 members in the Abundance 360 program are running 10 million to $10 billion 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 Abundance360 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 on 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.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's amazing.

It still looks the same.

And we still have the same mindset, which is the most important.

Except it's actually coming true.

It is. There's a few interesting facts people should know. You and I co founded Singularity University and Abundance360. I got you your first job. I don't think people know that, which is kind of funny.

At Google, you mean?

Yeah, I mean, you had written this book, how to Make a Mind, and then you invited me to help you.

To join your board, and we introduced that to Larry Page.

Yeah. So 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 xprize. I'm happy to introduce you. And so I reached out to Larry and I said, yeah, I'd love to meet Ray. And 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? Do you remember?

Patterns.

Yeah, Patterns, Inc. That's right. 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, not everybody you approach is going to be interested. He said, I'll just buy the company.

I remember him saying, we have so much compute and so much data here. Why would you want to do Power Patterns Inc. Outside of the company?

Right? And I said, okay, but we 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 ask you to invest if it wasn't worth anything. He said, okay, so I'll buy it. Yeah.

And then you said, well, how would you value it? And then I remember him saying, we can value anything, right?

That's right.

Yeah. It was fun. And that's how you got your first job.

That's right.

So what's your title? 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 thrilled to be having this conversation, and this podcast could last a good 48 hours straight on all the subjects we have to chat about. But we'll keep it rather succinct and brief. I want to jump in with a question I've actually had for a bit. 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, though 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 of 20?

It can play go better than any human and et cetera for every single thing that humans can do.

I buy that, but my question is, why is the singularity 44 years out? If we're doubling, we've got 10 doublings. The power of AI is doubling not once every two years, but in some instances it's doubling every few months.

So it's 20 years away. 2045 is almost 21 years from today.

But why is it so far out? It seems like if I don't think it's. We're able to predict anything by 2035, and the speed is going to be just extraordinary by then.

Well, the singularity is a metaphor, and it's something that we can't really say about, like, if information goes into a physics 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. And so 2000s 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, it amplifies us, but it's not the same thing as singularity. 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 you use a language model, it doesn't seem like it's ourselves, it seems like it's somebody else. We're going to do that with things like the future version of neuralink right now, which allows you to actually access your own brain. And so neuralink, for example, is implanted in two paralyzed patients. They can control a computer with their brain. They can do it actually as good as people can access their own computer. But accessing your own computer isn't like accessing your own mind. Like, 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 pop up instantly. So we're going to be able to do that in the2030s. 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 million fold. That's so remarkable that we can't really say what it'll 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 capacity.

No, but it's going to be exponential. And exponential seems very fast. But their positions, once it gets established, boom. It interacts in a fraction of a second and we get the singularity minus. We're going to go exponentially towards that. But exponentially gets to be faster and faster. So it seems similar, but it's actually on the Sloat school of the singularity, we're going to get there exponentially.

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Well, Gai.

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 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 was there. Stanford actually organized a conference. Several hundred people came and the consensus was 80% thought it would be 100 years, including Geoffrey Hinton. And he's saying that he was wrong. It's actually more like 30 years. Like what Kurzweil was 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, raise 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 within 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 an ancient history.

Yeah, it is ancient history, but one.

Of the things that was happened in the last year, it's just remarkable. And it's going to keep happening faster and faster each year. So 2029 for AGI is conservative.

And on the predictive 12 to 24 months accurate. 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 curious what your comments are about.

Say that again.

Elon and Geoffrey Hinton said that looking forward 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 disruptive to humanity. I'm curious if you feel that's correct and what do we do to minimize the downside?

Yeah, well, I deal with that a lot in my book.

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 trekking through. Where was I? I was in Chile, trekking in the mountains there.

I hadn't met you at that point.

You hadn't met me? No. And I had this backpack. This huge hardcover book was a significant amount of the weight I was carrying. And when I finished reading this book, I was like, okay, I know a lot of this stuff, having spent 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, International Singularity University, which became Singularity University, which I then approached you. And instantly we were having lunch, I think. And that actually. Yeah, go on.

Well, I make decisions very quickly.

Yeah, instantly you said, yeah, let's do it.

Persist in my life for decades, I make instantly. 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 exist. And so Singularity has done really well, and then you and I started the Abundance360 membership, which is Singularity's highest level membership and the Abundance Summit. But going back to the 8020 probability, what do you think? Do you give us 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. It 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. 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 exists today. That's affecting the election, which is a, a few weeks away. 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. And we're going to actually learn its problems. People present problems that AI 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 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. So yes, intelligence has brought us problems that we didn't have before. But I mean, I've given you a few charts. US 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 that a person in the United states makes is 10 times what it was 100 years ago.

In constant dollars. So we see literally an exponential curve between 1774 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.

And all this is driven by the exponential increase in computation. 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 Zuse computer. He was a German. In 1939, it was shown to Hitler. He was not actually supportive of Hitler. But it got shown to him Hitler had no interest in computation. The third computer on this chart is Turing's computer, which was shown to wrote to the leader of the Allied forces. We use it to decode the Nazi messages. Anyway, this is a straight line. It means exponential growth and started at 0.000007 calculations per second per constant 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 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 three years ago. We began to have them two years ago. If we compare the things two years ago to today, 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 deemed this the law of accelerating returns. Moore's law is a segment of it which involves integrated circuits.

Right. Moore's law 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 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. It's pretty amazing. It's going to continue. We made the same progress with software as we have with hardware. The actual value 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 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 large language models. If we compare what we have today to two years ago, it's something like that. So it's pretty extraordinary.

Amazing.

I believe that 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.

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Well, I mean, we have to consider what jobs, what good are, what value we get out of jobs. And if it's actually 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. But people are very eager to retire because they really don't like their jobs. Their jobs is we've got a bunch of tables that have been used, we have to clean it up. That's not the kind of jobs or the bathroom. Yeah, these people are.

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 what 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 some kind of dislocation. For example, large language models can code already. They're not quite at 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. That'll be very good. That's what we've done anyway. 80% of people worked in food production 200 years ago. Farmers 2%. So we've lost all those jobs and yet we have actually more people working. People say, well, don't worry about losing your 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. So there's going to be problems with figuring this out and it's going to go very, very quickly. But ultimately we'll be happier for it. I think we will give people money so they can manage while they're reconsidering.

What kind of work they think UBI will come Online universal basic income?

Yes, I think in the2030s, would 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 ubi.

People have different ideas. I'm not sure we'll follow anybody's ideas, but we'll figure that out. I mean, we'll have to do that. We won't have. People won't have money 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 as we get super intelligent, as we head towards digital superintelligence or artificial superintelligence, whatever, the digital superintelligence.

Is going to be within us. It's not like we're here and AI is 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 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 AIs get bored with us and just take off and go away. 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 don't want to have it with you and people? No. Maybe once a day I'll look at it. Recently I asked everybody who has a cell phone. Literally everybody had their cell phone.

Yeah, I'm sure.

So it's not like there's certain persons that carry their cell phone and certain people that don't. Carrying a cell phone 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. Even better if it just pops up in your mind and it's like 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 mean I have to carry this around all the time.

What a pain in the neck, huh? Or a pain in the butt. It is, but we do it. So you think purpose is going to be. We're going to up level our purpose because we're able to now take on new Huge aspirational goals. Because we're more intelligent and capable.

Yes, absolutely. As doctor Would we want to stay the level of a mouse? I mean, a lot of the problems we have are because of our intelligence. Like, we created atomic weapons. Mice didn't do that. We did that. And that's because of our added intelligence. So we've actually created problems, and people think of new problems created by the additional intelligence we'll have. And I guess I'm advocating that we'll become more intelligent. I think that's beneficial. And we'll be able to do things that are aspirational.

You know, today when I'm on stages and I speak about a future of connecting with the cloud 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 there's always a good 20% in the audience, but it's not 100%, because I think they fear the unknown. I think it's very similar to when you asked the question 20 years ago. How many of you want to carry this around with you everywhere, all the time? You know, neuralink, you know, we humans connect at like 40 bits per second as we're communication. Communicating, I think is the. Is the appropriate 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 speed like we have with our own brain, and that's what we'll have in the2030s. 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. But that will happen by the 2000 and 30s.

So I think one of the things that you pin both longevity, escape velocity, and brain computer interface on is the nanotechnology world. And of course, 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 the Engines of Creation. And of course, you've written extensively about nanotechnology. He described 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. We don't actually need that type of capability to do what I'm saying will happen in the2030s. It's basically the ability to communicate from our neocortex outside of our body that will go to a cloud. And that does not actually require drexelarian nanotechnology.

Eric spoke about assemblers, right. Which are nanomachines that can rearrange individual anything.

And we've had the description of computers that are at that level. So literally, computer this size would have the intelligence of all human beings, you know, like 10 billion human beings together. But we don't need that for the2030s. 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. The neocortex is organized like a funnel. And as you go up the funnel, concepts become more complex, and you really only need to interact with the last part of the neocortex that we can do in the 2000 and 30s. And so if you're thinking about something, thoughts will come to you just like it comes to you 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 Schrodinger'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.

I'm going back to MIT and becoming a physics. A physics major. It's going to be so much easier.

Physics in every other field, but, I mean, you can do the large language model today. You 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 really the difference. Knowing it instantly like it was in your own brain.

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Yes, it was very much for AI.

Yeah, it was 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 think they should get rid of that requirement because computer scientists, they may not have studied anything, but they know computer science and they can develop AlphaFold, for example, which should stymie human beings 50 years to get alpha fold.

Yeah. I remember when I was in medical school, the huge grand challenge was, can you predict the folding of a protein? It was the unknown supercomputer.

Some people could do that, but they didn't do it very accurately. And we only did a few hundred thousand. Then one year, we did 200 million proteins in one year. And then Alpha Proteo, we can actually design new proteins that bind to a given target protein. And we can actually create something, for example, that goes into a cell, determine whether or not it can divide cancerously. And if it divides cancerously, it will set a flag. And if that flag is set, it would destroy that cell. So basically there would be a cure for cancer. And we can actually do that with Alpha Proteo. We have to actually design the protein. So there's a few steps left, but that's actually done a very large fraction of curing cancer, for example.

Let's switch on that note to the subject of longevity, escape velocity, something that we're both passionate about. In fact, I've got my longevity cup here which says on the backside, what would you do with an extra 30 years of healthy life, which is a low ball number.

Well, also, when you get the 30 years of extra life, it's not like nothing's going to happen during the 30 years.

That's the incredible part. Right.

It's like every year we're going to be able to develop new things, for example, all of our organs. What do they do? They either put things into the bloodstream or they take things out. Except for the heart and brain, which is a different matter, but we can also deal with that. But like the lungs put in oxygen, take out a carbon dioxide, and we're actually developing those. Going to a board meeting of the United Therapeutic Sex here and we're actually developing lungs, hearts, kidneys, livers.

Kidneys. Yeah.

It's only a few years away, so literally all of our organs will be redeveloped, so they'll be much more reliable. Right now, people lose their lives because one of their organs doesn't function properly. So right now you go through a year and use up a year of your longevity. However, you're getting back approximately four months from scientific research. So you're only losing about eight months a year of your longevity. But by the early2030s, around 2032, depending on how diligent you are, you'll live a year. You give up a year of your longevity, but you'll get back a full year from scientific progress beyond that point, you'll actually get back more than a year. So you'll actually go backwards in terms of time. Now that doesn't guarantee you'll live forever. You could have a healthy 20 year old, you could compute his longevity is many, many decades and he could die tomorrow, probably from an accident. We're also dealing with that self driving cars, for example, have almost no accidents. We lose $40,000 a year from human drivers. Generally, self driving cars will actually have no accidents. But anyway.

It'S an amazing time. I just tweeted out this morning a quote from a paper by Dario Amodi, the CEO of Anthropic, who considers you one of the great visionaries. You're a hero of his. And he says it is my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these biological discoveries, giving us the next 50 to 100 years of biological progress in the next 5 to 10 years.

And it's going to keep getting faster and faster. It's not like we just go through one step and suddenly we're going from getting back four months a year to 12 months. It's going to go faster and faster and we're going to actually deal with accidents and actually be able to back up our brain, back up our heart. And it's going to be very hard to imagine how you could die. And people don't really want to die. You ask people, well, do you want to live to 120? And people are negative about that because they think of people that they've met. Exactly. Anybody 120, but they've met 95, 100 year olds. They don't want to be like that, but we won't be like that. And people actually, and people say, well, I don't want to live past 95, but when they get to be 95 and if they're sound mind in body and they said, do you want to die tomorrow? The answer is no, unless they're in horrible pain. And obviously we want to avoid that as well.

Yeah, I agree. Now you've been very, again, part of your predictions, been very specific in saying that we're going to reach longevity escape velocity by the end of the year 2030. You know, I've had this conversation with George Church and David Sinclair and they are placing it in the mid-2030s. That's still, for anybody listening, you know, that's the next six to 10 years. And so I think your advice is don't die from something stupid between now and then.

Right, right, exactly. And so we're so dependent on our own body, which is very problematic. We 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, I mean, I really believe if you can hold on for five, maybe 10 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 drosophila's connectome? They were able to, using a scanning electron microscope, actually slice the brain of a drosophila 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.

Yeah, we're not going to use actual brain matter to expand our brain. We're going to use kind of, I mean, already the brains of computers are much more intelligent and we can go trillions of calculations per second. Our own brain goes 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, all kinds of things.

I mean, literally every day there's fantastic progress. I just think about a year ago, it seems like ancient history, let's go a year forward.

I am curious, being the Oracle of the singularity Ray, that's my nickname for you. What do you have for us for the year 2025? What do you think is likely? Or maybe you broaden it from 25, 26, 27. What are we likely to see in the next one to three years.

Well, I mean, just based on conversations I've had in the last few days, we can already take an idea we have and transform it into a movie. Today, the movies are not quite there. Wouldn't convince you that it's done by a person. Although Google actually has a thing where you can actually take anything. Like I fed in my entire book, 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? It's called Notebook lm, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's an amazing product.

It actually got the right summary because there's 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. Suppose you say, well, okay, we got these two people, but I want to actually see them. I want them to actually be in some kind of situation and can't quite do that today, but that will happen within a year or two.

Yeah, I believe that. I just saw one of the avatar type companies has created your ability to create your avatar and then have it join a zoom meeting and represent you in form and voice and so you can be attending 100 or 500 you. And I used to joke, I'll have Ray 2 of 10 meet with Peter 3 of 10 in the meeting tomorrow afternoon. And being able to be in multiple places at once, that's pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, that's going to happen. I don't know if it's one year, two years, or three years, but it's.

In that time frame.

Yeah.

Any other fun predictions or conversations you've had in the back halls of Google?

Well, all the things that we do. I mean, 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 it on people, and 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're doing 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. So 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 would be able to eliminate that by testing it, also by using simulated biology and do that in a few days. And we'll be able to actually test every type 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 alkali Proteo. 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 actually. And already there's things on the market that were done that way for cancer and so on. I've got people who've got head cancer and actually trying these new things. It's going to be really fantastic over the next few years.

Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos national labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their rna? Well, a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize Health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter I want 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 Panart. 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 15 years ago whether people would carry this round, 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 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 Ray?

Well, right now we have really just one body we can be. Virtual reality has given us a little bit of flexibility on that. But the type of bodies you can get with virtual reality 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. That's a great point. Different bodies for different occasions. And you can have flaws or not have flaws and so on. And what we'll accept from a body won't necessarily be even a human body, you'll be able to play games and so on where you have a different type of body. We won't be limited to one body per person.

I love that. Torstenhq 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 is preparing them for the future. What's your recommendation?

Right, 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. You know, 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? 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 enabling, enabled with AI? And I'm reading into their question here because I don't. It's not my question like you know, like, like China benefit more from AI or a decentralized government be more beneficial from AI. We had the idea of communism never could possibly have worked 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 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 it 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've 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 2000s. 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. Right. And we just didn't notice. Do you agree with that?

Yes. I said the Turing Test is going to be. We're going to hear early versions that computers have passed the Turing Test. 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 and we've already gone past that first point. We've already heard that GP4 Zone can handle the training test. By 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.

We saw GPT01 score an IQ of 120. About a year ago. We saw anthropic Claude3 score an IQ of 101. The average human IQ by definition is 100. I know that Google.

Right. But there's some people that have a higher iq.

Sure.

So it's not as. 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, 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 it's going to be far beyond what humans can do.

I think that is definitely true. But 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.0001% 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, has ever dealt with.

Ray, I want to thank you for your mentorship, for your leadership, for your vision, for all that you have.

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, you know.

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, the 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 don't want to have children, so.

Yeah, well, 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 youn Think, came, 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.

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.