Ray Kurzweil Interview (page: 2 / 6) Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence	Print Interview

You're often described as a futurist. As you look ahead into the 21st century, what do you see as the problems and challenges that face us?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ray Kurzweil: What I see is quite different than what a lot of people see, because I think a major failing of even some very thoughtful observers is the real implications of the acceleration of technological change. If you say that technical change is accelerating, people are quick to agree with that. It's just sort of "motherhood and apple pie." But people don't really incorporate that. I call this the "intuitive linear view" versus the "historical exponential view." People assume that in the next 50 years we'll see 50 years of progress at today's rate of progress. I've had these arguments. People will say, "Oh well, we won't see nanotechnology self-replicators for a hundred years. I say, "Well yes, a hundred years at today's rate of progress, which will take 25 years." We're doubling the paradigm shift rate every ten years. I mean, that's something I pulled out of the air. I've been studying this. I have models of it. That means the 21st century will not be a hundred years of progress. It will be 20,000 years of progress at today's rate of progress. And the 20th century was not a hundred years, but was 25 years at today's rate of progress because we weren't going at this rate of progress for the whole century. So the 21st century will be a thousand times greater in terms of technological change than the 20th century, and the 20th century was pretty profound. That's quite a different view than if you just think in linear terms, which most people do, despite the fact that they lived through this acceleration, but they assume that it's going to stop or they just don't think about it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We're going to be profoundly redefining our own bodies, our own brains. We're going to be expanding our intelligence, our intimate connection with intelligent machines. We're going to be spending a lot of time in virtual reality, which will incorporate all of our senses. And I guess it's complicated to explain all of that, but I do see the future will be very different, but it will be an extension of human civilization. It'll all be derivative of human intelligence and will reflect human values, and it'll be an expansion, a continued expansion, really, because we've been growing exponentially. Our knowledge is growing exponentially, and we will continue that through the 21st century. It's really the next step in evolution. Technological evolution actually continued biological evolution. You can see that very clearly. The first paradigm shifts took billions of years, and it sped it and was taken over by technological evolution, and now paradigm shifts take just a few years' time. And the next step in evolution will be enhancing our own intelligence through intimate connection with machine intelligence.

It is utterly mind-boggling. Where does it all lead? Where does it end up? Is it possible to see far enough ahead?

Ray Kurzweil: We can describe certain aspects of it, but we can't actually imagine all the innovation.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We see very powerful trends, and we see that, for example, computer power has been growing exponentially, and people say, "Okay, but Moore's Law's going to come to an end." But in fact, what I've seen is that every time one paradigm comes to an end, we replace it with another one. We've done that already five times in computation. So we can, I think, anticipate enormous power in all of these technologies. What they'll be applied for? We can't imagine all of the innovation that will occur. But I see it as fundamentally a spiritual process. The word God is really an ideal of -- and has been described as -- infinite intelligence, creativity, beauty, love, all-knowing. And what we see in evolution is that intelligence, beauty, creativity grows at an exponential rate and gets greater and greater -- never becomes infinite but becomes enormously more powerful growing exponentially, therefore becoming closer or more God-like, but never really reaching that ideal. So it's moving in that spiritual direction. I see evolution as a spiritual process, and I see technology as the cutting edge of that process. It is the human species which is different from any other species in that other species use tools, but they don't evolve over generations the way ours do, taking the next step in evolution by merging with our technology and continuing to grow in this sort of exponentially accelerating condition.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

The New York Times reviewed your book in last weekend's paper. They put it like this: "How seriously are we to take all of this breathless compu-hype? Will the 21st century really see machines acquire mentality?"

Ray Kurzweil: Well, that's The New York Times review of my book!

Get the Flash Player to see this video. That particular writer I think is dealing with the issue of consciousness, which is a supremely subtle, slippery issue, ultimately the most important issue. I don't think it's a scientific issue, and in saying that, I don't mean to dismiss it. I really mean to say that there's room for -- or importance to -- fields of philosophy and religion that go beyond science, that really do deal with these issues of who is conscious, and a deep respect for consciousness as sort of the ultimate reality. Western thinking has been that there's all this swirling matter and it finally evolves to be complex enough and you get entities that are conscious. Whereas, at the risk of oversimplification, Eastern and Buddhist ways of thinking very often start with the premise that consciousness is the ultimate reality and that consciousness basically creates the world of energy and matter in our thoughts. We think things and those thoughts then manifest themselves in what we consider to be physical reality. And I think in fields such as quantum mechanics, we're finding there's a blend of both, and that there's some interaction that's deeply mysterious between consciousness and the material world.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I don't think there's any such thing as a consciousness detector. I mean, I think we will have machines that have the complexity, richness, and subtlety of human behavior. I mean, right now it's very easy to dismiss machines because they're still a million times simpler than human beings, and they don't have all the endearing qualities. If you have a virtual character that claims to be conscious and have feelings, we so quickly reach the limits of their performance -- and they lack the subtle cues that we associate with really having consciousness and emotion -- then it's not an effective impression. But we will achieve machines in a few decades that have the complexity and richness of human thinking, in many ways they'll be derivative of human thinking or even copies of human thinking in a different medium, and they'll have the richness of behavior. And when they claim to be having feelings and being conscious, people will believe them. If we don't believe them, they'll get mad at us. But there will be philosophers that come along and say, "Yes, that entity is a really great simulation of a human and it really is very convincing, but it doesn't squirt neurotransmitters so it can't be conscious." And there's no way to really settle that argument. There's no machine you can put it in and a light will go on that, yes, this entity is conscious. It becomes fundamentally a deeply philosophical issue. But I think the reality will be that we will accept the consciousness of these entities, and there won't be a clear distinction. We're going to have human minds, brains that have non-biological thinking processes melded with biological ones. We'll have fully non-biological thinking processes that seem very human-like because they're derived from human thinking, and there's going to be many different subtle ways of interacting, of the two worlds interacting, and there's not going to be a clear distinction between human and machine.

How is that going to affect our lives?

Ray Kurzweil: I think it'll feel very natural when we get there.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you described today's world to people a hundred years ago, they would find many things we talk about totally mystifying, even people from ten years ago. But we don't wake up suddenly in the year 2040. We get there a day at a time, and it's actually interesting how quickly we adjust to new developments that seem remarkable. We kind of hear about them before they happen. Then when they happen, they don't really happen because they don't quite work yet. Then they start working a little bit better. By the time they work well, it's not new anymore because we've been hearing about it for many years. And we kind of get used to these gradually evolving changes. We have a great deal of plasticity as a species in what we can accept. So we get there a step at a time, and each increment makes sense as it happens. I think it'll be part of everyday reality.

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