Ray Kurzweil Interview (page: 3 / 6) Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence	Print Interview

Are there any limits to what a machine is going to be able to do?

Ray Kurzweil: No.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think once a machine achieves a human level of intelligence, it'll combine it with some natural advantages that machines have. Machines can share their knowledge. My knowledge of a subject is a pattern of energy and matter, a pattern of internal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations. I can't take that pattern and download it to your brain. I can maybe take months to explain something, and you can explain things to me, but it's a very slow process. But machines can instantly share these patterns, and they're ultimately much faster. We use this chemical information processing that's ten million times slower than electronic circuits, and we can't remember things very precisely. So a machine will be able -- once it actually achieves some of the subtlety of human intelligence based on our chaotic, massively parallel thinking processes -- it'll be able to combine that with some of these natural advantages of machines, machine intelligence. And machines will continue to evolve exponentially.

Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, in competing against the IBM chess computer, emphatically said, "The computer might beat me in a game, but the computer will never beat me in a match, in a series of games." In other words, the computer will never be able to achieve the kind of creativity and instinctive responses of the human brain. He said he would never lose a match with a computer.

Ray Kurzweil: Well, he did lose a match.

He lost a game.

Ray Kurzweil: No, it was a series of games. He lost a match. It was a standard tournament match.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The word "never" is also subject to the law of accelerating returns. It used to be when people said things will never happen, it actually took 40 or 50 years before they happened. Now when people say things will never happen, we see them in five or ten years. So it's also an accelerating process, and Deep Blue used only one narrow technique in artificial intelligence, which is recursive search, just brute force of looking at all the different possible moves and then counter-moves and building up this tree. There's a few other tricks to it, but it was not using pattern recognition, which is a sort of chaotic, highly parallel, self-organizing process we have in the brain. That's actually my field, and that's not exclusively a human province. We can create machines built on those same principles, and they'll have some of the same properties. They won't be perfect, but they'll be able to see insights and recognize patterns that are extremely subtle. Once we combine that kind of thinking with some of the logical analysis that computers have always been very good at, that'll be a very powerful combination. Kasparov is commenting on this one machine that he encountered and then thinking that that's never going to change. "Well, that machine may be able to play chess but really can't talk about chess and doesn't really understand the context of chess in the historical level." But that doesn't mean that no machine ever will.

You grew up in Queens, New York. What was it like growing up there?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, I first grew up in kind of an urban area, Jackson Heights, and then we moved to a more suburban area. I went to a public high school, although actually there was a very good science program there. We had more Westinghouse winners than any other high school in the country, actually.

How would you describe yourself as a kid growing up?

Ray Kurzweil: Curious.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I always had a project I was working on. I always had one good friend. I had some intense friendships. I wasn't gregarious, but I wasn't a classical nerd, either. I knew I wanted to be a scientist from age five, but I actually didn't understand what a scientist was. What I really wanted to do was be an inventor. I liked creating things, some kind of magic. You put materials together and something happens that goes beyond what you put into it if you get the combination just right.

What attracted you to science at age five?

Ray Kurzweil: For some reason I decided I wanted to build a rocket ship, and it was amazing to me that you could put these ordinary materials together and then take a trip to another world. It didn't work, so I learned that lesson, but I kept at it. I discovered the computer at age 12, and that did bring me to other worlds, but more subjective worlds.

Were you reading Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? Why do you think you were interested in this at such a young age?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ray Kurzweil: There was a fascination with science then that emerged. This was the 1950s. My parents found it surprising. They were both artists, but they encouraged it because science was the thing to do. My father was a musician. He always felt actually I would combine computers and music, because he felt there was a natural affinity, and he actually had an interest in the 1960s in some of the early synthesizer work. My mother was, and still is, a visual artist. But I had a lot of scientists in my family, actually. My grandmother was, I believe, the first woman in Europe to get a Ph.D. in chemistry, and she lectured in Europe, and she also ran a school for girls. So I came from an intellectual family.

Did you have siblings? Brothers and sisters?

Ray Kurzweil: Yeah, one sister. She's six years younger, and she's an accountant in Santa Barbara now.

Were you a good big brother?

Ray Kurzweil: I hope so. I'm seeing her tomorrow, actually.

As a kid, what did you do besides think about inventing something? What were you and your friends interested in?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, aside from that, it's pretty typical. There was this little island in the middle of our street, an island of untamed bushes where we would create little fantasy worlds. I liked to create different worlds.

Did that come from reading? Was there someone early in your life who inspired you to think such things?

Ray Kurzweil: I don't know about that. I did like reading stories, Rudyard Kipling and some science fiction I remember as a child.

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