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Radio Lab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know, wherever you get podcasts. What does one of the leading experts on artificial intelligence see on the horizon? The reason we don't get smarter is we have a limited size for our brain, but if we can actually go outside of our brain and into the cloud, the cloud right now is expanding exponentially we'll be able to think much deeper thoughts. It's Wednesday, June 19th, and just like every day, today is Science Friday.
I'm Cypher, I produce their Kathleen Davis. Ray Kurzweil has been in the field of artificial intelligence for more than 60 years, longer than probably anybody else. One of his biggest accomplishments is coining the term the singularity. The idea that man and machine will merge as the next stage of evolution. Raise new book The Singularity is Neuror when we merge with AI is out this month. Here he is talking to I Reflato.
Joining me now is futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil author of the new book The Singularity is Neuror when we merge with AI. Ray has worked with artificial intelligence in that field for more than 60 years. I'm going to guess longer than probably any other person alive. Welcome back to Science Friday Ray. Yeah, great to be here again. Nice to have you.
You know, when you look at the last 20 years, is it hard for you not to just, yeah, I told you so, I mean, has it gone the way you thought it would? Well, other people are saying that in 1999, I predicted by 2029, we'd reach the Turing test and also AGI were basically computer can do anything a human can do. People met that with a great deal of skepticism. Stanford had a conference, apparently about a thousand people came from around the world.
And everybody agreed that this would happen, but they didn't think it would happen in 30 years. The average was 100 years. Some people said several hundred years. Nobody said it would happen within 30 years. But now everybody is saying that. Well, why did you get it right and they didn't? Because I have a graph, price performance of computation, and it's a straight line on a logarithmic graph, so as you go up the graph, it represents an exponentiation of the speed.
So in 1939, we did 0.000007 calculations per second per constant dollar. And the last thing we did, 135 billion calculations per second. So that says 75 quadrillion-fold increase for the same amount of money. And I basically used that chart, basically for most of my predictions. I figured we needed about a trillion calculations per second to achieve what human beings could do. And I figured that would take place in 2029. And we're right on that track.
It's an absolutely straight line on a logarithmic graph. It's pretty extraordinary. And we were actually changing different types of technology. In the beginning it was relays, then discrete transistors, then integrated circuits. No matter what type of technology we were improving, we made the same shift in exponential terms every year for 81 years. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. You predicted that AI will pass the Turing test in 2029. Does that prediction still stand or might it be even earlier?
Well, most people now are saying it's going to happen earlier. Elon Musk says we'll do it within two years. So I'm saying five years. I've seen no reason to amplify my prediction, but it probably will happen sooner than that. And in terms of the singularity you predicted, it will happen in 2045. Is that still the case or could that be earlier? I'm sticking with that prediction.
That basically means we'll be able to shift our awareness to what happens in our own brain as well as what happens in the cloud. And the reason we don't get smarter is we have a limited size for our brain. But if we can actually go outside of our brain and into the cloud, the cloud right now is expanding exponentially. It gets twice as fast every year for the same money. We'll be able to think much deeper thoughts. We'll feel the same, except we'll be able to do what we do now.
We do with our phones. Fones are a little slow. We'd like to actually just have these thoughts appear in our brain without having the way to type things in and so on. Are you thinking of a brain computer interface here? Yes, exactly. But if you go back to 2005, we didn't even have phones. Very few people had phones. And if you had a phone, it did very little. I've actually done polls where I've asked people who he has their phone. Everybody raises their hand.
Nobody goes outside without their phone. And so we'll have a brain computer cloud interface that no one will think twice about is what you're saying. Right. And people say, oh, I wouldn't do that. But like people didn't think they would use phones 20 years ago, either carry around this thing and let lose it. But now everybody has a phone and we'll be able to interface our brain wirelessly to the cloud, which is growing exponentially.
But a lot of things are happening now that we only just thought about in 2005. For example, we're doing now biology this way. For example, Moderna, they actually gathered several billion different possibilities for what could cause COVID. And generally we would go through that with personal trials, but they actually did it with simulated trials. And they did that in two days, using AI, different types of techniques to eliminate various possibilities and came out with one.
And that's still the solution that we're using now for COVID with done in two days a few years ago. And actually, the variation of that is now dealing with cancer. We have our first trial with a thousand people in England where we're testing pancreatic and breast cancer and several other different types of cancer using something very similar and getting very positive results so far. We don't have the final results yet. But that never could take place before.
This is actually the very first time that this has happened. So we're going to go through all kinds of diseases using simulated biology as of two or three years ago. We had gone through 170,000 proteins. They were actually done by person, but that was a very small fraction of them. And then AlphaFull 2 in 2022 went through 200 million proteins and got the shape exactly correct. And that's going to help come up with new medications.
So there's a lot of things that we had imagined or that I imagined in 2005 that are now actually coming true. You had also imagined if I remember way back in the day that people might live forever. That's not exactly what I'm saying. We're going to reach longevity escape velocity. Right now you go through a year, you use up a year of your longevity. However, scientific progress is also progressing and you get back a certain number of months from that.
Right now you're getting back about four months a year. So you lose a year but you get back four months or one losing eight months. Now with the scientific progress is progressing exponentially. Somewhere between 29 and 2035 you'll get back not four months but a full year. So you use up a year but you'll get back a year and you'll basically stay in the same place as far as your longevity is concerned.
Now that's not a guarantee you could have a 20 year old and you can compute their life expectancy as many decades and they could die tomorrow, let's say from an accident. So we're also dealing with accidents, for example, cars. Right now we lose 40,000 lives from humans driving cars. When a computer drives a car it's going to be much safer. In fact that's one of the reasons it's held up. We don't want any accidents. And so we're going to get rid of a lot of accidents in cars and other places.
But it's not a guarantee. You could develop a disease that we don't have a cure for yet. But as we go through a year you're not going to be using up a year of your longevity. Because we'll have new medicines and vaccines and body parts. Yes. Because we weigh around our body parts, right? Absolutely. In fact I'm involved with a company where we're creating artificial kidneys and people are working on artificial hearts, artificial lungs. So we're going to be recreating body parts as well.
And we're going to be making progress at a much faster pace than we've done before. As we watch artificial intelligence, AI, skyrocketing, we're also aware that it uses a lot of energy. Right? It's using more energy than Bitcoin mining these days. Can we achieve the singularity without completely depleting our energy sources and our grids? Well, we're also making fantastic progress on converting renewable resources into energy. Right now solar cells are 99.7% cheaper since 1975.
We've increased the amount of energy coming from that 2 million fold. And the total amount of energy we're getting from solar and wind, it's doubling every four years. So at that rate, in about 10 years we'll be getting all of our energy that way. And it'll keep getting cheaper. So ultimately, it'll be very inexpensive. We actually have 10,000 times more sunlight that falls on the earth than we need to meet all of our energy needs.
Some of it's hard to get to, but we have plenty of headroom and we'll be able to do more than do that within 10 years. Support for Science Friday comes from the Rita Allen Foundation, more at RitaAllen.org. Do we have enough headroom for making computer chips that all this stuff is going to need? I mean the basic elements needed for computing. What about mining of the materials we need for it? Let's hold part of the process. I mean, it's gone on for 81 years.
We find the materials were able to create many more computations per second. I include in the book an analysis of what the ultimate would be. We call that a compitronium. And we're very, very far from that. So we can keep this exponential growth going for a very long time. There's a climate change argument against the massive use of computing and AI. Can they work together? Well, that's only true if we use non-renewable sources.
If we use oil and coal and so on that add to carbon dioxide, these new forms of solar and wind don't use any of that. And we also can go and use all of our energy that way and completely eliminate adding carbon dioxide to develop energy. That's where we're headed. Do you think we could ask AI to help us solve the climate change problem? Well, it's doing that by converting things that don't add carbon dioxide to create energy. And that's going at an exponential rate.
So as we get to the 2030s, we'll actually be able to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we're creating. Moving on to the dominance of the AI industry. Do you think there needs to be checks and balances so that AI doesn't get out of hand? I mean, how can we make progress without losing control in this race to the top? Or do you expect that AI will take us over in that singularity? Well, yes and no. I mean, we do need some more guidelines.
We actually have an acylamar meeting because the acylamar meetings on biotechnology have worked out very well. And we're doing that now for AI. There is a lot of guidelines already. I mean, any of these major companies, if they put out something that causes a great tale of harm, there'll be a lot of liability to the very motivated to avoid that. And I would say in all these new changes, they put more effort into avoiding problems and creating the new developments.
So the insurance companies, as they always do? Yeah. That's actually part of the motivation and sometimes people look at the problems we're creating and they can imagine the problems and they don't imagine any new solutions and they go, oh, gee, if somebody put this out, we'd have a big problem. But we're actually making advances in how to avoid problems at the same time that we're creating these new problems. So far, it's worked out well. We've had this concern.
I mean, the light light movement started 200 years ago. They were correct at things like the cotton Jenny and so on, did eliminate lots of these jobs. We created new jobs. And if you ask, well, gee, what are the new jobs going to be? And you asked that 200 years ago, no one could answer because we hadn't even invented these new jobs and the new industries that they were employed in. So I'm optimistic, but I mean, there are definitely problems.
Intelligence is really the most important resource we have. And if you have somebody that's not of right mind who has a lot of intelligence, that could be a problem. So I'm not saying there's no issues. I mean, we really have to pay attention to this. Speaking of paying attention, what about the upcoming elections, the possibility of phony AI, AI-generated statements and photos? I mean, that's probably the biggest problem that AI is presenting for this election.
It probably will take place right before the election so there won't be time to actually sort it out. Because if it happened now, we'd be able to figure out, okay, that's probably a fake answer. I mean, you see Biden and he said something. It looks real, but it's completely fake. And that could cause a lot of problems. It hasn't really happened to the major players. So I'm not saying there's no problems. I mean, we really do have to pay attention to this.
I think we'll make it through, but these are definitely issues we didn't have in the last election, for example. Yeah, and as we move toward the singularity, what concerns you most about that? Well, we're going to have to make changes much more quickly. You ask actually people in the side polls where people think that poverty is getting worse. 80% of the people think that poverty is getting worse. There's actually, it's been reduced to 50% in the last 20 years.
And so we're actually doing much better than we thought, really because of technology. And we had time to figure that out. I mean, how many jobs were lost from the railroad? But it took decades for that to happen. That was happening very, very quickly. I think people are actually getting used to this, but it could be a problem with just the speed of change. We are actually getting wealthier. US personal income per capita is actually 10 times better than it was 100 years ago.
People think, oh, gee, I'd like to live in 1900, but they don't realize how poor we were and how little help we got from health technology, for example. So things were very, very poor 100 years ago. And that's going to continue. But we're going to have to change our expectations as to what kind of jobs we can have and so on. So this can be very rapid change. And we've seen this in the last two years. I mean, this air revolution started two years ago.
But you compared the technology two years ago to today, it's quite astounding how much progress has been made. Well, do you think our job training can keep up with this? Has people will need to change the kinds of jobs and the education they get? Yes. And it's not exactly clear what to do. I think we will actually have some government programs so that your baseline, I mean, some people can't work, for example. It's not going to be zero and we're going to move towards that.
But then the real concern is having a job that gives you satisfaction and personal reflection and so on, not just being able to make a living. So that's a nice problem to have, but that's actually going to take a lot of concern on people who try to plan things like job training and so on. Ray, we were brought out of time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I wish you good luck with your book. It's a great read. Yes, we're very much looking forward to it.
It's coming out on the 25th of this month. Ray Curzwile, inventor, futurist, and author of the Singularity is Nearer. When we merge with AI, and if you want to read an excerpt of the book, you can do so on our website, sciencefrieday.com slash Singularity. And that's all the time that we have for today. A lot of folks helped make the show happen this week, including... Deep Uttersmith. Sandy Roberts. Beth Ranny. Simon Kasmur. And many more.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about why Tick Season is getting longer. And some tips for spotting those past year racnids. But for now, I'm Cypher, I produce your Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping croaker. And you'll find over 30,000 mouth watering choices that excite your inner foodie. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week.
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