Gadgetory

hello everyone I'm Hollywood from cnet.com at South by Southwest 2012 and I am incredibly excited today to be speaking with Ray Kurzweil engineer futurist author of singularity is near and then this forthcoming book which sounds incredible which is how to create a mind the secret of human thought revealed so no pressure for this book that's a pretty big promise well I think we actually have enough understanding now to describe the basic mechanism of the neocortex it's this little region of the brain where we do our thinking my thesis is a module that recognizes a pattern and can remember a pattern and it's repeated 300 million times and self organizes itself into elaborate hierarchies that's a keyword that's why we can do hierarchical thinking which is a key feature of mammals but we took it to a greater extent so 80% of our brain is the neocortex but I described how that works and related to things like creativity and innovation and consciousness pretty well all those issues and are you relating it to the eventual development of those same capabilities and machines yes that's actually the title how to create a mind turns out a technique that we've actually gravitated to in artificial intelligence it's mathematically equivalent to what the brain actually does not because we copied it but we kind of arrived at the same conclusion and I describe how that works and we have very impressive examples now of artificial intelligence like Watson for example and not only just Watson understand these convoluted jeopardy queries but it actually sat down so to speak and read 200 million pages of material including all of Wikipedia and remembered it all and it understood it in natural language this is not hand coded by the scientists so it's capable of actually absorbing knowledge from documents we've written 200 million of them so when you look around then party bus pause when you look around you're sort of have most recently pegged to the potential date of the singularity at 2045 when you look at something like Watson and you think about your own theory of exponential change and growth do you feel like we might be getting closer absolutely there's two key dates 2029 is when a computer will actually match human intelligence it's interesting to note that Watson even though it actually does not understand human language as well as a human could get a higher score than the best two humans put together because whatever a computer can do it can then do that over massive amounts of material and master at all and have Total Recall you and I could read Wikipedia but we wouldn't remember very much of it it would double in size by the time we were done Wikipedia can can read the whole thing in in a week and remember it all so it's a very powerful combination this should give us real confidence that that 2029 date is if anything conservative and then information technology both hardware and software which is not appreciated will continue to grow exponentially so we're 2045 we're talking about an increase in our collective human machine intelligence of a factor of a billion that's such a singular change that we borrowed this metaphor from physics and call it a singularity I read your book and one of the things I find really interesting about it is that you have a fairly optimistic view of what will happen post singularity I almost feel reading your book like that like it's an optimism that pervades even through you know the terrible news that we see today that I feel like well you know technology will fix these problems not everyone agrees though well first of all this terrible news that you read is good news that you read it because 30,000 people might die in a battle in world war ii and you saw it at all it was in a grainy newsreel three weeks later on the movie theater well one maybe you read about it in a newspaper but only elite did that in 19th century there's no information at all we have much better information today about what's wrong with the world that's a good thing and I have many analyses and graphs that show the same kind of progression steadily towards better health better wealth more education for the developing world and worldwide all of these measures that we associate with well-being are continually improving so this is not just often in the future we read Thomas Hobbes the Charles Dickens about how horrific human life was human life expectancy was 37 200 years ago that that being said there are dangers to these new technologies fire kept us warm but also burn down our villages technology's been a double-edged sword ever since we've had technology and I've written you know probably more than about these dangers and what to do about them but these are not Pat answers and this is a major challenge of humanity how do we control the dangers let's say of a bioterrorist getting a hold of biotechnology and re-engineering a virus to be more deadly I mean these are negative scenarios that that we have to be wary of so I tend to be an optimistic person I think if you actually examine human history to date and look at it factually we are steadily getting better and better off kid in Africa where the smartphone has access to more information than the president United States did 15 years ago he or she is walking around with a billion dollars of communications and computation circa 1975 so we're all and it's not just gonna be these gadgets we're going to be applying there's exponentially growing information technologies to things like food and water and energy right when you look around though let's say at some place like South by Southwest how much of a stake do you have in the types of or an interest at least the types of innovations that we're pursuing you know I've heard people complain that at South by Southwest it feels like the only thing we're innovating on as a tech community is the better ways to check into restaurants do you know what what could distract us from from the goal of a really great technological innovation well I'm fed up tunity to talk to a very small fraction of the people here and have encountered some very creative companies that are working in artificial intelligence biotechnology new applications of communications in social networks every area of technology and in my view we get from here to the kind of future visions I paint one small innovation at a time it's not that some lab is going to make this giant leap and so it's all of these entrepreneurs to meet here and that I need every day that are gonna make that happen that was kind of my next question is do you do you see it as one thing that it's a like a light row comes along electro camera comes along and that pushes digital imaging forward in a new direction and it all adds up to another log method lower logarithmic graph let's actually have a daily newsletter sorry I read what myself and my editorial staff come up with and we at the struggle when we began ten years ago maybe once a week we'd find a real exciting story that was a breakthrough they're now several a day it's definitely happening faster and faster the printing press took 400 years to take off the telephone did better 50 years reached a quarter of the US population cell phone bill Bevans seven years social networks wiki's and blogs did that in three years well Mike four years ago most people didn't use social networks wiki's and blogs it sounds like ancient history there wasn't so long ago so things are happening faster and faster and it's made up of lots of innovators and the whole support around the world really because I traveled the world and the American model of venture capital and angel Capital and a spirit of innovation entrepreneurship is really growing everywhere and that's very encouraging so as we have access to more information more knowledge it seems like we also have a the potential to generate more fear more concerned I mean what are the is there a point at which humanity would stop itself from progressing do we have built-in political religious even scientific there or economic barriers that could slow down this bro you know the things that get slowed down if they do at all are very small stones in the river like take stem-cell research those that's not not equivalent to biotechnology that's one little technique and the progress has float around it invented a way to create the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without embryos by taking a skin cells dating for genes and creating what's called an induced pluripotent cell which is equivalent turn an embryonic stem cell on the ethicists who were opposed to embryonic stem cells like this idea because there's no embryos involved and it's better anyway if you want a new liver you'd like it to have your DNA and not the DNA of some other embryo and more and more people are now involved because the tools of innovation have been democratized a kid in his dorm room can start Facebook or Google and you've got you know teenagers like tavi Gevinson who rules the world of fashion she's 14 years old with her very influential blog she's going to cover a vogue recently and so you're seeing young people with very inexpensive tools who can create ideas that shake the world and actually reach the world market some friends and I the other day we're talking about the idea of hobbyist geneticists and hobbyist biologists who now have the tools to map viruses at home virtually at home and patient groups are organizing not just to keep each other informed but to actually solve the problem they have the motivation to cure their disease and they have now the tools to do so you've got a hundred thousand or million people with a disease they've got the skills and with collaborative decision-making and problem solving software which is solving lots of different problems that's becoming quite feasible I couldn't I would be remiss if I didn't ask you obviously about the future of humanity it felt like the book The Singularity is near is pretty positive about what will happen to humans in a singularity world that we will be happily part of a new machine consciousness and a sort of biological machine existence but I I was very interested in the idea that there would be this small group of humans that chooses to remain natural and exist first of all there is chapter 8 the deeply intertwined promise sources peril of GN R which talks in pretty stark terms about some of the dangers so we are introducing new technologies that are dangerous and that's really our major challenge but as for people that opt out we have them today called the Amish maybe there are a few other groups I mean how many people opt out of modern communication technologies and so on but it's not one thing it's not like check here I want to be an ant yes no I mean there's a million choices there's a million choices on iPhone apps already so there's going to be millions of choices they'll be very conservative things which you would be foolish not to use some nanobots that basically fights you know many or most diseases and you'd be irresponsible not to do it then there'd be more edgy things that are optional and the be millions of those and some of the early adopters some won't be but it's gonna be very hard to find people that opt out completely how many people opt out now well and it seems that that these concerns have led to kind of what could be very useful planning right for the kind of survival of humanity into the singularity University and well the reason I write about these things and the reason I think it's important is for people to know where we're headed we can't define precisely this company's gonna succeed this technical standard will be adopted but we can talk about terms about what the power capacity price performance of these future technologies will be and it does provide the scale to solve the major challenges of humanity availability of water or applying three-dimensional printing to printing out houses at very low cost Lego style and so on these are really feasible ideas and people look at the problems then they get overwhelmed because they're assuming that we're only gonna have 19th century tools to deal with them but if they look at these submerging exponentially growing technologies it has the potential to solve the major challenges at the same time it's going to introduce new challenges this issues like privacy which you're familiar with there's more existential risks so we have to we have to deal with those I believe there is a path where we have to give a high priority to overcoming the challenges and taking advantage of that promise do you ever feel like you're just like the scientist in quantum mechanics who's studying the properties of molecule and then changing it by looking at it because sometimes when I look at the predictions that are attributed to you say 2019 we will all have heads up display glasses I mean our Google engineers working on those glasses because you wrote about them I think there's some feedback and I'm actually trying to influence technology in a constructivist direction the reason I write about these things that said that we will develop the positive applications and also be mindful of of the risks so we need ethical standards how to avoid dangers we need rapid response systems like a system that would respond to someone put out a new bioengineered virus that actually is in place I've actually worked on that with the army so writing about those dangers is intended to get people to work on it this is maybe a little bit of a left turn but what about space so if you are imagining a civilization in which we have progressed so far that we're you know beings of incredible consciousness that potentially start to control the universe is it possible that some other species on a different planet gets there first well I've written extensively about that one and I've had a public debates at SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence about this issue I think the common SETI assumption is that well this the likelihood that any one planet has intelligent civilizations it's small but there's so many of them billions of billions that there must be thousands of them out there the problem is that that they're ignoring what I call the law of accelerating over chance and once the tech a civilization gets to say the point that we were at with primitive radio and the Pony Express it's only a matter of a few short centuries before they're dealing with the kind of technologies that I write about in the singularity look how far we've come and even the last 150 years 50 years from now hundred years from now gonna have these fantastic technologies within a couple centuries will be doing galaxy-wide engineering it'd be impossible not to notice if there were thousands of civilizations out there doing galaxy-wide engineering and we don't see them that's the Fermi paradox my conclusion is they're probably not out there you might say that must be incredibly like that we are the first but somebody's got to be first in fact it's very unlikely to have a universe altogether that can undergo evolution encode information yet here we are by the entropic principle if it weren't the case we wouldn't be talking about it so I've written about this in the singularity it's me I think the fact that we haven't noticed it means we're probably not going to notice them or that if we're there were moving much faster well once you get to say the point we are at it's a very short amount of time cosmologically speaking which is measured in millions or billions of years to get to a point of vast technological reach and then what are your thoughts on the the search for the Higgs boson search for the search for the Higgs boson and and I mean I assume that it you must consider it all part of our sort of every question that gets answered leads to ten more questions and ten more answers that's like how a journalist understands expert has been great at coming up with anthropomorphic terms that people can relate to because otherwise it's very hard to understand I didn't call it the god particle so now that came from the physics community and not from the press now they wish they'd never said it so dark matter that sounds very mysterious so I think it's help watching it to try to make physics more understandable and because physics leads to practical results in all of electronics is based on physics and based on quantum effects and so all of these insights lead to practical insights but understanding the world around us is a natural curiosity we have and one of the things were curious about is how our own brains work so that's what I'm and so the book comes out in October okay i pre-ordered it today I want you to do it really looking forward to reading it thank you so much for sitting down with us today and enjoy Austin oh well I am great so you can see obviously this interview that you're watching now many more interviews from South by Southwest and all of our coverage at CNN tv.com