What You Need to Know About the Future with Legendary Futurist Ray Kurzweil | Impact Theory

Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's episode is filmed a little bit differently than normal. It was filmed at the amazing Abundance 360 conference, which is thrown by Peter Diamandis, and it brings together some of the world's foremost thinkers in technology, and we took advantage of that opportunity and filmed today's guest there. And he is one of the world's leading inventors. Forbes magazine called him the ultimate thinking machine, and Inc. magazine referred to him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. Not at all surprising, given the laundry list of ubiquitous technologies he's invented. Here are but a few. He's the principal inventor of the first CCD, the first flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition device. His inventions have laid the foundation for several of the industries that we literally just take for granted today. For instance, his work in the music industry has been so fundamental to the evolution of that industry that he's received a Grammy award for outstanding achievements in music and technology. He holds 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three US presidents. He's also the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as a matter of course. All of that, coupled with the fact that he has a 30-year track record of accurate predictions about the future and what technology will look like, it is no surprise that Google hired him as a director of engineering. He's written five best-selling books, including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, and he's the co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University, which he helped create to help sharpen the next generation of great minds. So, please help me in welcoming the man who PBS named as one of the 16 revolutionaries who made America. The legendary futurist, Ray Kurzweil. Ray, thank you so much for joining us and I wanted to jump right in. The kind of success that you've had is really unparalleled from the accuracy of your predictions, but I think even more enthralling from the fact that you've been an entrepreneur since you were in your teens. Um what is it that's allowed you to be as successful as you are? Well, it's it it's a question uh I don't actually get that often. To to think about it. Like a lot of uh entrepreneurs or creative people who pursue endeavors in all kinds of fields, uh the idea kind of takes over and has an imperative uh of its own and I just have to pursue it. So, it's not like I choose the project, the project kind of uh recruits me and uh I then become devoted to it, whether it's writing a book or planning a speech or an invention or a company. It just becomes an imperative. So, there's a kind of a devotion to it. Part of my philosophy is failure is just success deferred. And I think actually if you knew of all the obstacles you'd meet, you'd never start a project. So, it's actually good not to think too much about what you're doing, uh but make sure you have a passion for it that uh it's something that would be beneficial to to the world. One practice I use is I imagine uh I'm giving a speech say four or five years from now and I'm describing how I succeeded in this project. So, what would I have to be saying? Well, if a project, let's say it's a reading machine for the blind, it's going to have to uh uh can adapt, but their level their conceptual level, their ability to operate at an abstract level differs depending on really the size of their neocortex. So, primates, which have more neocortex, really optimized uh the neocortex within brain without our big foreheads, are pretty adaptable and can solve problems at a certain level. When we got that additional neocortex, we were already doing a very good job of being primates. Uh so, we created higher levels of abstractness and language and music and so, solving a problem how to create a beautiful piece of music, that's just a level of of abstraction that mammals without a frontal cortex can't do. It's not that we're more adaptable, it's just that we are operating at a higher conceptual level. But do you have um things that that are beliefs or otherwise that you use to to give structure to your approach to a problem? I mean, I have certain methodologies. Ultimately, it's a belief in my end goal and I think about that carefully uh that the end goal is worth doing. Uh it is feasible. I have some rough model of how to get there really through this inverse process of imagining that I'm explaining how I solved it and what would I have to be saying and then a belief that I can overcome obstacles. And one method I use is actually a sleep method. When I go to sleep at night, I assign myself a problem and it it can be a broad diversity of types of problems. It could be how to solve a certain technical issue or a math problem or a relationship problem or a business strategy issue. Should I do this deal? Should I hire this person? How am I going to articulate this idea in a book I'm writing? And I try not to solve it, but I try to imagine what form would a solution take, what are the options, what do I know about it. And Freud said that in your dreams, your sensors, that's c e n s o r s, are relaxed. So, that's why you'll dream about things that are culturally taboo, but they're also professional taboo. So, like you can't solve a signal processing problem with these formulas, and linguistics doesn't use these rules. So, those kinds of inhibitions are relaxed in your dreams, and you'll think of things that you wouldn't otherwise allow yourself to think about uh during your waking time. Something else that doesn't work in your dreams is your rational faculties. So, when the elephant walks on the wall, the most remarkable thing about it is that you don't think it's remarkable. So, you really can't evaluate ideas rationally. So, the next And if I wake up, I'll find myself dreaming very obliquely and strangely about this problem. The next step is in the morning I try to get into a lucid dream state, which is really halfway between dreaming and being awake. So, I'm still in the dream, I have access to the dream ideas, I have the dream emotion, but I'm also aware, for example, that I'm in a bed. So, now I have really both the creative dream ideas and my rational faculties, and I'll run through the dream and try to interpret it and try to make sense out of it. And invariably, doesn't always work, but it it works more times than not, I'll have some new insight. It may be a whole new idea uh about this issue. I've gotten up with it and written a patent application for an invention that's come out this way. So, during the day, I'm just kind of carrying out my dream decisions. That's really interesting. Now, did lucid dreaming come easily to you, or is that something you had to practice? Uh it's something to practice. Uh I describe this in in uh my book Transcend. There's a chapter on sleep, and in there I describe this this method. That's really interesting. I've actually never heard somebody talk about using lucid dreaming to solve business problems. I do something sort of similar with meditation, where I'll side on a problem before I start meditating and then click in. Right. I think that's a purpose of dreams is in fact to solve problems, to make sense of the experiences we've had to to re- sort of calibrate our uh patterns in our neocortex to to accommodate new information. Uh but you can utilize that creative process uh consciously and dreams obviously allow you to think about things you otherwise wouldn't. How do they work? It's interesting though when I So, I've tried lucid dreaming not well. Um and what I find is as soon as I engage in the dream with any sort of awareness that it is a dream, it wakes me up. Well, the lucid dreaming is not while you're sleeping, it's in the morning when you are now kind of waking up and you're halfway between the dream and being awake. So, you're kind of aware that you're in a bed, but you're also still have access to the dream. So, you don't do the least lucid dreaming throughout the night. You just let yourself dream and it'll be influenced by what you seeded your subconscious with by signing yourself this problem. I want to go back for a second. So, if my math is right, you launched your first company in the '60s. Is that true? Well, my first company was matching high school students to colleges by computer. That was in started in 1967. I was a sophomore at MIT. I did and we ran some tens of thousands of students through it and sold it to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, a big publishing company in New York and used those proceeds to put myself through college and help support my parents. My father was already ill with heart disease. Major company was uh 1973. Basically, created a reading machine for the blind and that needed three different technologies: Omnifont optical character recognition, flatbed scanning, and text to speech synthesis and we put those three together into a reading machine. That company today is Nuance, which is a leader in language technologies. So, that's even more amazing now when I think about it. So, the reason I brought that up is I wanted to know in a modern context like starting a company, okay, yeah, it's cool, especially for it to succeed. I mean, to have lasted roughly 50 years is insanity. What was the entrepreneurial scene like back then? Did people even use the word entrepreneur? Was there seed capital? The word entrepreneurship or entrepreneur was not used and it was not a thing. It was not celebrated like it is today. People always talk about the trends from this year to the next, but if you look at the broad trend over the decades, it's just grown exponentially. The total amount of venture capital for high-tech in the United States in 1974 when I started this reading machine business was $10 million. Um, that's a small deal today. So, it it just wasn't uh on the radar and I basically funded it through angel capital. But then, when we got established and had a product, we did get an investment from Fidelity and Xerox. And then, Xerox in 1979 bought the company basically to provide a bridge back from the world of information on paper to an intelligent computer form. That became the scanners for for Xerox. So, knowing that you've built something that's gone on to be just incredibly successful, um, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs that are starting today when like you said, $10 million is a small deal, the access to the internet, I mean, there's so so much of the barrier to entry is just gone. Right. Well, there's a real emphasis on having the right idea and also the right team. Companies that succeed really have the right people behind it. I mean, if you look at Google, uh, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a great idea of reversing the links on the internet to provide a a search engine. But, they also put a very high priority on the quality of people they brought in. And that continues to be the case. And and then the team dynamics are very important. You very often have a great idea and a great team, but something happens to the team. There's a schism and they're kind of at war with each other or there's a problem personality and those kinds of issues kill more companies than anything else. But, the opportunities now to fund it in many creative ways like initial coin offerings and a substantial organization of the angel capital and just amount of money in in all different forms is breathtaking. So, if you have a good idea, uh learn to articulate it. You have to have a passion for it. People start a company say, "Well, I really want to start a company and the idea is secondary." That's really not the right But, you have to have a passion for what you're doing. And other than passion, how should people evaluate their ideas? I think with other people, mentors are very important. So, find people who've done maybe not your idea exactly, but have followed creative ideas to successful conclusion and get their input and you know, just like writing a book, you write it and then you rewrite it based on feedback from other people. It's the same thing with an entrepreneurial idea. Write a business plan. Get feedback on it. You can go through a lot of iterations. May turn out very different when you're actually going out to the marketplace. And what do you think about people that are like um paranoid to share their idea? They think that they've got something and they don't want to talk to people about it. Generally speaking, that's a mistake. I do know some companies that are operating in stealth fashion for that reason. Sometimes it's justified, but generally it's going to be the quality of your execution and your passion and your commitment. That's important. You have to break some eggs to make an omelette, and you want to recruit people and financing and mentors and all kinds of resources to succeed. You're going to have to share your idea generally far and wide. It's not a bad idea to share it publicly and get some excitement going about the idea. Most companies that have succeeded have operated that way. The thing that um really first drew me to you was you were one of the first people I heard talking about potentially living forever and what that might look like and obviously the singularity and the notion that maybe our consciousness could outlive our bodies, but even um when I first started researching you, you were really optimizing your health and trying to make sure that just hey, that the physical body lasted as long as it possibly could. Um one, what is the escape velocity longevity escape velocity exactly? Um where is that on a a timeline for the average person? So, my co-author Terry Grossman uh who was my co-author for uh Fantastic Voyage and Transcend, we talk about three bridges to radical life extension, and I would add a fourth. Bridge one is where we are now, although it's it's actually beginning to blend into the second bridge. But the first bridge is kind of what you can do based on our current knowledge and knowledge of yourself uh to get to bridge two. So, I take a lot of supplements. Some of them medications like metformin, which actually prevents cancer by killing cancer stem cells and is a caloric restriction mimetics, meaning it provides the same biochemical changes as eating less. But I take a lot of pills, about 100 a day. People say, "Ray, you really think taking these supplements and pills is going to enable you to live hundreds of years?" No, the goal is to get to bridge two. Bridge two is already started. It's going to be quite mature in a decade. That's biotechnology. Basically having the means of understanding and reprogramming the outdated software of life. And that's not a metaphor. I mean, we literally have strings of data in our genome that control our lives. And we're learning how it works, and it's outdated. It was not in the interest of the human species when that evolved for us to live much past 20. You know, when life expectancy was 19 a thousand years ago. So, we're learning how to reprogram that. We have now applications at the edge of clinical practice. We can, for example, fix a broken heart from a heart attack. We can grow organs with your DNA. And all that's coming soon. It's working already in Actually, fixing a broken heart is working in humans. That'll be a flood over the next 10 years. And I think in 10 years we'll reach longevity escape velocity, which is adding more time than is going by. Not just to infant life expectancy, but to your remaining life expectancy. This So, the sands of time will run in rather than run out. Now, it's not a guarantee. Life expectancy is a calculated number as to how long you would live if there were no further scientific progress, which of course is not the case. But you can have a computed life expectancy of 30 years, 50 years. You could still be run over by the proverbial bus tomorrow. We're working on that, too, with self-driving cars. Uh but we'll get we'll get there, I think, for the at least the diligent public in about a decade. I think, you know, I'm personally there. I think I'm not running out of time with the advances going as quickly as they already are. I'm adding at least as much time as going by. And again, life expectancy is a uh a calculation that kind of place no further scientific progress. But that's not the case. So, if you taking into consideration expected progress, I already expect to live indefinitely cuz I'm going to get to a point where we will have information and knowledge to get to the next point. So, it's a bridge to a bridge to a bridge. The third bridge is medical nanorobots that can go basically go and do microsurgery and fix every kind of disease. Uh the fourth bridge is being able to actually back ourselves up. Your phone already has sort of infinite life because you if you throw it out the window and it smashes on the ground three stories down, you can recreate it cuz it's all in the cloud and you can recreate its knowledge, its skills, its personality. Uh we can't do that yet. People will think it with our brains people will think it pretty remarkable people actually went through the day and night in 2018 without backing up their mind file. We'll ultimately be able to do that. And the reason we'll be able to do that is part of our thinking will be non-biological. That part is going to grow exponentially. So, it will ultimately predominate. It will become so smart that it can only back itself up, but it will completely understand the biological part and be able to back that up, too. So, we'll be able to back ourselves up. Going back to what you were saying about being able to fix a broken heart, one of the things I find utterly fascinating about your story and I think is illuminates what I love about your mindset is I know that you had a heart condition and had it addressed and you were being interviewed about it and you said so matter-of-factly, "I'm really glad that it was something so simple because I didn't want to have to invent a way to fix, you know, something more complicated." And I love that it there it wasn't like, "Oh, I would have died from that thing." It was just, "I would have had to invent a way." What makes you think like that? This comes from my family. The power of human ideas to solve problems. I remember when I was I think about eight, my grandfather went back to Europe, his first return visit after fleeing Hitler 1938. And he was given the opportunity to handle with his own hands original documents by Leonardo da Vinci. And he described it in reverential terms. These were sacred documents, but they were not written by God, they were written by a guy who had brilliant ideas that actually were not feasible in his lifetime, but went on to transform the world. And this was personalized. You, Ray, can find ideas that can solve problems either that you encounter or that the world encounters, and you have a responsibility to do that. It was personalized. My mother's mother's mother uh started the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls went through 14th grade. If you were lucky enough to get an education at all in mid 19th century Europe as a girl, you went through ninth grade. It was controversial. She went around Europe lecturing on the importance of educating girls and how to do it. The school was very influential on the education of women. Her daughter, my grandmother, became an exemplar, uh became uh the first woman in Europe to get a PhD in chemistry, took over the school. Between the two women, they ran it for 70 years, and then fled Hitler. So, I I got this philosophy of the power of human ideas and the importance of education and developing your ideas from my family. And it's worked so far. I mean, so far, if I've encountered problems, it could be business problems, relational problems, problems with an invention, I've found a solution. So, I have just have this confidence. It's not guaranteed, but uh so far, so good. So, I would say so far, so very good, yeah. If you had to cobble together a few traits that you think make people successful as sort of a general rule, maybe the things you've tried to pass on to your kids, like what are those few just like absolutely critical traits? Well, try to find goals and uh objectives that are meaningful to yourself and to the world. Now, in my father's case, he had a a brilliance for music, so it was creating music. My mother was a very talented artist. In my case, it was having ideas about technology, but also writing. But have some passion for what you want to accomplish at any point in time. And then optimism, uh not a trivial optimism, but a confidence that you can overcome the challenges that will invariably occur. Getting along with people because you can't do these things by yourself and so you have to be a good salesperson in the best meaning of that term to and you can sell something if you really believe in it yourself and have a passion for it. So, my first major company was building a reading machine for the blind, so it was possible to get other people to be passionate about that goal and it was meaningful. And a belief in the power of ideas and uh that you can find ideas that will solve any problem that comes along. Those are very powerful traits. You've been referred to as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. I think that's incredibly fair. I also think, I don't know if anybody's ever called you this or not, but they should, uh you're like the the real accurate Nostradamus. Something like 86% of your predictions have been accurate, which is crazy. So, would you say that, given you have that kind of track record, is the world getting better or worse? Well, there's no question it's getting better. I mean, you track any measure of uh human well-being, literacy, uh almost everybody was illiterate uh century ago, certainly two centuries ago. Almost everybody is literate today. And I have these charts that just show the trend on all these different measures. Poverty in Asia's gone down 95% over the last 25 years. And measure after measure of education, health, wealth, renewable energy, all these things are moving in the right direction. We have an evolutionary tendency to emphasize bad news that was actually important for survival. You're walking through the jungle a millennium ago, you really needed to pay attention to potential bad news like a rustling in the leaves that might be a predator. That was really important. The fact that your crops were 1% better than last year, that wasn't quite as critical to be aware of. And we have a natural empathy, so we hear about something horrible that happened halfway around the world to a small group of people, our hearts go out to them. People have the wrong algorithm processing whether the world is getting better or worse. It's how often do they hear good news versus bad news, and that's not the right measure. The world is getting better by every measure, but it happens day by day, and so it's not very exciting news that, well, compared to last week, literacy fell by, you know, 0.3%, and so we tend not to focus on that. Our information about what's wrong with the world, including violence, is getting exponentially better. So, I'd say this is the most peaceful time in human history, and people look at me like I'm nuts. Didn't you pay attention to the news and you hear about that event yesterday and last week? That's because we're hearing about events, and that's a good thing. It's painful to hear about bad news, but it actually focus us to solve them. So, looking at some of the predictions that you made, which for me as a hardcore techno-optimist, um they're very exciting. And the whole notion of the singularity, and for people that don't know, the singularity, it's um basically you describe it in fact. I mean, it's I would be stealing your words. So, what is the singularity and why shouldn't people be tense? Well, the singularity is a complex endpoint. One of my thesis is the exponential growth of information technology. And I have all these graphs are different forms of information technology like the price performance of computing and they're very perfect exponentials. It's a straight line or even another exponential on a logarithmic graph and this has been going on since the late 19th century and I have a whole mathematical explanation about why that happens. We're already past the point where we have enough hardware to emulate the human brain. The little boards that actually have over 100 times the computation needed to functionally emulate the human brain already. The software is a more challenging issue, but I make the case that we're moving exponentially on that also and we're getting some of our insights by exponentially more information about the human brain. So, I make the case that we will achieve human levels of performance in every area that humans can now perform by 2029. And once a computer achieves human levels of performance in an area, it very quickly soars past it. I mean, we saw that computers could play an average game of Go early last year and then within months soared past the best human. And then within days of that, a computer soared past that, AlphaGo Zero. And then I describe how we're going to merge with this technology in the 2030s, medical nanobots will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Basically, it's a synthetic neocortex and make ourselves smarter. It'll be like what we did 2 million years ago when we got these big foreheads. That was additional neocortex. We put it at the top of the hierarchy. The neocortex is a hierarchical structure and that additional neocortex, which we got with these big foreheads, that was the enabling factor for us to invent language and art and music and science and technology. We're going to do it again by connecting our neocortex to the cloud, only that time it it won't be a one-shot deal. We couldn't keep expanding uh our skulls or our birth would have become impossible. But it when we connect it wirelessly to the cloud, the cloud is pure information technology. It's not limited by a fixed enclosure. It's going to keep growing exponentially. You do the math and these uh trajectories are quite predictable and have been. I mean, I've been making forward-looking predictions since the early '80s and it's continued uh to pan out. Uh we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by 2045. That's such a profound transformation, such a singular transformation, that we borrow this metaphor from physics and call it a singularity. Because we can no longer predict what that would look like. Right. Although uh in you know, you can't see what's going on easily in a a black in a singularity in physics because the event horizon around it keeps all the information in because gravity is so great. However, we connect we can use our intellect to actually describe what it would be like to fall into a physics black hole. And similarly, we can use our intellect to talk about what life will be like past this historical singularity. What do you say to people cuz when I do that, like intuitively, I have to admit, I fall into the the first trap of well, won't we all then just be the same? Like intelligence will will become such this race. It's like the machine playing Go against itself, right? What will become more different. Right now, we're very much the same. We all actually have a very similar architecture of about 300 million neocortical modules organized in a hierarchy and that some of us have organized them better than others for particular tasks. So, somebody might be a master at playing chess and someone else, like my father was, a master at creating music. We actually don't have enough capacity to do more than one thing at a master level. Uh we'll be able to pursue things very deeply as we expand the capacity of our neocortex and it'll give us the opportunity to actually be more different not more the same. So, one thing that Bryan Johnson said that I'd never heard before that I thought was really interesting is this concept that humans operate from a position of familiar and AI, what makes AI so interesting is it can operate from a completely surprising angle and you talked about it as as beginning to feel like alien intelligence. Um um what is it about AI that excites you and does it have to do with that ability to think so radically differently? Well, intelligence inherently thinks in a radical way and comes up with surprising uh new approaches and it's only a surprising different approach that's going to solve a problem that heretofore was intractable. Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind, the Google subsidiary, used his term alien intelligence to describe AlphaZero how it played chess and Go in sort of shocking ways of maybe sacrificing a queen and a bishop which was unheard of but turned out to be a brilliant move and or making a move in Go placing uh a piece in a corner of the board which really made no sense uh from a conventional rule of thumb approach but turned out to be a brilliant move. But, that's true of intelligence uh in general is is shocking and surprising but ultimately is capable of solving previously unsolved problems. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? Well, I have a website Kurzweil AI.net. We have about 10 million readers. There's a free daily newsletter, which is very influential, which you can sign up for on the homepage. So, Kurzweil AI.net. Perfect. And then my final question is, what is the impact that you want to have on the world? My massively transformative purpose, which goes back more than 50 years, actually to 1962 when I was 14 and I met with Marvin Minsky, who became my mentor for 55 years, and Frank Rosenblatt, who really started the connectionist school, is to develop artificial intelligence to amplify our own intelligence and to be enable us to solve problems that we couldn't otherwise solve. It's only intelligence that enables us to make progress. If it weren't for our innate intelligence, we'd still be writing on cave walls. In fact, we wouldn't be doing that. And we've made tremendous progress. I mean, if you read what life was like even 200 years ago, uh read Thomas Hobbes, who describes life as short, brutish, disaster-prone, poverty-filled, disease-filled. It's extremely harsh, let alone 1,000 years ago. People tend to romanticize the past, but we've made life immeasurably better because of applying our intelligence to solving one problem after another. And if we had more intelligence, we could do more of that. And that's that's been my passion, uh at least for the last 50 years. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ray. I really appreciate it. All right, guys, this is somebody who's been making predictions for a very long time, been doing incredible things for a long time. So, when you dive into his world, there's going to be an immeasurable amount of stuff to see there. And the one thing that I hope came across in this interview and that you will see without question as you research more into him, is there is a beautiful optimism to what he's trying to pull off. Like he said, it can't be some sort of overly simplistic try like everything is going to be okay. It's really about being driven to figure out and solve the problems yourselves. My favorite story about him is that when faced with a heart condition, he looked at it and said, "Well, if it had been something more complicated, I would have just had to invent a solution for that." And when you approach the world like that and have the optimism, the fortitude, and the persistence to pursue the things that you're passionate about in order to turn them into something that is actually usable, you get what I think is um the ultimate way forward. And when people look at him and try to classify Ray, it really is as the man who is ushering in the future, and I don't think that we could be in any more capable hands. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.