Inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, now 76, hopes to reach the "Singularity" and live indefinitely. His margin for error is shrinking. Photo / New York Times
Inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, now 76, hopes to reach the "Singularity" and live indefinitely. His margin for error is shrinking. Photo / New York Times
Now 76, the inventor and futurist hopes to reach ‘the Singularity’ and live indefinitely. His margin of error is shrinking.
Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth over the past 85 years in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy.
A neon-green line rose steadily across the page, climbing like fireworks in the night sky.
That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was only 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesised moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide.
Kurzweil (then 27) in 1976 with his Kurzweil Reading Machine, which converted printed words into synthetic speech and was intended for use by the sightless. Photo / Getty Images
“If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t anticipate what it is going to do,” he said, wearing multicoloured suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.
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Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who built a career on predictions that defy conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. After the arrival of AI technologies like ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips inside people’s heads, he believes the time is right to restate his claim. Last week, he published a sequel: The Singularity Is Nearer.
Now that Kurzweil is 76 is moving a lot more slowly than he used to, his predictions carry an added edge. He has long said he plans to experience the Singularity, merge with AI and, in this way, live indefinitely. But if the Singularity arrives in 2045, as he claims it will, there is no guarantee he will be alive to see it.
“Even a healthy 20-year-old could die tomorrow,” he said.
But his prediction is not quite as outlandish as it seemed in 2005. The success of the chatbot ChatGPT and similar technologies has encouraged many prominent computer scientists, Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists to make extravagant predictions about the future of AI and how it will alter the course of humanity.
Kurzweil has long predicted that advances in AI and nanotechnology, which can alter the body at the cellular level, will push back against the inevitability of death. Photo / New York Times
Tech giants and other deep-pocketed investors are pumping billions into AI development, and the technologies are growing more powerful every few months.
Many sceptics warn extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence may crumble as the industry struggles with the limits of the raw materials needed to build AI, including electrical power, digital data, mathematics and computing capacity. Techno-optimism can also feel myopic — and entitled — in the face of the world’s many problems.
“When people say that AI will solve every problem, they are not actually looking at what the causes of those problems are,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a researcher at UCLA who explores claims about the future of AI.
The big leap, of course, is imagining how human consciousness would merge with a machine, and people like Kurzweil struggle to explain how exactly this would happen.
‘Too optimistic’
Born in New York City, Kurzweil began programming computers as a teenager, when computers were room-size machines. In 1965, as a 17-year-old, he appeared on the CBS television show I’ve Got a Secret, performing a piano piece composed by a computer that he designed.
Kurzweil believes technologies will extend lives at a faster rate than people age, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that allows people to extend their lives indefinitely: “By the early 2030s, we won’t die because of ageing.” Photo / New York Times
While still a student at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, he exchanged letters with Marvin Minsky, one of the computer scientists who founded the field of artificial intelligence at a conference in the mid-1950s. He soon enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study under Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic pursuit — a mix of computer science, neuroscience, psychology and an almost-religious belief that thinking machines were possible.
When the term “artificial intelligence” was first presented to the public during a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, Minsky and the other computer scientists gathered there did not think it would take long to build machines that could match the power of the human brain. Some argued a computer would beat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorem within a decade.
They were a bit too optimistic. A computer would not beat the world chess champion until the late 1990s. And the world is still waiting for a machine to discover its own mathematical theorem.
After Kurzweil built a series of companies that developed everything from speech recognition technologies to music synthesisers, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the country’s highest honour for achievement in tech innovation. His profile continued to rise as he wrote a series of books that predicted the future.
Around the turn of the century, Kurzweil predicted AI would match human intelligence before the end of the 2020s and that the Singularity would follow 15 years later. He repeated these predictions when the world’s leading AI researchers gathered in Boston in 2006 to celebrate the field’s 50th anniversary.
“There were polite snickers,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an AI researcher and Arizona State University professor.
AI began to rapidly improve in the early 2010s as a group of researchers at the University of Toronto explored a technology called a neural network. This mathematical system could learn skills by analysing vast amounts of data. By analysing thousands of cat photos, it could learn to identify a cat.
It was an old idea dismissed by the likes of Minsky decades before. But it started to work in eye-opening ways, thanks to the enormous amounts of data the world had uploaded to the internet — and the arrival of the raw computing power needed to analyse all that data.
The result, in 2022, was ChatGPT. It had been driven by that exponential growth in computing power.
Prediction ‘no longer silly’
Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto professor who helped develop neural network technology and may be more responsible for its success than any other researcher, once dismissed Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would exceed human intelligence before the end of this decade. Now, he believes it was insightful.
“His prediction no longer looks so silly. Things are happening much faster than I expected,” said Hinton, who until recently worked at Google where Kurzweil has led a research group since 2012.
Hinton is among the AI researchers who believe the technologies driving chatbots like ChatGPT could become dangerous — perhaps even destroy humanity. But Kurzweil is more optimistic.
He has long predicted that advances in AI and nanotechnology, which could alter the microscopic mechanisms that control the way our bodies behave and the diseases that afflict them, will push back against the inevitability of death. Soon, he said, these technologies will extend lives at a faster rate than people age, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that allows people to extend their lives indefinitely.
“By the early 2030s, we won’t die because of ageing,” he said.
If he can reach this moment, Kurzweil explained, he can probably reach the Singularity.
But the trends that anchor Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computer power and other technologies over long periods of time — do not always keep going the way people expect them to, said Sayash Kapoor, a Princeton University researcher and co-author of the influential online newsletter AI Snake Oil and a book of the same name.
When a New York Times reporter asked Kurzweil if he was predicting immortality for himself back in 2013, he replied: “The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, ‘Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever’ because it’s never forever.” In other words, he could never be proved right.
But he could be proved wrong. Sitting near the window in Boston, Kurzweil acknowledged that death comes in many forms. And he knows his margin of error is shrinking.
He recalled a conversation with his aunt, a psychotherapist, when she was 98. He explained his theory of life longevity escape velocity — that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied: “Can you please hurry up with that?” Two weeks later, she died.
Though Hinton is impressed with Kurzweil’s prediction that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor and futurist will live forever.
“I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be an appalling place,” Hinton said.
