Sitting by the window of Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil showed a paper showing the steady increase in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar can buy over the past 85 years.
A neon-green line grew ever larger across the page, like fireworks in the night sky.
He said this diagonal line shows that humanity is just 20 years away from destruction. singularityThis is a long-envisioned moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and gain computational power millions of times greater than their biological brains.
“If you make something that’s thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t predict what it’s going to do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.
Mr. Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who built his career on predictions that challenged conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” The advent of AI technologies like ChatGPT More recent efforts Implant computer chips inside people's headsHe believes the time is right to reiterate his claim. Last week, he published a sequel: “The Singularity Is Nearer.”
Now that Mr. Kurzweil is 76 and moving at a much slower pace than before, his predictions have an extra edge. He has long said that he plans to experience the Singularity, merge with AI and thereby, live indefinitelyBut if the singularity does arrive in 2045, as they claim, there’s no guarantee they’ll live to see it.
“Even a healthy 20-year-old could die tomorrow,” he said.
But his prediction is not as outlandish as it seemed in 2005. The chatbots ChatGPT and Similar techniqueshas encouraged many prominent people Computer Scientists, Silicon Valley executives And venture capitalists Making extraordinary predictions about the future of AI and how it will change the course of humanity.
Technology giants and other wealthy investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI development, and the technologies are becoming increasingly popular. becoming more powerful Everyone A few months,
Many skeptics warn that hyperbolic predictions about artificial intelligence could come crashing down, as the industry grapples with limitations in the raw materials needed to build AI, including electrical power. digital dataMathematics and computing ability. Techno-optimism can also feel short-sighted – and entitled – in the face of the world’s many problems.
“When people say AI will solve every problem, they’re not really looking at what causes those problems,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who investigates claims about the future of AI.
Of course, the biggest challenge is to imagine how human consciousness will merge with a machine, and people like Mr Kurzweil struggle to explain how exactly this will happen.
Born in New York City, Mr. Kurzweil began computer programming as a teenager, when computers were room-sized machines. In 1965, as a 17-year-old, he appeared on the CBS television show “I've Got a Secret,” where he performed a piano piece composed by a computer he had designed.
While 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 Dr. Minsky, who became the face of this new academic endeavor—a blend of computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and an almost religious belief that thinking machines were possible.
When the term artificial intelligence was first introduced to the public during a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists present did not think it would take long to create machines that could match the power of the human brain. Some argued that a computer would beat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorems within a decade.
They were a little too optimistic. Until the late 1990s, no computer could beat the world chess champion. And the world is still waiting for a machine that can discover its own mathematical theorems.
Mr. Kurzweil built a series of companies developing everything from speech recognition technology to music synthesizers, after which President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation's highest honor for achievement in technological innovation. His reputation grew after he wrote a series of books predicting the future.
Around the turn of the century, Mr. Kurzweil predicted that AI would match human intelligence before the end of the 2020s and that the Singularity would follow 15 years later. He reiterated these predictions when the world's leading AI researchers gathered in Boston in 2006 to celebrate the field's 50th anniversary.
“There was polite banter,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an AI researcher and professor at Arizona State University.
AI began to improve rapidly in the early 2010s. A group of researchers from the University of Toronto discovered a technology called neural networkThis mathematical system can learn skills by analyzing huge amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of pictures of cats, it can learn to identify a cat.
It was an old idea that people like Dr. Minsky dismissed decades ago. But it started to work in surprising ways, thanks to the vast amounts of data uploaded to the internet from around the world – and the advent of the raw computing power needed to analyze all that data.
The result was ChatGPT in 2022. It was driven by the exponential growth in computing power.
Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto who helped develop neural network technology And he may be more responsible for its success than any other researcher, having once dismissed Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that machines would surpass human intelligence before the end of this decade. Now, he believes it was insightful.
Dr. Hinton, who until recently worked at Google, where Mr. Kurzweil has led a research group since 2012, said, “His predictions don't seem so silly anymore. Things are happening much more quickly than I expected.”
Dr. Hinton is among the AI researchers who believe that the technologies that drive chatbots like ChatGPT could be dangerous – maybe even destroy humanity. But Mr. Kurzweil is more optimistic.
He has long predicted that advances in AI and nanotechnology, which can alter the microscopic mechanisms that govern our bodies' behavior and the diseases that affect them, will push back the inevitability of death. Soon, he said, these technologies will extend life at a rate faster than people are aging, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that allows people to extend their lives indefinitely.
“We won't die of aging until the early 2030s,” he said.
Mr. Kurzweil explained that if he could reach this moment, he could possibly reach the Singularity as well.
But Saish Kapur, a researcher at Princeton University and co-author of the influential online newsletter “AI Snake Oil” and a book of the same name, said the trends that underpin Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computer power and other technologies over long periods of time — don’t always turn out the way people expect.
When a New York Times reporter asked Mr. Kurzweil in 2013 if he was predicting immortality for himself, he said answered: “The problem is I can’t talk to you on the phone in the future and say, ‘Okay, I’ve done this, I’ve lived forever,’ because it’s never forever.” In other words, he can never be proven right.
But he could be proven wrong. Sitting by the window in Boston, Mr. Kurzweil acknowledged that death comes in many forms. And he knows his margin for error is shrinking.
He recalled a conversation he had with his aunt, a psychiatrist, 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 responded: “Can you please hurry it up?” Two weeks later, she died.
Although Dr Hinton is impressed by Mr Kurzweil's prediction that machines will become more intelligent than humans by the end of the decade, he disagrees with the idea that inventors and futurists will live forever.
“I think a world run by white men 200 years from now would be a horrible place,” Dr. Hinton said.
Creation of audio Patricia Sulbarn,