Ray Kurzweil says humanity well on course to merge with AI – Times of India

Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years. 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 just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide. “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 multi coloured su spenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.

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 years old and is moving a lot slower 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 to make extravagant predictions about the future of AI and how it will alter the course of humanity.

Many skeptics warn that 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.

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.

Born in New York City, Kurzweil began programming computers as a teenager, when computers were roomsize 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.

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.

AI began to rapidly improve in the 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.

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,” said Hinton, who until recently worked at Google, where Kurzweil has led a research team since 2012.

Hinton is among the AI researchers who believe that the technologies driving chatbots like ChatGPT could become dangerous — perhaps even destroy humanity.

But Kurzweil is 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 aging,” he said.