Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held a sheet of paper showing the steady increase in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy in last 85 years.
A neon-green line rose steadily up the page, climbing like fireworks into the night sky.
That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long-hypothetical moment when humans would merge with artificial intelligence and grow with millions of times more computing power than biological humans now provide. the brain.
“If you create 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 colorful suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney. World in the early 1980s.
Mr. Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who has 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 artificial intelligence 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 Mr. Kurzweil is 76 and moving much more slowly than he used to, his predictions have an added edge. He has long said that he plans to experience the singularity, merge with artificial intelligence and, in doing so, live indefinitely. But if the Singularity arrives in 2045, as he claims it will, there’s no guarantee he’ll be alive 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 success of chatbot ChatGPT and similar technologies has encouraged many prominent computer scientists, Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists to make wild predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and how it will change course. of humanity.
Tech giants and other deep-pocketed investors are pouring billions into AI development, and the technologies are getting more powerful every few months.
Many skeptics warn that wild predictions about artificial intelligence may come crashing down as the industry grapples with the limits of the raw materials needed to build AI, including electricity, digital data, math and computing power. Techno-optimism can also feel myopic—and justified—in the face of the world’s many problems.
“When people say AI will solve every problem, they’re not really looking at what the causes of those problems are,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles who investigates claims about the future of AI. .
The big leap, of course, is to imagine how human consciousness would merge with a machine, and people like Mr. Kurzweil struggle to explain exactly how that would happen.
Born in New York, Mr. Kurzweil began programming computers 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,” performing a piano piece composed by a computer 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 studied under Dr. Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic pursuit—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 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, Dr. 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 that a computer would beat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorem within a decade.
They were a little too optimistic. A computer wouldn’t 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 Mr. Kurzweil created a series of companies that developed everything from speech recognition technologies to music synthesizers, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for achievement in innovative technology. His profile continued to rise as he wrote a series of books that predicted the future.
Around the turn of the century, Mr. Kurzweil predicted that artificial intelligence 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 top AI researchers gathered in Boston in 2006 to celebrate the field’s 50th anniversary.
“There were polite scoffers,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an artificial intelligence researcher and professor at Arizona State University.
Artificial intelligence began to improve rapidly 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 analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of cat photos, it could learn to recognize a cat.
It was an old idea that was dismissed by the likes of Dr. Minsky decades ago. But it began to work in spectacular ways, thanks to the massive amounts of data the world had uploaded to the Internet—and the arrival of the raw computing power needed to analyze all that data.
The result, in 2022, was ChatGPT. It was driven by this exponential increase in computing power.
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 Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would surpass human intelligence before since the end of this decade. Now, he thinks it was insightful.
“His prediction doesn’t seem so silly anymore. Things are happening much faster than I expected,” said Dr. Hinton, who until recently worked at Google, where Mr. Kurzweil has led a research team since 2012.
Dr Hinton is among the AI researchers who believe the technologies that drive chatbots like ChatGPT could become dangerous – perhaps even ruining humanity. But Mr Kurzweil is more optimistic.
He has long predicted that advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, which could change the tiny mechanisms that control how our bodies behave and the diseases that afflict them, will push back the inevitability of death. Soon, he said, these technologies will extend their 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 be dying of aging,” he said.
If it can reach this moment, Mr. Kurzweil explained, it can probably reach the Singularity.
But the trends that underpin Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computing power and other technologies over long periods of time — don’t always continue as people expect, said Sayash Kapoor, a researcher and fellow at the University of Princeton. -author of the influential online newsletter “AI Snake Oil” and a book of the same name.
When a New York Times reporter asked Mr. Kurzweil if he predicted immortality for himself 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 lived forever, because it is never forever.” In other words, he could never be proven right.
But he could be proven wrong. Sitting near 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 with his aunt, a psychotherapist, when he was 98 years old. He explained his theory of the escape velocity of longevity – that humans will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied, “Can you please hurry up with this?” Two weeks later, he died.
Although Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of the decade, not convinced that the inventor and futurist will live forever.
“I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be a terrible place,” Dr Hinton said.
The sound is produced by Patricia Sulbaran.
