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Ray Kurzweil Author, Inventor and Data Scientist Ray Kurzweil Has Seen the Future, and Every ­Single One of Us Is There

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Ray Kurzweil Author, Inventor and Data Scientist Ray Kurzweil Has Seen the Future, and Every ­Single One of Us Is There H INTERVIEW RAY KURZWEIL Author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil has seen the future, and every single one of us is there. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 60 people as Google’s director of engineering, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045. Many think he is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. ¶ Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up secular, worshiping knowledge above all and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in created the first electronic music keyboard to time, Kurzweil started a hedge fund and just Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, replicate the sound of a grand piano and many finished his first novel. He is a husband, fa- who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock ther and grandfather. science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurz- concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil Contributing writer David Hochman, who weil was designing programs to help do home- on the back of a synthesizer. last interviewed Rachel Maddow, spent ex- work. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze These days, Kurzweil plays the role of tech tended time in San Francisco with Kurzweil. and create music in the style of various famous oracle to the Silicon Valley elite. His bestsell- “Talking to Ray is a little like chatting with composers. The program won him the presti- ing titles The Age of Intelligent Machines and Einstein, Mr. Spock and the Google guys all at gious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a The Singularity Is Near offer eerily specific once,” Hochman says. “His intelligence is off prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to forecasts on artificial intelligence, biotech- the charts. He knows everything about every- the White House. That year, on the game show nology and human evolution. Much of his work thing, and it’s all filtered through the lens of I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some but- sounds like science fiction, but Kurzweil ratio- whatever’s at the forefront of the wired world.” tons on a data processor the size of a small car. nally lays out his vision at symposia, college Kurzweil, who wore a Google smartwatch on It coughed out original sheet music that could lectures and confabs such as SXSW and TED. one wrist and a Mickey Mouse watch on the have been written by Brahms. At 68, Kurzweil has his finger in many pots. other, spoke for hours with his gaze fixed on After earning a B.S. in computer science He co-founded Singularity University, a re- the middle distance, as if he were in a kind of and literature at MIT, he began to sell his in- search institute and think tank that focuses trance, Hochman says. The biggest surprise? ventions, including the first optical charac- on how science can solve humanity’s chal- “We were together for two days, and Ray didn’t ter recognition system that could read text in lenges around water scarcity, overpopulation check his e-mail or text messages once.” any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading and energy shortfalls. His Google team is de- machine” could help the blind, but to make it veloping tools for machine intelligence and PLAYBOY: You describe a near future in which work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech natural language understanding, including a nanobots inhabit our bloodstreams, our brains synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner that series of “chatbots” that can converse with you upload to the cloud and people never die. It is still in wide use today. In the 1980s Kurzweil and have different personalities. In his spare sounds terrifying. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX FREUND 52 H INTERVIEW KURZWEIL: When people talk about the humanoids evolved and developed a large fore- our mobile phones, and I’ll be able to say ex- future of technology, especially artificial in- head. If you look at other primates, they have a actly the right thing. telligence, they very often have the common slanted brow. They don’t have a frontal cortex. But the truth is, we don’t know what it will dystopian Hollywood-movie model of us versus That additional amount of neocortex is what look like. Once we can expand our thinking in the machines. My view is that we will use these we used to add higher levels of abstraction, the cloud, our intelligence grows beyond any- tools as we’ve used all other tools—to broaden and that was the enabling factor for us to in- thing we can currently comprehend. Our intu- our reach. And in this case, we’ll be extending vent, first of all, language, but also things like ition about the future is linear. It’s hardwired the most important attribute we have, which is humor and music. No other animal can keep a in our brains that way. Ten thousand years ago our intelligence. beat. No other animal can tell a joke. you would track an animal in the field and ex- The capability of information technology PLAYBOY: So plugging our brains into ma- pect it to speed up as it went along. You would doubles each year. At the same time, the price chines will make us exponentially smarter and make a linear prediction as to where it would of the same functionality comes down by half more charming? go so you could catch it. That type of think- every year. These are all features of what I call KURZWEIL: Exactly. By the 2030s we will ing made sense, but it ignores the sort of ex- the law of accelerating returns. It’s why you have nanobots that can go into a brain non- ponential growth we see with technology. can buy an iPhone or an Android phone that’s invasively through the capillaries, connect We’re approaching a point where technologi- twice as good as the one two years ago for half to our neocortex and basically connect it to a cal progress will become so fast that everyday the price. My smartphone is several thousand synthetic neocortex that works the same way human intelligence will be unable to follow times more powerful and mil- it. It’s a horizon past which the lions of times less expensive concepts we’re familiar with than the $11 million IBM 7094 are so transformed that it’s computer I used when I was an hard to see past it. undergraduate at MIT in 1963. WE’RE PLAYBOY: This is the event ho- But that’s not the most interest- rizon you call the Singularity. ing thing about my phone. If I STARTING TO Why have you set its arrival so want to multiply computational specifically in 2045? and communication power by KURZWEIL: The nonbiological 10,000—that is to say, if I need REPROGRAM intelligence created in that year to access 10,000 computers—I will reach a level that’s a billion can do that in the cloud, and that THE OUTDATED times more powerful than all happens all the time. We’re not human intelligence today. But even aware of it. Do a complex there will be dramatic changes language translation, a com- SOFTWARE prior to that. I’ve been consis- plex search or many other types tent about these dates for de- of transactions, and you’re ac- OF LIFE. cades now. One is 2029, which is cessing thousands of computers when computers will pass a valid while you sit quietly in a park Turing test, meaning they’ll be somewhere. Over the next cou- indistinguishable from human ple of decades we’re going to make ourselves in the cloud. So we’ll have an additional neo- intelligence in a conversation. smarter by integrating with these tools. cortex, just like we developed an additional PLAYBOY: How will all this help us live longer? PLAYBOY: Humans are evolving into iPhones? neocortex 2 million years ago, and we’ll use it KURZWEIL: Let’s start with genetics, which KURZWEIL: We’re merging with these non- just as we used the frontal cortex: to add addi- is now called biotechnology. It’s beginning to biological technologies. We’re already on that tional levels of abstraction. We’ll create more revolutionize clinical practice and will com- path. I mean, this little Android phone I’m car- profound forms of communication than we’re pletely transform medicine within one to two rying on my belt is not yet inside my physical familiar with today, more profound music decades. We’re starting to reprogram the out- body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction. It is and funnier jokes. We’ll be funnier. We’ll be dated software of life—the 24,000 little pro- part of who I am—not necessarily the phone sexier. We’ll be more adept at expressing lov- grams we have in our bodies, called genes. itself but the connection to the cloud and all ing sentiments. We’re programming them away from disease the resources I can access there.
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