Ray Kurzweil still says he will merge with AI.

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Sitting by a window inside Boston's Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking the duck pond in the city's Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady increase in the amount of raw computer power that a A dollar can buy over the past 85 years.

Rising like a firework into the night sky, a neon green line continued to grow across the page.

He said the diagonal line showed why humanity is only 20 years away from the singularity, a long-hypothetical moment when humans will merge with artificial intelligence and find themselves millions of times larger than their biological brains. will increase with computational power.

“If you build 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 from Disney. said The world in the early 1980s.

Mr. Kurzweil, a famous inventor and futurist who built his career on predictions that defy conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” With the advent of AI technologies like ChatGPT and recent attempts to implant computer chips inside people's heads, they believe the time is right to reiterate their claim. Last week, he published a sequel: “The Singularity Is Near.”

Now that Mr. Kurzweil is 76 years old and walking much more slowly than he used to, his predictions are even more nuanced. He has long stated that he intends to experience the singularity, merge with AI, and live that way indefinitely. But if singularity comes in 2045, as he claims it will, there's no guarantee he'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 success of chatbot ChatGPT and similar technologies has inspired many prominent computer scientists, Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists to make extraordinary predictions about the future of AI and how it will change. humanities course.

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 fall apart as the industry struggles with the limitations of the raw materials needed to build AI, including electrical power, digital data, math and computing power. Given the world's many problems, technological optimism can feel — and justified — too.

“When people say AI will solve every problem, they're not really looking at what the causes of those problems are,” said Shazada Ahmed, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the future of AI. Investigate claims about

The big leap, of course, is imagining how human consciousness will merge with a machine, and people like Mr. Kurzweil struggle to explain how exactly that 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”, performing a computer-generated piano piece 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. was He soon enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study under Dr. Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic pursuit—a blend of computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and the almost religious belief that thinking machines could. are possible

When the term artificial intelligence was first introduced to the public at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists gathered there did not think it would take long to create machines that could perform human tasks. Be able to match the power of the mind. Some argued that a computer would beat the world chess champion and discover its mathematical theory within a decade.

He was a bit more optimistic. A computer could not beat a world chess champion until the late 1990s. And the world is still waiting for a machine to discover its mathematical theory.

After Mr. Kurzweil built 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, an achievement in tech innovation. It is the highest honor of the country. His profile continued to rise as he wrote a series of books that predicted the future.

At the turn of the century, Mr Kurzweil predicted that AI would match human intelligence before the end of the 2020s and 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 smiles,” said Subbarao Kumbhampati, an AI researcher and professor at Arizona State University.

AI began to rapidly improve in the early 2010s when a group of researchers at the University of Toronto explored a technology called neural networks. This mathematical system can learn skills by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of cat images, it can learn to recognize cats.

It was an old idea that the likes of Dr. Minsky had debunked decades ago. But it began to work in eye-opening ways, thanks to the world uploading vast amounts of data to the Internet—and the advent of the raw computing power needed to analyze all that data.

The result, in 2022, was ChatGPT. This was driven by this rapid growth in computing power.

Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto professor who helped develop neural network technology and may be more responsible than any other researcher for its success, once rejected Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that machines Human intelligence will be surpassed before 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 most recently worked at Google, where Mr Kurzweil has led a research group since 2012. are doing

Dr Hinton is among the AI ​​researchers who believe that the technologies that run chatbots like ChatGPT could be dangerous – perhaps even destroying humanity. But Mr. Kurzweil is more optimistic.

He has long predicted that advances in AI and nanotechnology, which can alter the microscopic mechanisms that control our bodies' behavior and the diseases they cause, will push back against the inevitability of death. will Soon, he said, these technologies will extend lives faster than people age, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that would allow people to extend their lives indefinitely. Is.

“By the early 2030s, we won't be dying of aging,” he said.

If he could reach that moment, Mr. Kurzweil explained, he might reach the singularity.

But the trends that anchor Mr. Kurzweil's predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computer power and other technologies over long periods of time — aren't always on track, said Sayash Kapur, a Princeton University researcher and contributor. Walk the way people expect them to. – 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 that I can't get on the phone with you in the future and Say, 'Well, I did it, I lived forever, because it's not forever, in other words, he could never be right.

But he could be proven wrong. Sitting near a 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 psychotherapist, when she was 98. He explained his theory of life expectancy escape velocity – that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. He replied: Can you hurry with it? Two weeks later, he died.

Although Dr. Hinton is impressed by Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that machines will be smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is no less convinced that inventors and futurists will live forever.

“I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be a terrible place,” Dr. Hinton said.

Audio produced by Patricia Silberan.

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