Sitting by 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 growth in the amount of raw computing power a dollar could buy over the past 85 years.
A neon green line rose steadily across the page, climbing like fireworks in the night sky.
This diagonal line, he said, shows why humanity is only 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 computing power than their biological brains currently 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’s going to do,” he said, wearing multi-colored 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 his career on conventional wisdom-defying predictions, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” With the advent of artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips in people’s heads, he believes the time has come to reaffirm his claim. Last week, he published a follow-up, “The Singularity Is Nearer.”
Now that Mr. Kurzweil is 76 and moving much more slowly than he used to, his predictions are even more interesting. He has long said that he plans to experience the Singularity, to merge with AI and, in that way, live indefinitely. But if the Singularity arrives in 2045, as he claims, there is no guarantee that he will be alive to see it.
“Even a healthy 20-year-old could die tomorrow,” he said.
But his prediction isn’t as far-fetched as it seemed in 2005. The success of the ChatGPT chatbot and similar technologies has encouraged many leading computer scientists, Silicon Valley executives, and venture capitalists to make wild predictions about the future of AI and how it will change the course of humanity.
Tech giants and other wealthy 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 could come crashing down as the industry struggles with the limits of the raw materials needed to build AI, including electrical power, digital data, mathematics and computing power. Technological optimism can also seem short-sighted – and pretentious – in the face of the world’s many problems.
“When people say AI will solve all problems, they’re not really looking at what causes those problems,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies claims about AI’s future.
The big step forward, of course, is to imagine how human consciousness would merge with a machine, and people like Mr. Kurzweil have difficulty explaining exactly how that would happen.
Born in New York, Mr. Kurzweil began programming computers as a teenager, at a time when computers were room-sized machines. In 1965, at age 17, he appeared on the CBS television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” performing a piano piece composed by a computer he had 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 with Dr. Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic discipline—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 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 build machines that could match the power of the human brain. Some claimed that a computer could beat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorem within a decade.
They were a little too optimistic. A computer wouldn’t be able to 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 founding a series of companies that developed technologies as diverse as speech recognition to music synthesizers, Mr. Kurzweil was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Bill Clinton, the nation’s highest honor for achievement in technological innovation. His fame continued to grow as he wrote a series of books that predicted the future.
At the turn of the century, Kurzweil predicted that artificial intelligence would match human intelligence by the end of the 2020s, and that the Singularity would follow 15 years later. He repeated those predictions when the world’s leading AI researchers gathered in Boston in 2006 to celebrate the discipline’s 50th anniversary.
“There were polite snickers,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an AI researcher and professor at Arizona State University.
Artificial intelligence began to advance rapidly in the early 2010s, when 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 photos of cats, it could learn to identify a cat.
This old idea had been dismissed by researchers like Dr. Minsky decades before. But it began to work in revealing ways, thanks to the vast amounts of data the world had uploaded to the Internet and the advent of the raw computing power needed to analyze all that data.
The result, in 2022, was ChatGPT. It was driven by this exponential growth in computing power.
Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto who helped develop neural network technology and is perhaps most responsible for its success, once refuted Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would surpass human intelligence before the end of the decade. He now believes that prediction was correct.
“His prediction doesn’t seem so absurd anymore. Things are happening much faster than I anticipated,” said Dr. Hinton, who most recently worked at Google, where Mr. Kurzweil has led a research group since 2012.
Dr. Hinton is among the AI researchers who believe the technologies that power chatbots like ChatGPT could become dangerous, or even destroy humanity. But Mr. Kurzweil is more optimistic.
He has long predicted that advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, which could alter the microscopic mechanisms that control our bodies’ behavior and the diseases that afflict them, will help combat the inevitability of death. Soon, he said, these technologies will extend life at a faster rate than aging, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that will allow people to extend their lives indefinitely.
“By the early 2030s, we will no longer be dying from aging,” he said.
If he can reach that moment, Mr. Kurzweil explains, he 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 play out as people expect, said Sayash Kapoor, a researcher at Princeton University and co-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 in 2013 if he had predicted immortality for himself, he replied: “The problem is, I can’t call you in the future and say, ‘Well, I did it, I lived forever,’ because it’s never forever.” In other words, he could never be right.
But he could be wrong. Sitting by the window in Boston, Mr. Kurzweil acknowledged that death can take many forms. And he knows his margin for error is narrowing.
He recalls a conversation he had with his aunt, a psychotherapist, when she was 98. He explained to her his theory of longevity escape velocity, which states that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied, “Can you hurry up?” Two weeks later, she died.
While Dr. Hinton is impressed by Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is less convinced by the idea 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.
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbaran.
