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| SPIRITUAL MACHINES | |
 September 13, 1999  |
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David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News and World Report, talks with inventor Ray Kurzweil about his prediction that computers will attain the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by around 2020. Watch
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MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen engages inventor Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. DAVID GERGEN: Welcome. RAY KURZWEIL: Glad to be here. DAVID GERGEN: Before we talk about your book, Ray, our audience may wish to know a little bit more about your background. You've been an inventor in artificial intelligence for more than a quarter of a century. Can you tell us about a few of the machines that you brought to commercial market?
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| Exceeding Human Intelligence | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DAVID GERGEN: Mm-hmm. Let me just read one sentence to you and have your comment on it. "The emergence in the early 21st century of a new form of intelligence on earth will be a development of greater import than any of the events that have shaped human history." Tell us about that. RAY KURZWEIL: Well, within 30 years we'll see the emergence of machines, non-biological intelligence, that equals and ultimately exceeds human intelligence. In fact, once a machine can replicate all of the endearing and subtle qualities of human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. If I spend years learning French, I can't just download that knowledge to you. But machines can share their knowledge and databases. So once one machine learns something, every machine can master that skill within seconds. Machines are already... I mean, our electronic circuits are ten million times faster than interneuronal circuits today. Machines have much more exact memories.
But we're going to learn the secrets of human intelligence, the software of intelligence, how these resources are organized, by actually tapping the human brain itself. And we're already doing that. And those techniques, the ability to scan the human brain, is also growing exponentially. We'll be able to send scanners inside the brain, tiny little scanners that are the size of blood cells, that will travel through the brain, through our capillaries, and actually scan the human brain from inside and build up a database that describes everything going on in the human brain. And that's a scenario that will be feasible within 25 years. DAVID GERGEN: The bottom line, the machine will become more intelligent than the human beings by the year 2020 or so and then will surpass... RAY KURZWEIL: By 2020 we'll have the hardware. DAVID GERGEN: Right. RAY KURZWEIL: It will take another ten years to actually organize those resources. By that time, the hardware will already be much more powerful. DAVID GERGEN: And then it will surpass the intelligence of the entire human race by 2060 or so? RAY KURZWEIL: The exponential growth will continue. We actually have working in labs circuits called nano tubes which operate at the atomic level. A one-inch cube of nano tube circuitry would be about a million times more powerful than the human brain. By 2060, a $1,000 of computation will be equivalent to ten billion human brains. |
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| Emotion as Intelligence | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY KURZWEIL: Our emotional ability, our ability to recognize emotion, to respond to it appropriately, even our spirituality, is not something that's so stuck on to human intelligence as an after thought. It's really the cutting edge of human intelligence. It's so the supremely human, supremely subtle, complex, deep, rich feature of human intelligence. If we do the thought experiment of, let's say scanning my brain, every interneuronal connection, every neurotransmitter concentration and recreating that in a neurocomputer of sufficient capacity, we'll have an entity that acts very much like me. And if you interviewed that entity, it would say, "yeah, I was born in queens. I grew up, I went to MIT, I sold a few companies. I walked into the scanner there and I woke in the machine here." You'd have to give him a body or he'd quickly get depressed. But he would have very much the same personality and ability to respond to emotions that the original Ray Kurzweil did. DAVID GERGEN: So this is a second Ray Kurzweil. RAY KURZWEIL: It would certainly seem that way. And it does raise the issue of consciousness. Does it have Ray Kurzweil's consciousness? Is it conscience at all? And I talk about that at length. It's a difficult issue. It's one that philosophers have debated for thousands of years. And the 21st century will confront this issue in a very practical way, because we'll have entities, non-biological intelligence, that claim to be human, that claim to have emotions. And unlike virtual personalities that you might meet in today's video games, these 21st century personalities, virtual personalities, will be as compelling and as convincing as human beings. We will believe them because they will have the richness, subtlety and complexity of behavior and thought that humans have. DAVID GERGEN: And they will seem to have a spiritual life, you think. RAY KURZWEIL: They will claim to in a very convincing and compelling way. And, you know, in my mind, my view of consciousness, which is a subjective experience, it's not something you can test through objective means. It comes down to the very concepts of objective and subjective. DAVID GERGEN: A humanist would ask will that kind of entity know the difference between good and evil? Will we be unleashing something that could take over the world in a Frankenstein sense?
DAVID GERGEN: You suggest there will be almost a merger of humans and machines. Machines will look more like humans and humans will integrate some of the aspects of actual component from machines. RAY KURZWEIL: Right. We'll be actually putting intelligent machines in our brains. We're doing that today with disabled people. I have a deaf friend who has a neural implant that allows him to talk with me on the phone, that patients of Parkinson's Disease who put neural implants actually overcome the dysfunction in their brains caused by Parkinson's. Thirty years from now we'll all be using neural implants. They won't require surgery, we'll introduce them through this nanobots that travel through our blood stream. And they will allow us to enter virtual environments. Going to a Web site will mean entering a new virtual reality environment. They'll be expanding our memories, even our range of emotional abilities, our pattern recognition and cognitive functions. We'll be expanding human potential by marrying with our technology. DAVID GERGEN: So a human being could pick up a book, you suggest, and read it just in a matter of minute if not seconds. You could download the book, in effect. RAY KURZWEIL: Right. We'll be able to download knowledge... DAVID GERGEN: Into our own brains. RAY KURZWEIL: Right, right. I mean, machines can do that today. We taught one machine how to recognize speech. It took us years, but now we can just download that to your PC in seconds. So machines, non-biological intelligence, does have that advantage. We don't have quick downloading ports on our neurotransmitter concentrations. DAVID GERGEN: Do you sometimes wish you were 25 or 30 years younger so you could experience and see this new world? RAY KURZWEIL: Well, I hope to be around. I'm doing that the old-fashioned way now. Actually, I have an interest in health and wrote a health book. So I'm trying to stay healthy. The bioengineering revolution will help us a lot in expanding human longevity. So I hope to be here to see this promised land. DAVID GERGEN: Ray Kurzweil, thank you. RAY KURZWEIL: My pleasure. |
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RAY
KURZWEIL: Well, in 1976 we introduced the Kurzweil reading machine,
which was the first machine that could read books out loud so blind
people could read books and magazines. 1984, We had the Kurzweil synthesizers,
which were the first instruments that were electronic but sounded like
real instruments. When you pressed piano, it sounded like a real grand
piano. In the 1990's, I've worked on speech recognition so people can
dictate-- in fact, I dictated most of my book just by talking to my
computer. 
So
machines already exceed human intelligence in certain ways. They're
still a million times simpler than the human brain, but that discrepancy
is rapidly shrinking because non-biological intelligence is growing
exponentially. And by 2020, a $1,000 computer will be equal to the computing
power of the human brain. By 2030, a $1,000 computer will be a thousand
times more powerful than the human brain. Now, that doesn't itself doesn't
guarantee human intelligence. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
DAVID
GERGEN: And the emotional aspect is a fascinating one, because you think
the scanning of the brain will allow us to actually set up a computer
so it will duplicate the emotions of the human being? 
RAY
KURZWEIL: Let me put it this way. In my mind this is not an alien invasion
of intelligent machines coming, you know, from over the horizon. This
is emerging from within our human machine civilization. We're already
very intimate with computers. If all the computers stopped functioning
today, our civilization would grind to a halt. That wasn't true even
30 years from now, 30 years ago, and computers are already are very
influential. We'll be putting computers in our clothing, in our bodies
and even in our brains. They'll be extending human intelligence. We're
going to become smarter and actually more human, in my view, able to
overcome human dysfunction through this kind of melding with our technology.
