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 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 into the night sky.
That diagonal line, he said, shows why humanity was just 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 now 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, sporting multi-colored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.
Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who built his career on predictions that challenge conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” After the advent of artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips inside people’s heads, he believes the time is right to reaffirm his claim. Last week, he published a sequel, “The Singularity Is Nearer.”
Now that Kurzweil is 76 and moving much slower than before, his predictions have added value. He has long said that he plans to experience the Singularity, merge with AI and thus live indefinitely. But if the Singularity comes in 2045, as he claims it will, 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 prominent computer scientists, Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists to make outlandish predictions about the future of AI and how it will alter 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 extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence may fall apart 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 the problems, 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 explores 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 Kurzweil have a hard time explaining exactly how this would happen.
Kurzweil was born in New York City and began programming computers as a teenager, when computers were room-sized machines. In 1965, when he was 17, he appeared on the CBS television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” performing a piano piece composed on 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 under Dr. Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic pursuit—a blend of computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and a near-religious belief that thinking machines were possible.
When the term artificial intelligence was first introduced to the public during a lecture at Dartmouth College in 1956, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists 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 defeat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorem within a decade.
They were too optimistic. A computer would not defeat the world chess champion until the late 1990s. And the world is still waiting for a machine to discover its own mathematical theorem.
After Kurzweil created a series of companies that developed everything from voice recognition technologies to music synthesizers, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for achievements in technological innovation. His profile continued to rise as he wrote a series of books predicting the future.
At the turn of the century, Kurzweil predicted that AI would equal human intelligence before the end of the 2020s and that the Singularity would arrive 15 years later. He repeated these predictions when the world’s leading AI researchers met in Boston in 2006 to celebrate the field’s 50th anniversary.
“There was polite laughter,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an artificial intelligence researcher and professor at Arizona State University.
AI began to improve 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 large amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of photos of cats, it could learn to identify them.
It was an old idea that had been dismissed by people like Dr. Minsky decades earlier, but it began to take off in a revealing way thanks to the massive amounts of data the world had uploaded to the Internet and the arrival of the computing power needed to analyze all that data.
The result, in 2022, was ChatGPT, driven by that exponential growth in computing power.
Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto professor who helped develop neural network technology and who may be more responsible for its success than any other researcher, once dismissed Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would surpass human intelligence before the end of this decade. Now, he thinks it was revelatory.
“His prediction doesn’t seem so absurd anymore. Things are happening much faster than he expected,” said Hinton, who until recently worked at Google, where Kurzweil has led a research group since 2012.
Dr. Hinton is among AI researchers who believe the technologies powering chatbots like ChatGPT could become dangerous, perhaps even destroy humanity. But Kurzweil is more optimistic.
He has long predicted that advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, which could alter the microscopic mechanisms that control the behavior of our bodies and the diseases that afflict them, will push back the inevitability of death. Soon, he said, these technologies will extend life at a rate faster than people age, eventually reaching an “escape velocity” that allows them to prolong their lives indefinitely.
“By the early 2030s, we will not die of old age,” he said.
If he can make it to this point, Kurzweil explained, he can probably reach the Singularity.
But the trends that underpin Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computing power and other technologies over long periods of time — don’t always follow the paths 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 Kurzweil if he was predicting 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’ve done it, I’ve lived forever,’ because it’s never forever.” In other words, he could never be proven right.
But he could be proven wrong. Sitting by the window in Boston, 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 escape velocity theory of longevity — that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied, “Can you hurry that up?” Two weeks later, she died.
Although Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines will be smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is less convinced that the inventor and futurist will live forever.
“I think a world ruled by white men 200 years ago would be a horrible place,” Dr. Hinton said.
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbaran.
