{"id":20379,"date":"2017-11-02T19:59:02","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T19:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/?p=305937"},"modified":"2017-11-07T22:32:37","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T22:32:37","slug":"the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-and-its-impact-on-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/2017\/11\/02\/the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-and-its-impact-on-society\/","title":{"rendered":"talk | Future of Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

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organization:<\/span> Council on Foreign Relations | link<\/a>
\nevent:<\/span> Annual Term Member Conference | link
\ntalk title:<\/span> The\u00a0Future of Artificial Intelligence & Its Impact on Society | link<\/a><\/p>\n

host:<\/span> Nicholas Thompson — Editor in Chief at\u00a0Wired<\/em>
\nspeaker:<\/span> Ray Kurzweil — leading inventor, futurist, best selling author<\/p>\n

presentation date:<\/span> November 3, 2017<\/p>\n

about from CFR<\/span> | In a wide-ranging discussion at a Council on Foreign Relations event, Ray Kurzweil covers issues from how AI will enhance us — expanding our intelligence while improving our lives and even our spirituality — to ethical issues such as dealing with technological risks.<\/p>\n

Each year CFR * organizes more than 100 on-the-record events, conference calls, and podcasts in which senior government officials, global leaders, business executives, and prominent thinkers discuss pressing international issues.<\/p>\n

* CFR is the Council on Foreign Relations<\/p>\n

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on the web<\/span> | essentials<\/em><\/p>\n

Council on Foreign Relations | main<\/a>
\nCouncil on Foreign Relations | events: main<\/a>
\nCouncil on Foreign Relations | events: The Future of Artificial Intelligence & Its Impact on Society<\/a><\/p>\n

Council on Foreign Relations | YouTube channel: main<\/a>
\nCouncil on Foreign Relations | YouTube channel: The Future of Artificial Intelligence & Its Impact on Society — video<\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/em> | Council on Foreign Relations<\/a><\/p>\n

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transcript:<\/span> full talk<\/p>\n

organizer:<\/span> Council on Foreign Relations
\nevent:<\/span> Annual Term Member Conference<\/p>\n

talk title:<\/span> The Future of Artificial Intelligence & Its Impact on Society<\/p>\n

speaker:<\/span> Ray Kurzweil — leading inventor, futurist, best selling author
\nhost:<\/span> Nicholas Thompson — Editor in Chief at Wired<\/em><\/p>\n

THOMPSON: All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the closing session of the Council on Foreign Relations 22nd annual Term Member Conference with Ray Kurzweil.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m Nicholas Thompson. I will be presiding over today\u2019s session.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d also like to thank Andrew Gundlach, him and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, for their generous support of the CFR Term Member Program. I was a term member a couple years ago. I love this program. What a great event. I\u2019m so glad to be here. I\u2019m also glad to be here with Ray. All right, I\u2019m going to read Ray\u2019s biography, and then I\u2019m going to dig into some questions about how the world is changing, and he will blow your mind.<\/p>\n

So Ray Kurzweil is one of the world\u2019s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30 year track record of accurate predictions. It\u2019s true. If you look at his early books, they\u2019re 96% and 98% accurate. Called \u201cthe restless genius\u201d by The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, \u201cthe ultimate thinking machine\u201d by Forbes<\/em> magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. PBS selected him as one of the 16 revolutionaries who made America. Reading his bio, I was upset that he quotes all of my competitors, so I\u2019m going to add a quote from Wired magazine, which is \u201cHis mission is bolder than any voyage to space\u201d — Wired<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n

Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.<\/p>\n

Among Ray\u2019s many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds 21 honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Amazing.<\/p>\n

Ray has written five national bestselling books, which you should all buy immediately if you\u2019re on your phones, including New York Times<\/em> bestsellers \u201cThe Singularity Is Near\u201d and How To Create A Mind<\/em>. He is co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University —\u00a0and a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.<\/p>\n

He also, as I learned walking here, is the father of one of my sister\u2019s friends from grade school, who referred to him as the cool dad with the electric pianos — welcome, Ray.<\/p>\n

KURZWEIL: Great to be here.<\/p>\n

THOMPSON: All right. So some of you are probably familiar with his work. Some of you may not be. But let\u2019s begin, Ray, by talking about the law of accelerating returns, what that means for technology. Lay out a framework for what\u2019s about to happen, and then we\u2019ll dig into how foreign policy is going to be turned on its head.<\/p>\n

KURZWEIL: Sure. Well, that\u2019s the basis of my futurism. In 1981 I realized that the key to being successful as an inventor was timing. The inventors whose names you recognize, like Thomas Edison or my new boss — my first boss, Larry Page, were in the right place with the right idea at the right time. And timing turns out to be important for everything from writing magazine articles to making investments to romance. You got to be at the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n

I started with the common wisdom that you cannot predict the future, and I made a very surprising discovery. There\u2019s actually one thing about the future that\u2019s remarkably predictable, and that is that the price, performance, and capacity not of everything, not of every technology, but of every information technology follows a very predictable path. And that path is exponential, not linear. So that\u2019s the law of accelerating returns. But it bears a little explanation.<\/p>\n

I had the price\/performance of computing — calculations per second per constant dollar — going back to the 1890 Census through 1980 on a logarithmic scale, where a straight line is exponential growth. It was a gradual, second level of exponential, but it was a very smooth curve. And you could not see World War I or World War II or the Great Depression or the Cold War on that curve. So I projected it out to 2050. We\u2019re now 36 years later. It\u2019s exactly where it should be. So this is not just looking backward now and over-fitting to past data, but this has been a forward-looking progression that started in 1981. And it\u2019s true of many different measures of information technology.<\/p>\n

And the progression is not linear. It\u2019s exponential. And our brains are linear. If you wonder why we have a brain, it\u2019s to predict the future. But the kind of challenges we had, you know, 50,000 years ago when our brains were evolving were linear ones. We\u2019d look up and say: OK, that animal\u2019s going that way, I\u2019m coming up the path this way, we\u2019re going to meet at that rock. That\u2019s not a good idea. I\u2019m going to take a different path. That was good for survival. That became hardwired in our brains. We didn\u2019t expect that animal to speed up as it went along. We made a linear projection.<\/p>\n

The primary difference between myself and my critics, and many of them are coming around, is we look at the same world. They apply their linear intuition. For example, halfway through the Genome Project, 1 percent of the genome had been collected after seven years. So mainstream critics said: I told you this wasn\u2019t going to work. Here you are, seven years, 1 percent. It\u2019s going to take 700 years, just like we said. My reaction at the time was, well, we finished 1 percent, we\u2019re almost done, because 1 percent is only seven doublings from 100 percent, and have been doubling every year. Indeed, that continued. The project was finished seven years later. That\u2019s continued since the end of the Genome Project. That first genome cost a billion dollars. We\u2019re now down to $1,000. And every other aspect of what we call biotechnology — understanding this data, modeling, simulating it, and, most importantly, reprograming it, is progressing exponentially.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll mention just one implication of the law of accelerating returns, because it has many ripple effects and it\u2019s really behind this remarkable digital revolution we see, is the 50 percent deflation rate in information technologies. So I can get the same computation, communication, genetic sequencing, brain data as I could a year ago for half the price today. That\u2019s why you can buy an iPhone or an Android phone that\u2019s twice as good as the one two years ago for twice the price. You put some of the improved price performance in price and some of it into performance. So you asked me actually just a few minutes a question that I was also asked by Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, at her annual meeting recently: How come we don\u2019t see this in productivity statistics? And that\u2019s because we factor it out. We put it in the numerator and the denominator.<\/p>\n

So when this girl in Africa buys a smartphone for $75, it counts as $75 of economic activity, despite the fact that it\u2019s literally a trillion dollars of computation circa 1960, a billion dollars circa 1980. It\u2019s got millions of dollars of free information apps, just one of which is an encyclopedia far better than the one I saved up for years as a teenager to buy. All that counts for zero in economic activity because it\u2019s free. So we really don\u2019t count the value of these products. And people who compile these statistics say, well, we take into consideration quality improvement in products, but really using models that use the old linear assumption.<\/p>\n

So then Christine said, yes, it\u2019s true the digital world\u2019s amazing. We can do all these remarkable things. But you can\u2019t wear information technology. You can\u2019t eat it. You can\u2019t wear it. You can\u2019t live in it. And that\u2019s — and my next point is all of that\u2019s going to change. We\u2019ll be able to print out clothing using 3-D printers. Not today. We\u2019re kind of in the hype phase of 3-D printing, but the 2020s — early 2020s, we\u2019ll be able to print out clothing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019ll be lots of cool open-source designs you can download for free. We\u2019ll still have a fashion industry, just like we still have a music and movie and book industry. Coexistence of free, open-source products — which are a great leveler — and proprietary products. We\u2019ll print — we\u2019ll be able to create food very inexpensively using 3-D — vertical agriculture, using hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat. The first hamburger to be produced this way has already been consumed. It was expensive. It was a few hundred thousand dollars, but — but it was very good. (Laughter.)<\/p>\n

THOMPSON: A free side — that\u2019s like, what it costs.<\/p>\n

KURZWEIL: But that\u2019s research costs. So it\u2019s a long discussion, but all of these different resources are going to become information technologies. A building was put together recently, as a demo, using little modules snapped together, Lego style, printed on a 3-D printer in Asia. Put together a three-story office building in a few days. That\u2019ll be the nature of construction in the 2020s. 3-D printers will print out the physical things we need.<\/p>\n

She said, OK, but we\u2019re getting very crowded. Land is not expanding. That\u2019s not an information technology. And I said, actually there\u2019s lots of land. We just have decided to crowd ourselves together so we can work and play together. Cities was an early invention. We\u2019re already spreading out with even the crude virtual and augmented reality we have today. Try taking a train trip anywhere in the world, and you\u2019ll see that 97% of the land is unused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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