Topic
22 facts from 5 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
1868
Ray Kurzweil says his great-grandmother founded a school in 1868 that was the first in Europe to give girls higher education, through 14th grade.
“my mother's mother's mother created the school in 1868, and it was the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls.”
1900
Ray Kurzweil says life expectancy was 48 years in 1900 and is now over eighty.
“Life expectancy was forty eight in 1,900,”
1945
Ray Kurzweil notes that two nuclear bombs were used in 1945 and none has been used in anger since, which makes him think nuclear war will be avoided.
“We had two nuclear bombs go off in 45, so now we're seventy seven years later.”
1970s
Ray Kurzweil says he developed optical character recognition in the 1970s and waited until the 1980s for speech recognition, which needed more computation.
“I did OCR in the 1970s, uh, because OCR is, uh, doesn't require a lot of computation.”
1980s
Ray Kurzweil says salmonella from a trip to Mexico caused pancreatitis that left him with an unusual form of diabetes, neither type one nor type two.
“Went to Mexico 40 years ago, developed salmonella that created pancreatitis, which gave me a strange form of diabetes.”
1999
Ray Kurzweil first predicted in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines that computers would pass the Turing test in 2029.
“I made this in 1999 in my book, The age of spiritual machines, and then you repeated the prediction in 2,000 in 2005.”
1999
According to Ray Kurzweil, a 1999 Stanford conference polled AI experts on when AI would pass the Turing test, and the average answer was a hundred years.
“It was really the first time that AI experts worldwide were polled on this prediction. Uh, and the average poll was a hundred years.”
2005
Ray Kurzweil says his two analyses of the Drake equation in The Singularity Is Near gave either thousands of advanced civilizations per galaxy or just one.
“I have two analyses of the Drake equation, both with very reasonable assumptions, and one gives you thousands of s advanced civilizations in each galaxy, and another one gives you one civilization.”
2010-2022
Ray Kurzweil says the training compute used for the largest AI models has doubled roughly every six months.
“the fastest computer models that have been created, and that actually expands roughly twice a year, like every six months, it expands by two.”
2020s
Ray Kurzweil says he expects longevity escape velocity, where life expectancy rises more than a year per year, by the end of the decade.
“Longevity escape velocity, um, which we're not quite at yet, but I think we're actually pretty close.”
2021
Ray Kurzweil says that a year before the interview, the forecasting platform Metaculus polled AI experts and gave 2042 for passing the Turing test, later revised to 2030.
“So a year ago, uh, something called Meticulous, which you may be aware of, assesses different types of experts on the future.”
2029
Tony Robbins says Ray Kurzweil has predicted artificial general intelligence by 2029, while Geoffrey Hinton gives 2030 to 2040.
“Ray Kurzweil's a good friend of mine, he's the most accurate predictor of technology in history, and he's been saying 2029 for almost 20 years is when we have artificial general intelligence.”
2040s
Sinclair recalls futurist Ray Kurzweil predicting the singularity around the 2040s, though Sinclair is skeptical.
“Ray Kurzweil said, it's coming soon.”
Undated
Sinclair says he and Ray Kurzweil published the metabolic winter hypothesis, proposing that humans were historically often hungry or cold and now rarely are.
“We published what's called the metabolic winter hypothesis, which is few tens of thousands of years ago, we were either hungry or cold or both”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil says language models worked poorly at around 10 billion parameters, worked fairly well at 100 billion, and were moving toward 1 trillion.
“it requires a certain amount of information in order to, uh, be effective, and that we would not see AI really being effective until it got to that level.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil cites a poll in which 70 percent of respondents thought extreme poverty had worsened and only 1 percent correctly said it had fallen by half.
“70% thought it had gotten worse, and and that's the general impression.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil used cell phones, which started expensive and became affordable, to argue that advanced technology becomes cheap over time.
“I mean, there's like 4 billion cell phones in the world today.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil describes a product that read 200,000 books and returned the sentence that best answered a question, which he adapted to his father's writings.
“it would read 200,000 books, and then, and and then find the one sentence in 200,000 books that best answered your question.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil says he built a question-answering system from the writings of his father, Frederick, who directed choral and music groups.
“everything that Frederick Israel had written.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil says he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search as a high school student.
“where I won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.”
Undated
Ray Kurzweil describes the 'great goo' risk as a self-replicating nanobot that could turn everything into copies of itself and destroy biological life.
“it's the great goo challenge.”
Undated
Patel recalls that Ray Kurzweil's thesis was that people living to forty would reach technology allowing indefinite life extension.
“he had written this book where his thesis at the time was if you live until you're forty, we will have the science and technology to allow us to live in perpetuity.”
Episodes