Ray Kurzweil

It's under the oversight of humans, specifically themselves.

I mean, who was it? Ray Kurzweil is kind of classic for saying these grandiose things when he was asked, "Do you believe God exists?" And he...

as, uh, I think Abdu Murray quoted this in our symposium.

He, he responded, "Not yet." You know, I mean, what a, what a statement, right? Where you basically put all the either weight of saving the world or all the weight of killing everyone in the hands of humans or human inventions.

in other words, the outcome is the same with both the soft sell and the hard sell, and that is that we fuse with AI, and AI will then, uh, uh, dictate our thoughts and our emotional responses, and they won't have to manipulate information to manipulate perception anymore 'cause the perception will come direct.

That's the idea, and people like, um, Ray Kurzweil, the so-called futurist at Google, said years ago that by 2030 this will be happening.

I say it's already happening, as I explain in the books.

But, um, so we are, um, we are looking at a, a, a, uh, a, uh, an emerging, um, control system through AI that's, that's coming out of the astral.

Relief at being free, at being liberated from the world.

Compare this to recent statements by leading AI thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, who says, we didn't stay on the ground, we didn't stay on the planet, and we didn't stay within the limitations of our human biology.

We are liberating ourselves, just like we liberated ourselves from ground with airplanes, And we liberate ourselves from the planet with space travel.

We're now liberating ourselves from our human biology with AI.

And so for a variety of reasons, Yuval Harari calls the agrarian revolution the greatest fraud in history.

What do you think are the chances that the AI revolution may also turn out to be the greatest fraud in history? Because we have Ray Kurzweil, we have Peter Diamandis who are promising us a world of abundance.

Peter Diamandis' book is literally called The Future is Better Than You Think.

right? Steven Kotler is one of his co-authors.

We are still a little bit in front of that.

Yeah, your six foundational shifts kind of reminded me to.

Ray Kurzweil's six epochs, and I am not a fan of his six epochs.

I think it was on page 15 in The Singularity is Near where Ray Kurzweil has this kind of a neat graph.

I think it's worth stepping back to sort of level set about where the technology is headed and the nature of the technology itself.

So I became interested in this topic as a kid reading lots of futurist literature, like Ray Kurzweil, sort of fell into cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ended up going to economics because economics is in some ways, it gets conflated with finance, but really it's more extension of psychology, trying to understand human behavior.

And it turns out to have lots of mappings as well to artificial intelligence.

But I came away from that intellectual journey with an understanding of the mind as essentially what the brain does and the kinds of computations the brain performs are well approximated by artificial neural networks.

But either way, this sort of millenarian undercurrent to a lot of AI discourse is epidemic.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, right? So, you know, there's the genetic fallacy, just because something may remind you or originate and something else does not make it incorrect.

There is a sense in which Ray Kurzweil's notion of a singularity makes perfect physical sense.

In some ways, the Industrial Revolution was a singularity.

when ...

It's Ray Kurzweil.

What ...

Singularity.

This is exactly where you have to look at what Page spends his personal conviction on outside the day job, because to him, it's not abstract at all.

Twenty twelve, he hires Ray Kurzweil, a well-known futurist and evangelist for the idea of the singularity and for the idea that if medicine can just keep pace, you might live indefinitely, as a director of engineering.

Twenty thirteen, he launches a biotech venture with an openly stated mission to fight aging, one the press at the time literally described as trying to solve death.

Okay, so this isn't AI helps me search the web slightly better.

Look, there's a type of person who reads Snow Crash and it changes their life.

There's a type of person who stumbles across Ray Kurzweil's books on the singularity when they're in college as a freshman or first year at Mr. Jefferson's University.

And and it and it like fucks up their head really bad.

And that kind of happened to me.

I mean,

he was Ray Kurzweil 100 years before Ray Kurzweil.

Yeah.

And then, you know, now the question is how you attend to this thing, right? I just stumbled on a quote by Arthur C.