 So Matt, today we're reviewing the singularity as near when humans transcend biology by Ray Kurzweil. Tell the listeners, what on earth is this book about? Adam, you may have heard that the machine overlords are coming. Well, good news, you're going to become a machine overlord. The idea behind this book is that humans, machines, virtual reality, actual reality are all going to merge together as one. Yes, essentially technology will progress so quickly that we'll be subsumed with our technology and become one with it. Now, this can kind of sound like, you know, a sci-fi fantasy, something you might see in a pot of Star Trek, but Ray Kurzweil is really a respected author and AI theorist. Yeah, Kurzweil does seem to be writing about the Borg at times, but he's actually very respected. As you said, he's worked with Marvin Minsky in MIT. He's an entrepreneur that's founded a lot of different companies. And despite calling himself a singularitarian, he actually takes this very seriously. Yes, you know the singularitarian movement is full of intelligent people because the word is basically impossible for us to pronounce. And now, before we get further into our review of the singularity, it's time to remind listeners that this is random talkers, I am Adam, the other voice to hear is Matt. And this is a show where we prognosticate on how technology is going to shape our future for better and worse. You can hear us on YouTube, you can hear us on iTunes or SoundCloud if you prefer the podcast form. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, leave a comment. We love to hear from you, especially if you have any book suggestions for us to add to our reading list. Now, to get back to the idea of the singularity, you know, humans merging with machines, you might wonder how on earth technology is going to become advanced enough, but we'll get to a point where we're basically cool with becoming one with it. Now, in Ray Kurzweil's mind, this is going to happen because technology grows it an exponential rate. It's not a linear growth of a slight improvement year after year. No, it's a steadily increasing rate of growth, which is kind of powering with technological advancements of the future. Yeah, he calls this exponential growth rate the law of accelerating returns, the idea that each advancement builds on the last and it just gets faster and faster as time goes on. Now, if you take the 2004 rate of progress when this book was written, you'll actually see that Ray says we'll get 20,000 years of technological progress this century. I'm pretty excited by that, Adam. Yeah, I'm very excited by two. And one thing you just mentioned then is that this book was in fact written in 2004, which means now in 2018, we have 14 years to look back on some of the predictions that Ray made and kind of assess whether or not they're coming true. But you know, we'll get more into that later. Yeah, you know, you may find yourself doubting that this exponential growth could be true. But I'll point out that there is another law that seems to hold pretty steady, which is Moore's law. And the idea behind Moore's law is that we'll double the number of transistors on an integrated circuit approximately every two years. And this has held steady for about 45 years now. Yes, the other constant with Moore's law has been every two years or so we get an article proclaiming is Moore's law dead. But for the most part, you know, it seems to be chunking along reasonably well even here in 2018. Now, one key point that Ray makes towards exponential growth is to say that over a short period of time, exponential growth can appear more like linear growth. So if we look back over the last year or two, say, we might think that, you know, not much has really changed, you know, our phones are basically the same, you know, there might be a few more emojis, but not much really changed between the last iPhone and this one. You know, Adam, I would say you're not noticing the change because you're using an Android device. Yeah, that's true. I basically noticed how my phone doesn't work every day. But I'm sure iPhones are maybe progressing faster than I might think. But Ray basically says that we shouldn't consider technological growth on such a short time frame of one to two years. Instead, we need to look back say a century. And let's say as a thought experiment, we took the technology of today back to someone who was alive 100 years ago, they would surely be absolutely stunned by just how much technological advancement has taken place over a bad period of time. I mean, even something that we take for granted today, something like Spotify, the ability to stream a few thousands, millions of songs from a single device would have absolutely full abacus to someone who was alive 100 years ago. Yeah, you know, it's oftentimes lost in the present that some of the things we have, like a cell phone that is on, you know, the internet that can get any piece of information, is truly a sci-fi device to somebody, you know, for 100 or even 50 years ago. One way I like to think about this is my own family, my own relatives. I asked myself, what was the difference in generations between, let's say my great grandparents to my grandparents, to even my parents? And it's clear to me that the differences between those generations are increasing. My great grandparents were much more similar to my grandparents than even my parents are to me today. And because of this, I think there's a lot of evidence for this structure that Kurzweil is putting forward. Right. Kurzweil points out that new technologies are basically being adopted faster and faster. So if you look at like traditional landline phones versus the cell phone, the cell phone saturated the market a whole lot faster than the original phone did. Same thing with technologies like the internet. Kurzweil also says that we've had these kind of temporary blips in human history that you might expect to slow down a pace of technology, but they really haven't. So he's thinking of things here like depressions, recessions, world wars. But in fact, something like a world war might have actually sped up the pace of technology via the atomic bomb. Yeah, you know, Kurzweil really sees everything as exponential growth. And if you're a big fan of charts on a log scale, this book is for you. You know, the other thing he points out is that while it does look like exponential growth at the macro level, if you zoom in a bit, what you'll actually see is that technological change is a series of overlapping S curves. So the idea behind an S curve is there's a gradual steady state, a ramping up, if you will, then there's a really drastic step change to a new plateau. And then if you stack these S curves together, you'll actually get a very good representation of technological change. So to use an example here, let's think about computer design, computer paradigms. You've had relays, then you had vacuum tubes, then you had transistors. All of these are a step change function that has led us to where we are today. Right, I think this exponential growth kind of theory works very well for computing, but maybe not so much so for other areas. There's one chart in the book, for example, where Ray shows educational spend as following an exponential growth pattern. Now this might be true that spend on education has grown very sharply, but I doubt anyone would say that the returns from education have really increased at an exponential rate. And for that reason, it's hard to kind of say that we've seen the same progress in other areas of technology that we have in just say pure computing. Yeah, it may be exponential, but it's certainly not headed in the upward direction. I would also say that, you know, there's lots of different examples in the book that get used, for example, VR, that I think people today would point out AR is perhaps even more prominent. So didn't exactly nail that one. The other thing is, you know, obviously blockchain technology had not been invented yet, so that doesn't show up. And this is not to say that, you know, this is, you know, necessarily a flaw of the book, it's just pointing out that, you know, when you design a book written in 2004 trying to predict the future, especially when you believe there's going to be exponential growth, it's really, really difficult to get right. Now another area that that's also somewhat, you know, testing in my opinion, difficult to describe is his belief that, you know, we'll be able to model the human brain. This idea is that instead of, you know, creating AI through computer algorithms, we'll simply reverse engineer the existing circuitry of the brain to be a functional model of an AI algorithm. Now, I kind of equivocate this to, you know, Leonardo da Vinci coming up with a flying machine, but later on, we needed the Wright brothers to explain to us that we actually need a fixed wing aircraft for this thing to work. Right. Looking back now in 2018, the book that was written in 2004, I would say, rate gets a lot right, but there are some things that kind of stand out as being omitted or, you know, perhaps misrepresented in terms of how they would affect the future. So if you're looking for a discussion of crypto kitties and, you know, how they're going to transform technology, that's not in here, unfortunately. And also there is a kind of very long winded discussion of the brain and reverse engineering the brain and all kinds of facts about the brain. But just don't see particularly relevant to modern AI research, where if you read sort of intro AI books, I'll kind of say, yes, it's a neural network, but we're not trying to reverse engineer the brain. That's not what this is about. And that's not really what is kind of generating the AI progressive today. Nevertheless, there are some interesting parts when Ray is talking about the brain that we will be remiss to not to mention. For example, there's a discussion on just how many computations the brain can make. So Ray talks about a CPS metric or computations per second metric throughout the book. And for humans, it's about 10 to the 14th power, which is really quite stupendous. And at the time that the book was written, it was basically equivalent to the top supercomputer in the world. Another thing Ray talks about is how the brain stores memories. He kind of compares them to being a hologram, whereby they're stored in a diffuse pattern throughout the brain, whereby as neurons pick up new information, some of the neurons that were being used to store the memory are basically repurposed. But the overall structure of the memory sort of remains, it's just kind of a hologram that is losing its resolution. And that's kind of how we see memories fade in our brains as these neurons are essentially being replaced for other purposes over time. Well, I for one, Adam found these holograms much more useful than the holographic Tupac that appeared at Coachella a couple of years ago. Yeah, legendary rapper, not so legendary performance, I would say. Yeah, yeah, it didn't didn't turn out great. You know, in addition to reverse engineering the brain, Kurzweil sees there being three main drivers of technological progress, genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. Now we're going to shorten these as G and R, but we'll go through each of them in order. So the first is genetics. Now this is one where I think most people will probably be the most familiar. You of course have new technologies like CRISPR, but then the general idea that you can change DNA and eradicate diseases or make ourselves smarter, stronger, faster, whatever it may be. I think Ray Kurzweil kind of looks as this is not necessarily the most important or the most compelling because he kind of sees the machine side of things taking over and really negating our need to do too much genetic fiddling. Now the next side though is nanotechnology and nanotechnology is where Ray really shines. He loves nano anything at all. Yes, Ray is a huge believer in the power of nanotechnology. He lists a number of examples of nanotechnology, so many examples that one might get a little bit bored reading all of them. But overall, I would say that the gist of it is that nanotechnology will be to say physical manufacturing what AI is to computing whereby using nanobots you'll be able to make everything so cheaply that the value of the item will be in the design, not the kind of raw materials and processing needed to create it. There are some interesting nanotechnology applications that are mentioned in the book. Perhaps the most compelling one to me is the idea of nanobots inside you used as a superior immune system, whereby you'd have trillions of nanobots in your bloodstream fighting diseases, fighting viruses, basically making sure nothing goes wrong with you, perhaps even replacing organs with nanomaterials so that you'll live a much longer, healthier life. There is one slight concern here which is the nanobots would need to be internet connected in Ray's vision to receive updates and instructions which could be a little bit terrifying if you've heard anything about computer viruses, but in Ray's mind we've done a reasonably good job of controlling viruses when it comes to computers and he feels like we could do the same thing with nanobots and his view is that the overwhelming kind of positive consequences of nanobots will sort of overtake any negative side effects of them. Yeah I'm sure the dystopians out there will be very alarmed by these interconnected bots, but you know the real thing that you should have called on Adam is that he talks about a series of nanobots that will allow me to eat anything I want. That is the real value add. You just have the bots just chomp off all those excess calories and you know I'm having a good time. Yeah Ray has this interesting example where he basically says that you know we can have sex now about making a baby so we should be able to eat without gaining weight. You know you should be able to eat that burger for lunch, maybe have a second burger and the nanobots will just take care of it so you don't actually gain any weight. Yeah I think another interesting application of this is that perhaps we won't necessarily need the bots to eat up the excess calories. We'll just simply insert the bots into our brain and make us perceive a different reality. So I will eat a piece of lettuce but my brain will tell me oh you're actually eating a burger and I'll enjoy it the same way. Now obviously this starts to feel a bit like a Philip K Dick novel where you start to ask yourself if you have bots that are in the brain that can manipulate neurons in such a way. Can we know anything is real at all? How will we be able to perceive reality? What can we trust? Right and as part of kind of the singularity of emerging of humans and machines Ray basically envisions the physical and virtual world emerging too and I think one of kind of the differences in the way that Ray looks at the world to how most people look at it is that Ray I don't think really sees the virtual world as being inferior in any way to the physical world. You know he'd be absolutely fine with living in a virtual world you know if it was a fantastic utopia versus slogging things out in the real world. And for nanobots you know Ray really goes a step further when it comes to virtual reality you know today we think of virtual reality as putting on a clunky headset you have to wear all the time Ray actually basically says no we could have nanobots inside our brains but a program to basically show us this virtual world and that's his idea of a immersive virtual reality rather than kind of the headset version we have right now. But I would say you know the predictions that have been made in 2004 in terms of the the power of nanotechnology have not necessarily yet come to pass. One of the advancements that Ray talks about is nanotech being used for fuel efficient gains in terms of renewable energy. Basically you could create these amazing nanotechnology solar panels that would be much more fuel efficient than the ones we have right now but this hasn't really come to pass. There was a startup called Nanosolar that attracted about $400 million in VC money and it went completely bankrupt it didn't really go anywhere. And so some of these like advancements in nanotechnology you kind of have to put the brakes on and say you know is this really going to happen anytime soon. Yeah maybe we haven't seen the progress we expected in nanotech but one area we have seen progress in is robotics. So robotics is the R in G and R and it's the final area that Ray Kurzweil kind of sees as driving the future. Now up to this point he acknowledges that nanobots are sort of dumb technology. They follow a set of instructions but they can't really think or make decisions on their own. However Ray says that pretty soon we'll get into you know robotics which has a strong AI. Now a strong AI is an AI which is defined as being smarter than humans. So if you've read Nick Bostrom's Super Intelligence he goes into this topic at depth. We actually have a review out there of this book if you're interested but to describe this we'll say that at some point in the future AI is going to be smarter than humans and at that point they're really going to sort of be the next evolution if you will of humanity will be these super smart AIs and you know from Kurzweil's perspective he's not really bothered by this. He sort of sees the merger of man and machine as the natural evolutionary process and welcomes it with open arms. Right Ray doesn't see it as a takeover as some people might have AI he sees it as a merger where we'll basically gain from this AI we've created rather than being you know subservient to it. And in Ray's kind of vision of the world you know we are one with the machines we basically live in this world where the physical and virtual have merged basically ready to play one in real life kind of. One thing that Ray kind of takes away from this potential future is a lot of the issues and the problems that we have today will sort of go away. We'll have nanotechnology that can basically be used to say cure any diseases you know we'll be able to say upload our minds and save them forever and for that reason you know death won't really be a thing. And he's really against kind of us hanging on to what he sees as human imperfections and sort of romanticizing them or making them seem noble in any fashion. I mean one great line he has in the book is that he sees no reason to celebrate our limitations. You know he doesn't see the fact that we die as a necessary or a noble or a great thing but is you know somehow necessary for humanity. And instead he actually has quite an incisive critique of religion I would say in this book in which he basically says that religion has been created to justify why we have to die. But in Kurzweil's mind death isn't necessary at all. Yeah you know it's funny because he kind of sees death as this thing that one day will seem very outdated and shocking to people. Maybe if you look back in human history and you see you know perhaps infant mortality rates 100 or 200 years ago and you looked at you know that today it would be absolutely appalling. He kind of sees death as the same way in like 200 or 300 years we're going to look back at today and just be absolutely appalled that people died. Yes and so Ray for one is not accepting death anytime soon. He's actually written a book about living forever and he's quite serious about living long enough to get to a point where his say mind and intelligence could be uploaded and saved you know even if his physical body is no longer around. And he basically talks about this as being a bridge to a bridge to a bridge whereby you just have to make it to the next kind of technological innovation that's going to keep you alive and eventually you'll get to a point where death isn't really a thing. Yeah just waiting on that next S-curve. Yes but Ray points out that you know for this to happen we are going to be dependent on technology. You know evolution happens but it's incredibly slow. One interesting fact he has in the book is that he talks about how we evolve about one cubic inch of brain matter every 100,000 years. We get smarter but it takes a long time and if we instead depend on say a strong AI to help us we can get a lot further a lot faster. So these new technologies really bring up an important philosophical question for us which is what is the nature of who you are if you're backing up your mind to the internet if your body parts are being replaced by nanotech what is the nature of you? So one question that comes up in philosophy is this example of the ship of Theseus. So for those of you who may not know in Theseus' paradox the idea is that there's a ship it's traveling all around the world and it's on a journey let's say for 10 years and as it's traveling each of the pieces of the ship are being replaced so a board here a sail here and when the ship leaves it has all of its original parts but as it travels around every single one of those parts is replaced and we ask ourselves is the ship that returns to port at the end the exact ship or the same ship that started would you still call that the ship of Theseus and most people would say yes even though the pieces have been replaced that is the same ship but then you have this new interesting twist on the story which is if you took that same ship that Theseus had and you place it in museum and night by night you had someone sneak in and replace it part by part would that still be the original ship and I would say most people would disagree and say no it's actually the pieces that were stolen out that were the original ship so there's some element of Theseus owning the ship or having the ship that implies who the parts belong to and I think it then asks this interesting question if there are multiple copies of you if your brain is being influenced by different nanobots what is the nature of you what is your true reality so Ray kind of says you know for example if he was cloned and there was a ray two out there most people would agree that that ray two is not him it's not his identity but then he kind of talks like you said the ship of Theseus about gradual replacement whereby if our bodies were gradually over time replaced with nanomaterials you know would we still consider that to be us and some people even here are kind of saying well maybe not you know if I'm just nanobots is that really me but the counter to that that Ray has is that he says our bodies are replacing ourselves from themselves right now you know he says that every month essentially if you look at your biological material you know your cells are rebuilding what was you a month ago is not you now so he would argue that this gradual replacement is happening today and if it's happening with nanomaterials well that's all the more the better you know is going to be a better you a longer lasting you and you should sort of embrace that as still being your identity rather than worrying about yourself being you know taken over by nanobots so this question of what makes you you I would say has really infiltrated the culture as a kid saying if you watch netflix for example right now there's a show called altered carbon that is on and in this show human bodies are basically known as sleeves they're eminently replaceable what is us is essentially a metal desk that is plugged into the vertebrae of this sleeve and then basically turns on to become our body for that point in time and humans over the course of history can basically switch sleeves switch bodies and carry on just fine now there is some slight drama to this in the altered carbon universe which is that if your body or your sleeve is killed well you're okay because the desk can come out of the vertebrae and be plugged into another sleeve but if that disc itself is destroyed the vertebrae is destroyed well now you're done and your life is well and truly over and this of course adds a lot of drama to the show but you might wonder you know in a universe where the technology is available to do this why wouldn't they have made a backup of you that seems like it'd be useful to have you know I have to agree Adam in reality we would always want a backup but it does make a little bit of sense because I could see a government or other regulatory agency demanding that only one copy may exist and there's some good reasons for this you can imagine a world where you know Adolf Hitler has cloned himself a million times on some sort of you know outer rim planet and they're headed to do something evil so it's not something that you know I could see being that far off of reality the good news is is that Ray Kurzweil is the perennial tech optimist he really thinks in the long run the positive outcomes will always win out yes so Ray is really aggressive about how quickly he sees tech progressing for example by the end of the 2030s he predicts that we will be able to upload our digital cells basically keep our minds our memories our intelligence in the cloud and essentially live forever really and Ray is very serious about this concept of not dying he takes for example over 250 supplements per day that's about 250 more than I take Adam yet likewise he also receives about a half a dozen intravenous therapy drips and he is incredibly serious about keeping his body going and basically living long enough to reach this technological innovation whereby our minds can be saved forever now I think you can say that Ray was potentially a little over-infusiastic with some of the predictions that were made in the two finals and four edition of this book for example he talks about a drug to fight heart disease which was a torso trap it now this drug went into medical trials and unfortunately killed a lot of people who took it and therefore is never going to come to market and so I think this is just one of the dangers you obviously there's no way Ray at the time of writing this book have known that the drug wouldn't work out too well but this is one of the dangers of trying to kind of forecast drug advances medical advances that kind of thing you know it's very difficult to know what is actually going to take place yeah Adam one thing you're pointing out here is that Ray basically ignores all of the societal changes of his technological predictions he sort of thinks that you know everything will just work itself out we don't really need to worry about the detail so much just the direction we're going so for example one thing I think he gets right in the book it's his prediction that we will be cloning animals or creating some sort of synthetic meat in the near future but what he doesn't talk about at all is what that might do for farmers how are they going to find a job if they're out of work and they are used to raising cattle so that's completely ignored the environmental effect that this could create is also sort of glossed over because you could say that okay now we're actually going to have quite a bit of excess energy or less greenhouse gas because of that and that's that's maybe a good thing and you know in in the end he doesn't talk about it at all and I think the the glaring one and the one we talked about last time was UBI so universal basic income is something that we kind of said may be required to pay people or to provide sustenance in a world where people don't have jobs well again Ray sort of says eh don't worry too much about that yeah and Ray does credit does talk about kind of needing to convince the public about the benefits of technology and I would say that in the 14 years since this book was written that campaign has not been going terribly well I think there's been a lot of backlash against sort of tech companies as being sort of greedy and not necessarily kind of working towards the greater good and of course we have to work in a Trump reference there are you know impending trade wars with certain industries that may have not been foreseen yes and I think when we go back to the concept of G&R genetics nanotechnology robotics we see a lot of ways that these can go wrong but as sort of acknowledged by Ray but not necessarily delved into in a whole lot of detail so for nanotechnology you have the prospect of unstoppable nanobots self-replication for instance whereby to create trillions of nanobots we would essentially need them to be able to self-replicate but if this process were to grow out of control you could see a situation where nanobots take over the earth in about three and a half hours so yeah potentially look forward to that one when it comes to robotics and strong AI there's this idea that it's going to be very very difficult to control intelligence that is smarter than you everyone including Ray sort of acknowledges this but the general kind of you know compromise here or the general kind of acknowledgement is that you have to get the limitations of strong AI right the first time around you have to set the rules of the game before strong AI arrives and they have to be good enough to contain it once it does get here but I think we could all say that we're somewhat skeptical this is actually going to happen as people like Nick Boston pointed out now going back to kind of the lowly field of genetics in this book there are kind of terrifying implications here of you know altered DNA and the potential to create diseases that could kill people very effectively now Ray talks a lot in this book about SARS and the SARS outbreak and Ray kind of holds this up as being a successful example about how we were able to take a potentially very dangerous outbreak and basically contain it you know across nations and do a really good job of working together to make sure SARS wasn't too powerful one thing I will call out here is that SARS only had a mortality rate of about 15 to 20 percent and it didn't necessarily sprout as quickly as some of the diseases you could potentially see created in the future as genetics advances and especially if you had kind of a terrorist element that was able to introduce a disease into many world cities all at once it could be something where you have this terrifying threat with very little you can do before it had infected millions and millions of people so in that regard I mean I think all of the aspects of GNR genetics nanotechnology robotics all have areas where they could potentially grow out of control and be extremely dangerous yeah so for anyone who's played pandemic you should know that I will be hiding out in Madagascar if any of this goes down but I think we should switch gears a bit and talk a little bit about a concept that Ray thinks about a lot which is asymmetric risk tolerance the idea here is basically that there are a lot of dangers to the existing system and we just simply don't acknowledge them and we get freaked out a bit by potential changes so for example Ray talks a lot about how the drug approval process is too slow we drag our feet throughout the entire thing just to ensure that a drug doesn't harm people but we completely ignore the idea that the disease that the drug could potentially treat is killing people today so by doing that we're giving up lots of opportunity to save lives because we're scared that it might create incremental harm in some drug doubt yes while Ray is very much a tech futurist he does a good job I think in this book of focusing on the here and now and the millions of deaths from disease and famine that really should be preventable so famine in particular is something that Ray talks about extensively in the book he rails against environmentalists specifically of those who are trying to block the adoption of genetically modified crops because while Ray acknowledges there could be some you know obscure unforeseen danger of these crops for the most part they have been proven absolutely safe and they have the potential to save millions of lives in impoverished countries you know countries suffering from famine and environmentalists would think of those preventable deaths rather than worrying about some niche worry about you know GMO crops you know Adam intellectually Ray and I are on the same page but I'm going to have to leave eating the golden rice to you I did not realize you were such a lada when it came to to rice technology but let's move on and talk about something else yeah so another place asymmetric risk comes up all the time is when you think about self-driving technology now there was actually a very recent example of this where a uber self-driving car hit a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona and killed them and this person was walking in the middle of the street it was at night they appeared to be pushing a bicycle but we would have expected the LiDAR technology on the car to have detected the person now there's been a media firestorm where the media is asked like why this happened and how could we have prevented this but Ray Kurzweil would probably point out that we've completely ignored all of the countless deaths that are caused by human drivers who are not paying attention and hit a pedestrian and so because of this I would say you know this is a really good example where we're not thinking about this asymmetric risk correctly right so I don't want to really let uber off the hook here uber does not have the greatest reputation of any tech company I think there are valid questions about why was the human driver kind of supervising the car not looking at the road at the time why did the LiDAR not detect this person at all why did the car not slow down at all and I think because of that you know it's very reasonable there's going to be an extensive investigation into this to determine exactly what went wrong now having said that I do agree that the adoption of self-driving cars should generally dramatically reduce the amount of traffic deaths we see in the United States or anyway really but when I think you think about traffic deaths you can kind of separate them into three distinct categories right so there are those deaths that would have been say prevented by a self-driving car but not by a human driver who wouldn't have been able to respond in time so those are kind of great you know if you introduce self-driving cars you should be able to eliminate those deaths there are going to be some deaths that could not be prevented by either a human or a self-driving car you know maybe if there's some kind of like natural disaster a force of nature just nothing that a computer or human could possibly deal with and then the third category of the deaths that could be prevented by a human but not by a self-driving car because its algorithm for whatever reason could not prevent the death from occurring and I think people are somewhat concerned that this uber case could kind of fall into that third category whereby a human you know at night would have actually been able to at least slow the car down maybe get it down to a speed where the crash wasn't fatal whereas the self-driving car just did absolutely nothing you know kept going a 40 miles an hour or whatever speed was and struck this person and for that reason I think that's what people are upset about now I do think you can make the case as Ray probably would that people focus way too much on the third category of deaths whereby any death that you know a human possibly could have prevented the self-driving car didn't it's going to be looked on you know truly as a tragedy which it is but people aren't going to focus on kind of the first category of deaths which are the deaths that could be prevented by rolling out self-driving cars and I think a lot of people in kind of a self-driving community or just the tech community in general are going to be worried that this uber case is going to lead to a massive rollback in you know self-driving car progress which although preventing the third category of deaths is going to allow the first category of you know human kind of cause deaths to keep going which even though they could have been say solved by rolling out self-driving cars yeah I think all of these issues around self-driving cars and medical research calls into place for government regulation but I think Ray is pretty upfront that he doesn't think the government can be very effective in this space at all with maybe the exception if they are very totalitarian they can get away with some of these things but you know as a whole I think he really looks at things like open-source software development is being the way forward whereby you know if you can see the code that's written and everyone's familiar with it it actually will decrease things like computer viruses that's one example we talked about earlier and the other one is he believes a lot that industries can self-regulate so that you know there can be different principles and different you know guiding thoughts that industries can use and follow pretty closely and that's generally good enough to prevent really apparent behavior within a given industry the other thing though I think we should switch gears on a bit is just talk about the book in general this book covers a ton of topics Adam what did you like the most so yeah Ray can have you talking about the the Fermi paradox one moment switch to you know privacy and music the next he kind of goes around all over the place I actually thought this discussion of the Fermi paradox which is essentially why haven't we met any aliens yet it was pretty interesting and Ray's kind of solution to the paradox is that we are the civilization of all the civilizations that might be out there but as the furthest along in terms of technology this might be somewhat hard for us to believe but I think Ray makes a reasonably convincing case about why that may be so the stuff in here that considering the book was written in 2004 I would say has actually really been seen as kind of ahead of its time there's a discussion for example of government surveillance and NSA surveillance but really only came to kind of the general public's attention with Snowden and those revelations but here in 2004 you know Ray is on it you know he's talking about it right then overall you know this can be a pretty dense book it can be kind of dry in terms of the amount of technology that is discussed you know it's a pretty difficult read at certain points but overall I think Ray Kurzweil kind of comes at it with a sense of humor that sort of lifts the material up but it really keeps you engaged the whole way through in particular he has these dialogue sections kind of at the end of key points at the end of chapters whereby we have these dialogues where Ray might be talking to somebody from say the year 2100 or he has like historical figures jump in like Freud and Charles Darwin make appearances for instance and these kinds of mock conversations really help you sort of understand the concepts in your mind yeah you know I did not like the conversations the dialogue as much as you did Adam but the one thing I give Ray a lot of credit for is he comes out he makes his predictions but they're not exactly correct but he acknowledges that like he acknowledges that the future is ever changing and this is just a general framework for thinking about you know what might come to pass and I will say he gets a lot more right than he gets wrong so in general I don't hold him you know sort of speak accountable for for all of the misses because his hits are pretty high up there and you know I think he's just a really authentic person I think one of the interesting things about Ray Kurzweil as a person is he believes everything he says in this book I mean he is taking these you know 250 some odd supplements he is you know believe he does believe this with his whole being and so from that I give him a lot of credit he's not simply writing some you know book to put a theory out there and sell a bunch of books he's just telling you you know his philosophy on life if you will right and he's kind of put his money where his mouth points in his career in terms of a kind of technological investments he's made and he's really a kind of solid futurist in my mind and that he does make these very distinct predictions where he says you know by this particular point in time I think technology will have advanced to this state and I think you know if you went back and talked to sort of 2004 Ray now in 2018 you might find that he was perhaps you know a little bit disappointed about how far technology has come I mean we've certainly made strides in some areas you know like we've talked about self-driving cars appearing and for the most part they work but overall I think things like nanotechnology and kind of increases in computing power have not perhaps developed to the extent that Ray might have expected when he wrote the book yeah when I think back to 2004 a lot of the development in technology was hardware based was about you know rapidly increasing our capabilities in lots of different areas unfortunately I think shortly after that period of time you saw a bit of a change in the landscape whereby people who would go and you know let's say work at companies like Microsoft and Cisco are now working you know at companies that build apps and that's not necessarily a good or bad thing but I think it's changed the rate of some of these hardware predictions that someone like Kurzweil would be making you also saw this I think early on when people were talking in the early 2000s about oh you know it used to be that the best and the brightest were becoming doctors and scientists and now they're becoming Wall Street traders well unfortunately those Wall Street traders have now turned into app developers yes I mean I think the innovations he talks about you know essentially emerging man with machine you know creating these nanobots inside you that are going to fix up your immune system these kind of medical advances have not really come to pass at least not yet and so I think for Ray's vision of the singularity it could be a while before we get there you know I personally would be skeptical that we would reach a singularity vision within the next century although Ray certainly in this book and perhaps right now kind of believes it will come a lot sooner yeah one thing that is really hard to grasp is how quickly these changes will come and what do these changes mean so you know when Kurzweil says something like we'll have a trillion trillion trillion times more computational power what does that mean for us and what does it mean to say we have a universe saturated with intelligence all these are almost just too big in scale for us to really fathom and so trying to say where we're going almost as hard to get your head around is probably one of the more sort of difficult parts of the books and I think the other side we should go to is just asking ourselves will we be happier post-singularity yes it's very hard to kind of grasp just the scope of the changes that would occur instead of a true singularity vision I think one useful analogy that Ray kind of makes is he basically compares bacteria today to humans as being akin to humans today to post-singularity your human machines that would arise and so if you kind of think to yourself you know is a bacterium that much you know happier or unhappy of an human today that's kind of a situation you arise in with humans there are some obvious benefits of course of the singularity you know this idea that disease will essentially be eradicated you'll be able to live in the virtual world of your choosing and and from that you can kind of say well maybe things will be much more pleasurable um but there's also kind of a dystopian futures to you know AI takeovers government takeovers to where you might say that this would actually feel more like a prison than you know a bold new world you'd really want to in fact live in but overall I think after reading this book Matt and I would both consider ourselves singularitarians we have kind of grasped the scope and the potential power of the singularity Ray's book it is dense it is difficult to get through in parts but overall it is an engaging humorous read that I think we would both highly recommend um I hope you've enjoyed listening to our review this has been random talkers make sure to subscribe on youtube and we'll see you next time