Listen to Kurzweil Interview, Part 3
Ray Kurzweil (continued): From my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in that book, although it's considered an optimistic book, I talked about the dangers of these technologies.
And you don't have to look farther than say the past century to see this intertwined promise versus peril. We had a hundred million people killed, just in two World Wars and we had a lot of other wars.
And that wouldn't have been possible without technology. Technology amplified our destructive capabilities.
I am optimistic though that we've benefited a lot more than we've been hurt, although we've been hurt a lot. If you would explain today somehow to people two hundred years ago they might think it crazy to take the risks we have taken. And few people would really want to go back two hundred years ago, to the way that life was back then. Some people might have an idyllic and unrealistic idea of what it was like, they'd say, "I want to go back to those wonderful times."
Actually, life was very hard. Life expectancy was thirty-seven. Disease was rampant. We didn't have any antibiotics. There were no social safety nets. There wasn't enough wealth for that. People had to do enormous amounts of hard labor just to do something simple like cook the evening meal. A disaster would throw a family into desperation and there were lots of disasters because there was lots of disease they couldn't deal with.
Life was very, very difficult two hundred years ago, even one hundred years ago. And we've liberated ourselves to a great extent from that kind of hardship. There's still a lot of suffering to go around but technology has benefited a lot more than it has hurt us.
That's my view and my view is that that will continue to be the case. But it's not my view that this is going to lead us to some utopia. All these new capabilities lead to wonderful things but they also lead to new problems. We have the problem of all kinds of software pathogens, spam, software viruses, and that's going to continue to get worse. On the other hand, we have a technological immune system that has sprung up to deal with it.
Few people would say that the problem with software viruses is so bad, let's get rid of the Internet. There is general recognition that for all of its problems, this worldwide communication has more benefit than harm.
That's my view in general about technology. And the new technology is going to cure cancer and heart disease and every disease and slow down and ultimately stop aging and enable us all to use our potential.
The same technology could be applied by a terrorist to create a designer biological virus that could be very destructive. And the two kind of go hand in hand. So it's all right Bill Joy says, "I'm not anti-technology. Let's keep those good technologies, but those dangerous ones, let's just not do those."
Well, those dangerous ones use the same technology. The same technology and knowledge that could cure cancer could also be used, same laboratory, and the same insights can be used by a bio-terrorist to create something really destructive.
So my answer is, we actually need to put a few more stones on the defensive side of the equation and actually deploy explicitly and consciously our resources in society to developing defensive technologies. We should be spending tens of billions of dollars today on defensive technologies against biological viruses. And there's a lot of new ideas, I mentioned RNA interference that could be used for that purpose.
And we're close at hand. There's some broad spectrum, anti-viral therapies. We need to accelerate that so that we have them in time.
But my vision is that the world will be as complicated as it is today, in fact even more so, because over all everything is going to be amplified. It's not going to be utopia any more than it is today but if one feels, as I do, that we benefited enormously from technology, despite its amplification of our destructive side, that will continue.
Tony Candela: And it's been the human compulsion to continue to move forward and to solve problems.
Ray Kurzweil: We have that belief. It's certainly fundamental to American attitudes and Western attitudes. And it's becoming embraced around the world. Asia now actually graduates a lot more engineers than we do in Europe and the United States. It's a worldwide phenomenon.
There are fundamentalist movements that are opposed to progress. That don't believe in progress. They believe that things should stay the way they are or even the way they were. And I'm not just referring to fundamentalist religions but also fundamentalist humanism, where you should not change what a human is. And we define humans as their limitations and there's something wrong with overcoming those limitations.
Even the environmental movement, I consider myself, I did consider myself an environmentalist and I am very concerned with the environment, but large portions of the environmental movement have become anti-technology.
Like the anti-GMO, genetically modified organism movement in large measure has become just reflexively anti-technology. It's not my idea that genetically modified organisms are inherently safe. They should be tested like any other method. We've, in fact, been changing the genetic profile of plants and animals for many years using breeding, for example.
And this is a powerful technology that had tremendous benefits. And recently the founder of Greenpeace quit, in disgust, over Greeppeace's adamant opposition to Golden Rice. Golden Rice is something that could save millions of kids from going blind, because of Vitamin A deficiency, and a lot of other diseases. And there are a lot of other genetically modified crops that, for example, can prevent famines, that are very beneficial that are just opposed just because there is a blanket opposition to using this technique.
It's a scientific technique. It's an example of technology and this becomes...there are sort of strong anti-technology sentiments in the world. But they're not strong enough to stop progress. We do have deeply rooted belief in if there's a problem we can identify, we can work on a solution.
I do believe that personally, in terms of my own life. If I confront a problem like let's say a health problem or let's say a business problem and certainly if you're trying to make an invention or you are confronting a certain technical challenge, there's an idea that can overcome that challenge or set of ideas and we can find it. And that's sort of been the spirit that's animated my work.
Tony Candela: Do you have a leisure activity that you do that has nothing to do with your work, that people would be surprised to hear about? That you can talk about in decent company, that is?
Ray Kurzweil: I don't know about surprise. I enjoy doing things with my family: hiking and bicycle riding. They are very avid skiers. I've never gotten a flair for that.
I like to walk. That's the mainstay of my exercise. I walk several miles a day. It's relaxing, contemplative.
Tony Candela: Where do you do your walking?
Ray Kurzweil: Generally, if I can, around the neighborhood, although I have a treadmill in my basement and a large screen TV and I watch music concerts and movies.
Tony Candela: There's the multitasker again.
Ray Kurzweil: Well it's to be entertained while I'm...
Tony Candela: That's true. I find that boring, actually, myself, being on the treadmill.
Ray Kurzweil: I love my work. It's very much integrated in my life. It's not something I do to make a living. It's really my passion. It is my hobby. Retiring doesn't make any sense to me. This is what I want to do. People want to retire so they can do what they really like, enjoy doing, but this is what I enjoy doing.
So that's what I'm involved in. Otherwise I relax in pretty normal ways.
Tony Candela: Having analyzed I guess, from the past on forward, the progress that humankind has made, especially with regard to technology, is it something that's still thrilling to you to see just what can happen down the road, let's say twenty years from now, that you just can't think of yourself not being around to see it because it's a thrill?
Ray Kurzweil: It's certainly a motivation. The future is going to be extraordinary and I do want to be around to experience it and continue to be involved with it and contribute to these changes.
I've already been involved with technology forecasting long enough that I'm very confident at this point that there will be a continuation of these trends. It's nonetheless still a thrill as one sees, experiences and reads about all the new developments which come now on a very rapid basis.
We have this newsletter, KurzweilAI.net, where we only put out news items that are really pretty startling, in terms of breakthroughs in a variety of areas, having to do with information but it's very broad, ranging from entertainment to health and so on.
And we have three, four, five such articles a day and it's just amazing the pace of change. That's very much things that I anticipate happening, but that doesn't mean it's a sort of a routine experience to actually see it happen.
So you can now get a very sophisticated computer-based device for a few tens of dollars. It's pretty amazing even though it's something I've expected.
Tony Candela: So when it happens, it's as exciting as it was when you were contemplating it happening?
Ray Kurzweil: Yeah. Actually the thrill of being an inventor, it's not just making theoretical breakthroughs but it's sort of the link between dry formulas on a blackboard and actually transformations in people's lives.
So you have some formulas and some theories and some algorithms that recognize printed letters or that model musical sounds. And it's interesting intellectually, but then you put it into practice, it enables a blind person to read, to get an education or it enables a musician to create music in ways they couldn't do before. And then they send me their albums saying, "I couldn't have done this without your synthesizer," things like that.
That's a thrill to actually impact people's lives and see it being used in important ways and realize that this stems from the application of ideas such as formulas and equations. A scientist lives just for the formula. I'm not criticizing that and we rely in those kinds of scientific insights. But the sort of key motivating experience for an inventor is actually to see these ideas put into practice.
Tony Candela: Has anything ever been done with an idea of yours that totally amazed you? You didn't see it coming yourself?
Ray Kurzweil: Um. Well there's a lot, I've gotten a lot of exciting music that I didn't realize could be created. We create certain technical capabilities but then other people apply their imagination to using these tools, putting an equal amount of creativity into their application.
So the music project has been very exciting because it is a set of tools and then people do very creative things with them. So that's a thrill, to see how someone can actually apply them.
And then our own projects have gone in unexpected directions. We did some of this work in virtual reality technology that's actually become pretty influential in the way motion capture is done in movies.
We didn't necessarily anticipate, for example, reading machines becoming all software. Increasingly the hardware capabilities are so substantial and consumer electronics is so powerful that we can solve a problem using consumer electronics and put the solution in software then we are able to ride the enormous price performance improvements of consumer electronics.
As soon as you have to develop something specialized, particularly for a small market like the blindness field, then you kind of get stuck in the kind of shoals of progress and then there's not a big enough market and it's hard to continue to update the software, the hardware, because you're stuck with a particular hardware design.
So a number of years ago we switched from a hardware reading machine to a software reading machine. Now people can run it on the latest PC and take advantage of the tremendous reduction in cost and improvement in power of personal computing. You aren't stuck with some static hardware design.
Tony Candela: And it's always been the bug-a-boo of a niche industry, such as blindness assistive technology to get something that is powerful enough and yet not so expensive. You have to rely on other technologies going on out there.
Ray Kurzweil: Right. One needs to really avoid specialized hardware, wherever possible. And it's not always possible. If you want to display braille, you're not going to be able to do that in software. You're going to have to have a hardware device that displays braille.
But in the reading machine area we were able to have an all software solution. Screen readers have been a very important technology and blind people of all ages, both kids as well as adults, have really been on the cutting edge of computer users because it's such a powerful tool for accessibility to information. So it has been a very technically sophisticated group.
Things like application to GPS, to travel. That's pretty ubiquitous. That really can be done with consumer level products.
We're trying to limit the amount of specialized hardware required for this portable reading machine. That's where you get stuck in being in a niche market, if you want to develop specialized hardware. It's not always possible. A braille printer or a Braille display is probably a good example, where you're not going to be able to use consumer products.
Tony Candela: Can you envision an invention coming along that takes, let's say, the depicting of something tactually, out of the realm of the physical, per se?
You mentioned before, we're stuck with a hardware solution. But do you think there's a possibility that it could become a non-hardware solution?
Ray Kurzweil: Well, one thing we hope to do with this portable reading machine, particularly if it gets very small, is to make it more of a general sort of image description system so you could point it in a room and it would tell you, like a sighted aide might tell you, okay there's two chairs, there'd be some kind of method of describing the location. 6:00, angle 45 degrees. Some system that you'd be able to understand, describing where it is, field of view, three people, young woman, two men, one's bald.
As I look around my office here, there's a lot of objects. You'd have to figure out how not to provide information overload.
There actually are pattern recognition systems that can detect common objects pretty well, would be able to provide some general guidance to seed recognition. That's still not giving all the information that's in the visual world. People have struggled to find ways of transmitting this two-dimensional math. There have been attempts to do that tactilely, with piezoelectric vibrators but they don't have great spatial and temporal resolutions.
Tony Candela: Are you a science fiction buff?
Ray Kurzweil: Not really. Ideas from science fiction do filter down to me but I don't have time to sit and read a lot of novels of any kind really.
Tony Candela: A favorite show of mine through the years has been the Star Trek series. Somewhere in the 1980s they came up with Star Trek: The Next Generation and they had virtual reality hologram experiences all the time on that show.
The hope for the future there was that you could depict things, not only visually, but you could actually feel the holographic images.
Ray Kurzweil: I've written quite a bit about that. Auditory-visual virtual reality we'll have within a few years.
I have a device I use to give speeches. About half of my speeches I use this virtual reality technology, where the audience sees me in three dimensions, as if I'm there in real time. Looks like I'm standing behind the podium. It's a special podium.
It's not flat video conferencing. It looks like I'm there in three dimensions. I can see the audience too and it's real time. We send a technician out with a sort of podium virtual reality system and I've got the other end in the basement of this building here.
Because I get a lot of invitations in Europe and Australia and I can't travel to these places very often at all. But I've given lots of lectures in all those places. California.
Sometimes my schedule has a conflict. We had to actually bring down the transmitting side to Charleston, a couple of weeks ago because I had a presentation in Charleston and then within 24 hours two other presentations. One at the University of Pittsburgh and one in Arizona and I gave those two using this virtual reality system.
So I do do that. I talk about a scenario in the late 2020s where we will be able to do virtual reality from within the nervous system. We will be able to send millions of nanobots into the bloodstream through the capillaries of the brain.
If you want to go into virtual reality it's a matter of shutting down the signals coming from the real senses, replace them with the signals that you would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment. It appeals to your brain just like you were in that virtual environment. You can actually move around in that virtual environment, but it's not your real body moving, it's moving your virtual body.
And of course your virtual body could be different than your body in real reality and that gets back to this project that I did that I mentioned with my daughter where we demonstrated that visually and auditorily by transforming ourselves into different people.
And that incorporated all of the senses including the tactile sense and you can meet other people in these virtual environments and you can have any kind of experience from a sensual encounter to a business negotiation... using this kind of virtual reality system.
The telephone is virtual reality. It's as if you are together with that other person, at least as far as one sense is concerned, the auditory sense. And if you think about it, before the telephone, you couldn't do that. You could not have a conversation with someone unless you were in the same physical space.
So that was the beginning of virtual reality. That you could be with somebody else even if you were very far apart and create this virtual space, which is the phone call.
We're going to add all of the senses to virtual reality, certainly by the late 2020s. And like any other technology, it won't start out perfect from day one but ultimately it will be just as compelling and realistic as real reality and it will have lots of advantages so you can meet with anyone, no matter where they are. You can create any kind of virtual environments. You want to meet at the Taj Mahal or on a Mediterranean beach or a beautiful appointed room or you'll be able to do that in fantastic, creative environments that don't exist on earth or couldn't exist on earth, that would defy the laws of physics in some interesting way and design a new virtual reality environment which will be a new art form.
So virtual reality will be very compelling and we'll spend more and more of our time there. One could argue that people already spend a lot of time in virtual reality, say on their computers. One woman I spoke to said her son just considers real reality another window on the world. He's there with five windows open, he's chatting with different people including one of them is an audiovisual window and then she comes in the doorway and she's standing in the doorway and that's just another window for him.
Tony Candela: I hope she's exaggerating a little bit.
Ray Kurzweil: She also says that his computer might as well be in his brain because he carries it everywhere he goes.
Even if we're just sending e-mail, we are communicating with people in these virtual spaces in the Internet. A lot of the environments we would consider pretty crude compared to real reality today but nevertheless we spend a lot of our time there.
So when these virtual reality environments actually become as realistic and compelling as real reality, we'll be spending most of our time in them.
Tony Candela: Speaking of today's reality, do you spend much time over at Kurzweil Educational Systems these days?
Ray Kurzweil: Yeah. We just had an event with them earlier today at the OHern School. I'm Chairman Emeritus. I'm quite involved with them, not writing code, but I'm on the Board and work closely with the CEO and the management.
Tony Candela: So you're, for my benefit and for everybody else's, your relationship now with Kurzweil Educational Systems, can you describe it?
Are you separated from it, in a sense, bureaucratically?
Ray Kurzweil: Yeah. Well I'm on the Board of Directors. I'm Chairman Emeritus. I'm an advisor to the CEO and to the management.
I'm also working on a hand-held reading machine, which I expect Kurzweil Education to be the distribution channel [for]. And that's actually a significant technology effort.
Tony Candela: Most of us in the blindness assistive technology business, of course, think about the Kurzweil 1000 software and its latest versions as the epitome of your career in the blindness assistive technology business.
But we always need to be reminded that the Kurzweil 3000 software helps people with learning disabilities and that you are involved in a number of projects as you've been describing them.
Ray Kurzweil: I've found particularly with visual impairment and developing technology in that field to be very gratifying. It was really my first major project.
So I've kept a close relationship and have actually worked every year for the last thirty years in that field. I've also done some other things but I keep coming back to it and am working now on developing another step forward in reading technology.
Tony Candela: Other than the hand scanner? Something different from that?
Ray Kurzweil: No. That's the project.
Tony Candela: I thought I was going to get an early view of something else.
Well we wish that project lots of luck. Because there are a lot of people who are excited about what's going to happen with that.
Ray Kurzweil: I think that's very promising.
The enabling factor's there, is just tremendous price performance programs of computing and with the computer you can have now the power in your hand, vastly more powerful than the washing machine size computers we had earlier in reading machine history.
Tony Candela: I'd like to go back to that early reading machine history, if I could. But maybe I can get you to tell us some stories about how, for example, you ended up at a television show when you were 12 years old and when you knew you were going to be an inventor, and things like that.
Ray Kurzweil: When I was 16.
I knew I was going to be an inventor when I was 5.
Tony Candela: How did you know?
Ray Kurzweil: It's a good question. It wasn't some idle child's fantasy that I was just playing with. I knew I was going to be an inventor. I was just firmly convinced of that. I never wavered from it.
Tony Candela: Were your parents involved in inventing?
Ray Kurzweil: No, they were artists. My mother is a visual artist. Some of her paintings, there's one right behind me. We have quite a few in this office. My father was a musician, a noted conductor, a music educator.
But I was very friendly with an inventor and when I was 8 or 9 I actually built quite a few things, robotic theaters, robotic games. I was kind of involved with computers when I was 12. I built computing devices when I was 12 years old.
Tony Candela: How did you get the materials to do these things?
Ray Kurzweil: I got some from my uncle who was an engineer at Bell Labs. I also hung around the electronic surplus shops at Canal Street in New York, which [are] still there. I got a lot of equipment from them.
I did my first pattern recognition project. I built a computer, programmed it to recognize the melodies of the music I would feed into it and then write original music using the same kinds of patterns. So it would write music, recognizable as Mozart, Bach or Chopin.
Tony Candela: Using the patterns.
Ray Kurzweil: Yeah. Not as good as those composers but recognizable maybe as a student of theirs.
So that won first prize in an international science fair. I was a Westinghouse science talent search winner. I got to meet President Johnson. And that led to this TV show, I've Got a Secret. And I came out and I played a piece of music.
And I was real nervous about getting stuck because when you play music, 98% of the time you get through it. Sometimes you just get stuck and this was a live, national show. Fortunately I got through the piece. So then Steve Allen, he was the host, said, "Well that's very impressive. So what's your secret?" So then you whisper it into his ear and then they show the TV audience, "I built my own computer."
So then Steve Allen said, "That's very impressive. What's that got to do with the piece of music you just played?" And the second part of my secret was, "Well the computer composed the music."
And Bess Meyerson who was I guess Miss America, had been Miss America, she didn't get it but then the next panelist did guess the secret.
That was my debut on national television.
Tony Candela: Had you been taught to play conventional musical instruments, as a young child?
Ray Kurzweil: Yeah, I played piano as a young child. Developed a small classical repertory which I tried to keep up. I haven't actually had much time lately. But every time I get back to playing I can get back that repertoire, after practicing a few hours.
Tony Candela: Did I pick up that you grew up in New York City?
Ray Kurzweil: In Queens.
Tony Candela: Which part of Queens?
Ray Kurzweil: Near Martin Van Buren High School, near Union Turnpike, 220th Street.
Tony Candela: I'm a former New Yorker myself. I can picture exactly where you were.
And did you go to just the regular schools?
Ray Kurzweil: Yes, I went to public high school, which was the thing to do. I just don't know anybody who went to private school. It didn't seem to be common.
And I didn't go to Bronx High School of Science or Stuyvesant, but my public high school, Martin Van Buren High School, had an honors track for 2,000 kids per grade. A very big school.
But it had a very good science program. We actually had more Westinghouse Scholarship winners—it's now called the Intel Science Talent Search—than any other high school in the country, including the Bronx High School of Science.
It was fine. I actually paid very little attention to school. They did support my Westinghouse science project but most of the time I was actually working on my projects. School, fortunately, was easy enough that I didn't have to spend much time worrying about it.
Tony Candela: I'm sure we all want to know if you had a particular subject you were plain bad at.
Ray Kurzweil: I wasn't particularly crazy about French. I already knew a word for each concept, so it just seemed to clutter my brain to learn another word for window and chair. I didn't get into that.
I've learned a little German. My parents spoke German. They came from Vienna. I've not pursued other languages actively.
Tony Candela: Did you grow up... your religion... were you in a Jewish household?
Ray Kurzweil: My parents were Jewish. They wanted a less provincial and sort of more universal, liberal and flexible religious education, so I was brought up in a Unitarian church. And the theme was many paths to the truth.
Religious education actually consisted of studying different religions. We would spend six months let's say studying Buddhism. We would go to Buddhist services and have Buddhist leaders come in and sort of lead discussion group. We would read the books related to it and then we'd move on to Catholicism or Judaism or Hinduism.
And the theme was tolerance and many paths to the truth and that there are different stories and metaphors to get at the same universal truths.
And it did give me, it really did support, as did just the attitudes of my family, an open-minded perspective on life and key questions.
In this new book I have coming out next year called The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, I have a chapter called "Ich Bin Ein Singularitatian," a play on Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner."
And I describe the idea of singularitarianism, which is a lot like Unitarianism because there's no dogma and there's no beliefs... It's really an understanding of where the technology trends are going to bring humanity. So if somebody actually understands that and has reflected on it for their own life, I call [him or her a] singularitarian.
Because it does have an impact on one's view. There are a lot of narrow concerns people are concerned about, with the election or today's problems. You have a different perspective when you sort of open up your view to where society is going in the decades ahead. What it can mean for oneself and our ability to deal with problems that have plagued humanity for eons.
It's not just a narrow concern over looking at technology trends and seeing what kind of computer gadgets we are going to have in the future. It's going to profoundly transform the nature of human life and affect everything. And it's hard to seriously understand that and think about it without it affecting one's views.
So in my mind, singularitarianism is like... well, I actually express what it means for me. Because the last thing we need is a new dogma.
What it means for me is actually to respect human life such that we try to expand our own life in the present and also try to overcome aging and disease so that we can remain in good health.
I view disease and death as a tragedy. You might think, "Well, that's obvious." But actually, most people don't agree with that. They think death is ennobling and gives meaning to life. A lot of people actually get upset if you talk about being able to overcome death. We've rationalized death, taken this tragedy and said, "Actually, it's a good thing." Because we have no choice but to rationalize it and a lot of what traditional religions have done is to rationalize death in one way or another. That it's a positive thing.
I view it as a great loss of knowledge and human life.
Tony Candela: But don't you think that people see death as happening all around them and as a natural part of the universe when they look at plants dying or other animals dying...
Ray Kurzweil: Because it's natural doesn't mean it's good. In my view, we've taken a step away from the natural world. We're not just a plant. We are the species that seeks to go beyond our limitations. I don't know any plants that explored the moon or went off the planet or any animals for that matter.
On the one hand, we've learned a certain humility through science in that we learned the Earth is not the center of the universe and we discovered the humans weren't just created instantly by God, but in fact are not that dissimilar genetically from apes and other animals. So it's been a series of sort of humbling insights.
But there is one way we are different from apes and other animals and plants in that we've, through a combination of our rational faculties and our ability to manipulate the environment through our opposable thumbs, are able to expand our horizons. We are able to create models of who we are and then improve those models and improve reality. And go beyond our limitations. We're going to do that in every conceivable way. That is really the unique... If you ask, "What's unique about humans?" Well, you can say, "We tell jokes, or we wear clothes, we use language..." But one of the key things is that we seek to go beyond our limitations.
One of those limitations is the tragedy of dying, which is a great loss. We can seek to go beyond it. I think we... there's an imperative to do that. But, not everybody feels that way. Some people feel that we are just a plant.
Tony Candela: They haven't transcended the notion of us being not just another part of nature. And use the pattern of nature to think, "Well, that should be our fate as well." They don't jump beyond that.
Ray Kurzweil: That's a fundamental philosophical view. But, clearly humans have done that as a species. We've not just been a plant. We have really already greatly shaped our environment and ourselves and we're quite different than we were even two hundred years ago in terms of our condition and potential.
It's a long discussion, and I make the case that that is the cutting edge of evolution today. In that if you look at the acceleration of evolution, it actually started with biology. It took billions of years for DNA to evolve. Evolution uses its creations to bring on the next stage so, once we had DNA, which was a little computer to keep track of evolutionary experiments, the next stage, the Cambrian explosion, when all the body plans were evolved, went a lot faster — went a hundred times faster. It only took ten million years.
Then biological evolution kept accelerating. Homo sapiens evolved in only a hundred thousand years. And then the cutting edge moved to technology.
The first steps only took tens of thousands of years. Like fire, stone tools, the wheel. And it kept accelerating. Half a millennium ago the printing press took a century to be adopted. Now technologies like the Internet evolved in only a few years time.
So this acceleration of technology is a direct outgrowth of biological evolution. In fact, I have a double logarithmic chart that shows it literally as a straight line. And you could see very clearly that technological evolution comes right out of biological evolution as a continuation. That it is the cutting edge of evolution.
So this creation, this exponential expansion of knowledge and capability that we're doing is not some just hobby of this one natural species on Earth. It is the cutting edge of evolution on this planet. That is destiny of intelligence in general.
We're going to expand our human intelligence by merging with our technology and that is the destiny of not only our species, but of much of the universe.
Tony Candela: Where did you go to college?
Ray Kurzweil: MIT. I left Queens, New York, in 1965, almost forty years ago, to go to MIT. I took all the computer courses they had. I came here to study with Meir Minsky who became sort of my mentor. I took all the computer courses in the first year and a half because they only had about nine of them. Then I ended up with a dual major in computer science and creative writing. And I've actually kept both of those interests.
Tony Candela: Did you actually go all the way through for your doctorate?
Ray Kurzweil: No, no. I got a bachelor's degree in 1970 and had already started a business. But I've been in the world of technology entrepreneurship and inventing since that time.
