The Singularity is Near and Singularity University
June 23, 2021
In this episode, we talk about life in 2045 and how artificial intelligence is changing the world.
Today, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is changing the world. So I'm reminded by a book called the Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil and in this book Ray Kurzweil describes how eventually, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and that is a singular moment where everything will change in this singular moment.
Ray to give you a little bit more about his credibility, he is probably one of the modern da Vinci's of our time. He is a futurist, he is an inventor, he invented a lot of things he used to be um even spent some time as a CTO for Google. So he knows his shit and he's very credible. Well, he prophesied is that by 2045 that will be the point in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. And the way that Ray Kurzweil calculates this is by taking Moore's law.
So if you're unfamiliar with Moore's law, Moore's law says that the number of transistors that will be put into a microchip will double every couple of years, every two years or so. And what this means is not only will processor speeds get faster but computing will also be cheaper. And the price for computing will be halved in relationship to doubling the transistors. So this makes sense. Right?
So Ray figures that by 2045 we will have the processing power needed for artificial intelligence to surpass human intelligence. One of the ways that we will test this is by using the Turing Test. T. U R I N. G. And this test was developed by I think his name is Alan Turing, can't remember his first name. I think it's Alan Turing. And it's a test where it looks at the responses from artificial intelligent beings, and I'm not sure if I can use the word being but it feels like it's appropriate here. But it looks at the responses from artificially intelligent beings. And if a human cannot tell whether the responses that are being mimicked are human or artificial, then that being the artificial being will have passed the Turing test.
So this is something that we've been trying to do. There have been many actually cases where it's actually worked, but it's just not robust enough for us to be able to say that artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence. Now, what does the world look like when this happens? So if you can imagine an infinite amount of Einstein brains all networked together to solve the world's problems, this is probably what it will look like.
And when you have a situation like this, we are going to be moving towards an age of abundance because most of the world's problems will be solved for us. However, before we do get to this point, there's going to be a lot of growing pains because a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. If you recall Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang ran for President of the United States back in 2020. He was a presidential candidate, and he was running on the platform of UBI, Universal Basic Income. And one of the reasons he was running on this platform is because he sees the future. He sees that artificial intelligence will take jobs away from humans.
And he makes this one example where trucking companies including Tesla and other automotive companies, they're working on driverless trucks. So these trucks will be run by artificial intelligence, and it's putting these truckers out of a job. But it's not just truckers that are going to lose their job. If human intelligence is surpassed by artificial intelligence and they can move much faster and think much faster and do things all network together, then there's going to be a lot of jobs lost, right? You probably won't need to see your doctor anymore. It will replace your pharmacist, it will replace a lot of these thinking type of jobs where we're just better off using artificial intelligence.
Where it still might struggle to replace is maybe your barber because something like that will be very intricate to design. It's not saying it's impossible. It's just something that it's a type of job that won't be taken over as quickly as something like a pharmacist where a pharmacist, this is just looking at how things react to everything, and this can all be done by a machine much easier than what a pharmacist might do if he's trying to study this on his own.
The other way the world is going to change is everything is going to be smart. So if we have this capability where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and we can add intelligence to almost everything that we build. What does the world look like at this moment? So imagine that we have these nano dust chips, right? And these nano dust chips, you can barely see them. But they have sensors, they're intelligent, they have processing power, they have networking power. So they network with sensors around them, you can even create some kind of mesh networking aspect out of it.
But imagine we have the smart dust, and we put the smart dust into our construction practices. So let's say that we are building a house with smart dust, everything will have smart dust in it, right? Your coffee mug, your coffee table, your house, the asphalt on the street, and everything is going to be intelligent. So what this means is if the smart dust in the asphalt, for example, can detect that there is a green light. However, there's a blind man, he didn't notice the green light, and he's walking on the asphalt, and there are cars coming. Well, he can kind of rearrange the system to make sure that this person's life is saved.
And obviously, this is going to bring up a whole bunch of ethical questions. For example, the trolley problem, because the trolley problem, it's like who do you save first? Right. And if you're not familiar with the trolley problem, the trolley problem says, okay, if there is a trolley that's headed towards a track where you can change the track, but if you change the track and let's say track A, there's a person tied to the railroad tracks and that person will die. But if you go to track B, you will save the person that's tied to the railroad tracks on track A. But on track to B, the train will crash and five people that are on the train will die. So now the question is whose life is worth more in the street? The smart dust asphalt street example that I brought up the question will be, will other people die from this decision?
Well, you know who's who's life is worth more? Is the blind person walking down the street? Is his life worth more? How does the machine even know that what if this guy that's walking down the street holds the cure for cancer? Right? And it thinking that everyone's life could possibly be equal or something might save a car full of five people that are nothing but misfits and troublemakers and they make no contribution to society. But these are some of the things that some of the challenges that we will face when making these types of decisions. But at least for now, what you can imagine is that everything is going to be smart.
And at this, 2045, where it's proposed that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, what will the world look like? I think it's going to be a fascinating world. And obviously, like I said, there's going to be some growing pains along the way. And I was just hoping to introduce you to this concept that the singularity is near. And if you're more interested on this, I suggest you check out Ray Kurzweil, especially if you have a very futuristic start up, then you might want to go check out the Singularity University.
One of the things that we do for our start-up accelerator at Vertical Lift-Off is we help founders get their first paying customer without having to rely on investors. But the way that we do this is the products and services that are working on the vertical method. It works well for direct to consumer products, for business to business products and for all these different types of products where the vertical method would not work, however, is for something that's too far out in the future because we use the GPDS framework and the second stage of the GPDS framework is a pre-sell, the minimum viable mockup.
Well, this is where if you have an emerging technology where the vertical method won't work because most people will not be willing to wait 5, 10 years. And in our case for the singularity is near until 2045 for that for them to get delivery on their product. So if you do have an emerging technology that is very futuristic, I definitely recommend that you check out Singularity University. Singularity University is located in California. Ray Kurzweil is one of the founders, and they are building some awesome, amazing stuff. This is Robin Copernicus. Boom bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
Ray to give you a little bit more about his credibility, he is probably one of the modern da Vinci's of our time. He is a futurist, he is an inventor, he invented a lot of things he used to be um even spent some time as a CTO for Google. So he knows his shit and he's very credible. Well, he prophesied is that by 2045 that will be the point in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. And the way that Ray Kurzweil calculates this is by taking Moore's law.
So if you're unfamiliar with Moore's law, Moore's law says that the number of transistors that will be put into a microchip will double every couple of years, every two years or so. And what this means is not only will processor speeds get faster but computing will also be cheaper. And the price for computing will be halved in relationship to doubling the transistors. So this makes sense. Right?
So Ray figures that by 2045 we will have the processing power needed for artificial intelligence to surpass human intelligence. One of the ways that we will test this is by using the Turing Test. T. U R I N. G. And this test was developed by I think his name is Alan Turing, can't remember his first name. I think it's Alan Turing. And it's a test where it looks at the responses from artificial intelligent beings, and I'm not sure if I can use the word being but it feels like it's appropriate here. But it looks at the responses from artificially intelligent beings. And if a human cannot tell whether the responses that are being mimicked are human or artificial, then that being the artificial being will have passed the Turing test.
So this is something that we've been trying to do. There have been many actually cases where it's actually worked, but it's just not robust enough for us to be able to say that artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence. Now, what does the world look like when this happens? So if you can imagine an infinite amount of Einstein brains all networked together to solve the world's problems, this is probably what it will look like.
And when you have a situation like this, we are going to be moving towards an age of abundance because most of the world's problems will be solved for us. However, before we do get to this point, there's going to be a lot of growing pains because a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. If you recall Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang ran for President of the United States back in 2020. He was a presidential candidate, and he was running on the platform of UBI, Universal Basic Income. And one of the reasons he was running on this platform is because he sees the future. He sees that artificial intelligence will take jobs away from humans.
And he makes this one example where trucking companies including Tesla and other automotive companies, they're working on driverless trucks. So these trucks will be run by artificial intelligence, and it's putting these truckers out of a job. But it's not just truckers that are going to lose their job. If human intelligence is surpassed by artificial intelligence and they can move much faster and think much faster and do things all network together, then there's going to be a lot of jobs lost, right? You probably won't need to see your doctor anymore. It will replace your pharmacist, it will replace a lot of these thinking type of jobs where we're just better off using artificial intelligence.
Where it still might struggle to replace is maybe your barber because something like that will be very intricate to design. It's not saying it's impossible. It's just something that it's a type of job that won't be taken over as quickly as something like a pharmacist where a pharmacist, this is just looking at how things react to everything, and this can all be done by a machine much easier than what a pharmacist might do if he's trying to study this on his own.
The other way the world is going to change is everything is going to be smart. So if we have this capability where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and we can add intelligence to almost everything that we build. What does the world look like at this moment? So imagine that we have these nano dust chips, right? And these nano dust chips, you can barely see them. But they have sensors, they're intelligent, they have processing power, they have networking power. So they network with sensors around them, you can even create some kind of mesh networking aspect out of it.
But imagine we have the smart dust, and we put the smart dust into our construction practices. So let's say that we are building a house with smart dust, everything will have smart dust in it, right? Your coffee mug, your coffee table, your house, the asphalt on the street, and everything is going to be intelligent. So what this means is if the smart dust in the asphalt, for example, can detect that there is a green light. However, there's a blind man, he didn't notice the green light, and he's walking on the asphalt, and there are cars coming. Well, he can kind of rearrange the system to make sure that this person's life is saved.
And obviously, this is going to bring up a whole bunch of ethical questions. For example, the trolley problem, because the trolley problem, it's like who do you save first? Right. And if you're not familiar with the trolley problem, the trolley problem says, okay, if there is a trolley that's headed towards a track where you can change the track, but if you change the track and let's say track A, there's a person tied to the railroad tracks and that person will die. But if you go to track B, you will save the person that's tied to the railroad tracks on track A. But on track to B, the train will crash and five people that are on the train will die. So now the question is whose life is worth more in the street? The smart dust asphalt street example that I brought up the question will be, will other people die from this decision?
Well, you know who's who's life is worth more? Is the blind person walking down the street? Is his life worth more? How does the machine even know that what if this guy that's walking down the street holds the cure for cancer? Right? And it thinking that everyone's life could possibly be equal or something might save a car full of five people that are nothing but misfits and troublemakers and they make no contribution to society. But these are some of the things that some of the challenges that we will face when making these types of decisions. But at least for now, what you can imagine is that everything is going to be smart.
And at this, 2045, where it's proposed that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, what will the world look like? I think it's going to be a fascinating world. And obviously, like I said, there's going to be some growing pains along the way. And I was just hoping to introduce you to this concept that the singularity is near. And if you're more interested on this, I suggest you check out Ray Kurzweil, especially if you have a very futuristic start up, then you might want to go check out the Singularity University.
One of the things that we do for our start-up accelerator at Vertical Lift-Off is we help founders get their first paying customer without having to rely on investors. But the way that we do this is the products and services that are working on the vertical method. It works well for direct to consumer products, for business to business products and for all these different types of products where the vertical method would not work, however, is for something that's too far out in the future because we use the GPDS framework and the second stage of the GPDS framework is a pre-sell, the minimum viable mockup.
Well, this is where if you have an emerging technology where the vertical method won't work because most people will not be willing to wait 5, 10 years. And in our case for the singularity is near until 2045 for that for them to get delivery on their product. So if you do have an emerging technology that is very futuristic, I definitely recommend that you check out Singularity University. Singularity University is located in California. Ray Kurzweil is one of the founders, and they are building some awesome, amazing stuff. This is Robin Copernicus. Boom bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
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