Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil's eerily prescient predictions about AI are underpinned by a simple line chart. The chart, tracking the amount of computing power you could buy for a dollar over time, has grown exponentially for the past 85 years. Kurzweil initially used it to prioritize his inventions as a young programmer, focusing on a revolutionary print-to-speech machine for the blind in the 1970s, then early speech recognition software in the '80s. Eventually, he started writing about what he believed advances in computing power would bring and his predicting “took on a life of its own."

In 1990, Kurzweil correctly projected that AI would beat the best human player at chess before the turn of the millennium, and that mobile devices connected to a global information network would emerge in the decade that followed. In 1999, he forecast that by 2029, computers would match human intelligence in every domain. At the time, leading researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio thought it would take much longer. They have since changed their tune.

Six decades into his career, Kurzweil still devotes his days to pondering the technology, as AI Visionary at Google. His books, such as “The Singularity is Near,” have become sacred texts, inspiring many now leading the field—including DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg and top researcher at Anthropic Jan Leike—to dedicate their careers to AI. Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”

So of course the industry turns to Kurzweil with questions about what it means that we could be years, not decades, away from human-level AI. If you ask, Kurzweil will comfort you. We haven’t encountered any risks that would “doom humanity,” he says. He acknowledges that technology presents inherent dangers—the same drone that can carry medicine could also carry a bomb—but maintains they are far outweighed by the rewards. 

Of all the benefits, the now-76-year-old Kurzweil—who has long aspired to live forever—seems most impassioned by the prospect of AI-driven medical advances. For every year you age, he says, scientific advancements in longevity research give you roughly four months back. As scientific progress accelerates thanks to AI, eventually you will get more than 12 months back each year, so that, in principle, humans will live forever. This is what Kurzweil calls “longevity escape velocity.” He reportedly takes 80 pills a day to give himself the best chance of riding this technological wave and escaping death.

In his latest book, The Singularity is Nearer, released in June, Kurzweil cites developments like AI-drug discovery and ChatGPT as indicators that human-level intelligence is around the corner. The inevitable destination, Kurzweil believes, is “the singularity”—a moment when humans merge with AI via brain-to-computer interfaces to become “much smarter.” The term “singularity” comes from physics to describe the point at which space-time collapses on itself and the laws of physics—or, in this case, humanity—break down. Kurzweil reckons that the AI singularity will happen around 2045, a prediction he outlined in a 2011 TIME cover story titled "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal." (This might seem more believable now that Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a human-computer interface implanted in the brain, began human trials in January.)

“You can certainly talk about problems that come with intelligence,” Kurzweil says. But generally people want to be smarter. “I doubt we’d want to go back to the intelligence of a lesser animal,” he says.

He has been wrong before; he once forecast that speech-to-text would dominate writing by 2009. But Kurzweil's preoccupations with longevity and technological forecasting have become mainstays of the various AI subcultures, from starry-eyed optimists to apocalyptic doomsayers. In time, Kurzweil says, even skeptics will begin to see the world through his lens. “Not that I would wish catastrophic medical problems on anybody, but people who are against AI will get problems that are unsolvable," he says, "and AI will come up with a solution.”

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