>>Ray Kurzweil: Chelsea, you mentioned the under 30 demographic. I'm trying to get back
in that myself. I mean, biologically, not chronologically. I've got a ways to go. But
the transformations I'm going to talk about are going to help us all achieve that.
And the exponential progressions that I talked to you about last time I addressed this group
are alive and well. They are pervading more and more areas of our life. Health and medicine
didn't used to be an information technology. It was hit or miss. We've made progress. I
talked to a group of 12-year-olds recently, science winners around the country. I told
them they would all be senior citizens if it hadn't been for the progress we made. A
thousand years ago life expectancy was 18. But this is going to go into high gear now
that health and medicine is in information technology. My cell phone is updating itself
right as I speak. But I'm walking around, as we all are, with outdated software that
evolved thousands of years ago. And that's not a metaphor. I would like to tell my fat
insulin receptor gene you don't need to hold on to every calorie any more. The next hunting
season is going to be good. I'm very confident of that.
[ Laughter ] >>Ray Kurzweil: That was tried. These animals
ate ravenously. We have technologies that can turn genes off like RNA interference.
And these animals ate a lot, remained slim, lived 20% longer. There are pharmaceutical
companies rushing to bring that to the human market. There are 20,000 other genes we'd
like to modify. We have the technologies to change genes now, basically, to treat our
biology as information technology, which is fundamentally what it is.
Now, this is what I wanted to cover today. Any questions on any of this?
Well, I'll go through it a little more slowly, but not that slow.
But this was the first graph I discovered 30 years ago. Well, only through 1980. These
are the power of computers per unit currency, instructions per second per dollar. And this
represents trillions fold increase, even through 1980, because every level on this graph is
100,000 times greater than the level below it. But what's really remarkable is look at
how smooth a progression that is. It's going through thick and thin, war and peace, boom
times and recession sessions. People say, well, it must have slowed down during the
recent recession. No, it didn't. I don't think Google has slowed down. I don't think any
of your companies have slowed down. The statistics show that the progress of this is completely
unaffected by these economic cycles. It went through the Great Depression, World War I,
World War II, the Cold War. And I then, actually, plotted this out for the next 30 years back
in 1980. It has tracked right on course. "Time" magazine ran a cover story on this idea that
said we want you to put this particular computer they had just covered a few weeks ago on the
graph. And it's right there. It's the last point. It's really remarkable how predictive
this is. And what it predicts is exponential growth. And the important point is that's
not intuitive. Our intuition about the future is linear, not exponential. When we walked
through the fields a thousand years ago, we said okay, that animal is going to cross my
path in 20 seconds. I'm going to go this way. It was good for our survival. That's why intelligence
and brains evolved. But what's hard wired in our brains are linear predictors. This
is, fundamentally, the argument I get into with critics. They look at the current pace
and make a linear prediction. Take the Genome Project, which was the first indication that
biology was an information technology. Halfway through the project, seven years into this
15-year project, we had finished 1% of the project. So the mainstream skeptics said,
"I told you this wasn't going to work. 7 years, 1%, it's going to take 700 years."
My response was, "No, we're almost done. We're right on schedule. Once you get to 1% on an
exponential trajectory, you're only seven doublings from 100%. It had been doubling
every year. There are reasons to expect that to continue." Indeed, it did. The project
was finished seven years later. And we see that in case after case. The Internet itself.
I saw the DARPA net doubling every year in the early '80s. It was connecting a few thousand
scientists. Did the math and predicted a worldwide Web connecting hundreds of millions of people
in the late 1990s. People thought that was nuts. But that's the power of exponential
growth, and it's very unexpected. This is the number of bits being moved around
on the Internet over 100 years. Morse code over AM radio.
4G networks today. Every level on this graph is 1,000 times greater
than the level below it, so that's trillions fold increase. But look at how smooth a progression
it is. This is the first indication of biology as an information technology. DNA sequencing
costs. These are logarithmic graphs coming down by half every year, the amount of genetic
sequencing doubling every year. And we have many means now to, actually, reprogram biology
as an information technology. So these technologies, like stem cells to
regrow every organ in your body or rejuvenate broken hearts from heart attacks, which people
are actually doing now, will be a thousand times more powerful in 10 years, a billion
times more powerful in less than 30 years. That's the implication of doubling in power
every year. The Internet -- this slope on this logarithm
scale is a doubling of the number of bits we move around each year. And it looks like
dry data. But at each point new applications become feasible. This is highly democratizing.
I wrote in the early '80s that the Soviet Union would be destroyed by the democratizing
effect of this decentralized electronic communication. And that's exactly what we saw in that 1991
coup against Gorbachev. We had a rise of democratization during the '90s. We have another wave with
social networks. It's highly democratizing. And the tools of creativity have also been
democratized. A kid at Harvard, trying to find a better way of dating girls, decided
to put these books that you got of the pictures of all the freshmen online -- they were called
Facebooks -- with $19,000 in capital and created a revolution. Couple kids in Stanford in a
late night dorm room challenge created a revolution on their thousand dollar laptops are creating
the first effective search engine. The tools of disruptive change are really in everybody's
hands. And a kid in Africa today with a smartphone has access to more information than the President
of the United States did 15 years ago, which would be your father, actually.
[ Laughter ] >>Ray Kurzweil: He did a great job anyway.
And I'm sure he's got that information now. But it's very empowering to the individual.
Three dimensional printing. If I want to send you a book today or a music album or a movie,
I can send you an e-mail attachment. That used to be a FedEx package. I can send you
a violin, too, as an e-mail attachment. You would need a three-dimensional printer, which
is emerging technology. They're expensive today. But so were paper printers 10 years
ago. These are coming down in cost. The scale of precision is improving at a rate of 300
volume per decade. Right now you can print out 70% of the parts on a three-dimensional
printer to make another three-dimensional printer. And that will be 100% within 10 years.
And the scale will be at the molecular level within 20 years. So we'll really be able to
sort of print out anything. I can e-mail you a blouse or a solar panel. Singularity University,
which is a university we started with backing from Google and NASA, has a projects to apply
three-dimensional printing to print out blocks or modules which you can snap together logo-style
to create high-level housing for the developing world. And all of this is progressing in an
exponential manner. If I were to say someday you'll have a little nanobots in your bloodstream
keeping you healthy from inside, you'd say that sounds very futuristic. But there are
already dozens of experiments with doing that with at least the first generation of device.
And we are making exponential gains in understanding the brain. And last time I spoke here, that
really wasn't quite the case because we could not see inside the brain with enough resolution
and precision to actually see what was going on. Now we can actually see the brain create
your thoughts, your thoughts create your brain. We can see individual interneural connections
being formed and firing in realtime. And the amount of data is doubling every year. We
are turning this into effective models and simulations. This is a slice of the cerebral
cortex. I was on a panel recently where I was the conservative. The head of this project
feels you'll have a brain level simulation by 2018. I'm saying 2029. But the progress
is exponential. We're kind of where the Genome Project was when it was 1%, which means we
-- what we don't know is far greater than what we do know, but we're almost done because
of the exponential growth. The visual cortex, the auditory cortex, the cerebellum where
we do our skill formation -- all of these are being simulated. Let me show you one last
graph to address an issue which is: Is this good or bad? Is the world getting better or
worse? There's a very strong body of opinion that the world is going to hell in a hand
basket and that technology is responsible for that. So let's take a broad view and look
at a few parameters and harbingers of human well-being.
On the X axis here on a logarithmic circle is the Wealth of Nations. The big red circle
is China. It was in the hundreds of dollars per person in today's dollars in 1800.
On the X axis, it's life expectancy. It was in the 20s and 30s for these different countries.
37 was the average. So, in the early industrial revolution, not much happened. But you will
see, as we get into the 20th Century a wind carrying these nations up toward the upper
right-hand corner towards greater wealth and greater health. And there's still a have/have
not divide. But the world is getting better. At the end of this process, the countries
that are worst off are far better off than the countries that were worst off at the beginning
of this process. And this is going into high gear now. Education.
The number of years of schooling has actually tripled in the developing world. Average has
doubled in the developed world. There's a gap, but they're both moving in the right
direction. And, finally, this is the progress we've made
in longevity. And there's many other reflections of health that show the same trends. And this
is before health and medicine was an information technology.
Now that it is an information technology, now that we can reprogram biology away from
disease and away from aging, we're in the early stages of that. But this will go into
high gear. These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years. So, if you
can hang in there, we may get to see the remarkable century ahead. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]