>>Tim O'Reilly: one question I'd like to start with, Ray, is the question of choices.
You know, your graphs have this remarkable sense of inevitability about them.
And, yet, we know in our everyday life and we know in the life of nations that there
are choices to be made and that, if we make the wrong choice -- at least in the short-term
-- things can go very wrong.
At least there's evidence from history that they can go very wrong for a long time.
One of the things -- I think, being trained as a classist original, I think about things
like the fact that the Hagia Sophia was the largest building in the world for a thousand
years.
It's not -- when progress failed in the west, the western Roman empire, moved to the eastern
Roman empire, moved to the Arabic world and back to Europe, you know, we're increasingly
one world.
And we screw up, we screw up for everybody.
>>Ray Kurzweil: In terms of inevitability, sometimes people say why don't we just sit
back and let it happen?
Why are we working so hard?
If we did that, it wouldn't happen.
In a way, we're counting on people's passion to follow their inspiration and be creative
and the increasing enabling of the democratization of the tools of innovation, which I talked
about.
However, there's another reason to get involved.
They say war is too important to leave to the generals.
Technology is too important to leave to the technologists.
I talked somewhat about the promise, but there's also peril.
The same technology we're using to reprogram biology away from disease could be also be
applied by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be a deadly weapon.
We're not defenseless against that.
We can create a defensive system.
I've been working, actually, with the Army on doing that, a rapid response system for
biological viruses like we do have for software viruses.
But there is promise and peril.
That's been true of technology since fire, which kept us warm but also burned down our
villages.
And that's the reason to get involved.
And there are also subtle issues that are important beyond the existential risks.
Privacy, protection of intellectual property so that we can actually create information
of value and so on.
>>Tim O'Reilly: So let me shift over to your focus on health and wellness as IT.
I think there's an enormous opportunity there.
Some of it is in areas like genomics.
But there are also enormous opportunities just in creating learning loops.
You know, one of the things I like to think about with Google and advertising, of course,
this being a conference that has its roots in that world, one of the amazing things we
learned was how to solve what you could describe as the Wanamaker problem.
You know, half of my advertising doesn't work.
I just don't know which half.
Google made a big dent in solving that problem for a certain class of advertising.
As we move into healthcare as IT, we're actually trying to do that same thing.
We're, actually, trying to use collective intelligence, massive amounts of data to actually
figure out what's working and what isn't.
>>Ray Kurzweil: There's many aspects of that.
There's actual collective decision making using the tools that are becoming available.
Patients are perfectly good scientific and medical researchers.
And groups of patients are -- have a motivation to solve a disease.
And that is happening.
And patient goes into a doctor's office with a chronic disease, she is armed with the latest
knowledge from, you know, whole community of people who have that and who have a passion
for addressing that condition.
And she may very well know more about it than her physician.
>>Tim O'Reilly: That kind of brings me back to an issue of choices.
You know, one of the big areas that I know when I talk to people in medical research,
some of the privacy fears actually are holding us back.
You know, patients will quite willingly share their medical history with other patients,
if you look at a community like patients like me, people are sharing everything they know,
because, my gosh, they're trying to save their life.
Yet, our system penalizes people, makes it difficult to share.
Do we need to change our culture of data sharing in areas like this?
>>Ray Kurzweil: Yes, I think so.
HIPAA has slowed down the sharing of data to do outcome studies.
There -- that is changing, and there are large institutions, like Mayo Clinic and so on,
who are harvesting and harnessing this data and stripping off the patient information
and being able to do outcome studies.
NIH is collecting a million genomes to relate genetic states to diseases so we can do personalized
genetic medicine.
That wasn't feasible, by the way, when the genome cost a billion dollars each.
Now that it's approaching a thousand dollars each, that becomes feasible.
So privacy is a very important thing to solve.
I think it is solvable.
I think the technologies of privacy encryption have kept ahead of the technologies of breaking
privacy, which is decryption.
>>Tim O'Reilly: There's kind of another interesting element to this health care arena that I find
really instructive, and that is a shift in the model from diagnosis at the front end,
followed by treatment, to a situation where we're doing constant diagnosis to say, oh,
this treatment working?
I was at a recent health care event with G.E., and that's a big part of their focus now,
is shifting that model.
And it really makes a lot of what we've learned on the consumer Internet so much more relevant.
Because what we're always doing is testing, did this work.
We're learning constantly in our algorithms, gathering new data.
And it's remarkable to me that health care is following that same trajectory.
>>Ray Kurzweil: You mentioned Watson.
Watson is working with nuance, which is -- that's my first company, actually -- to have it read
all medical literature.
>>Tim O'Reilly: Right.
>>Ray Kurzweil: To use it as a diagnostician.
Medical doctors simply cannot read all the tens of thousands of articles that come out
each year in their area.
>>Tim O'Reilly: Yeah.
>>Ray Kurzweil: So that -- >>Tim O'Reilly: Yeah, I'm talking, though,
specifically about actual diagnostic devices, we look at personalized medicine, you're actually
perhaps looking at the biochemistry, looking at the genetics, looking at is this drug actually
working, which patients does it work for, which ones does it not work for and you're
tailoring treatment.
So there's kind of an interesting -- >>Ray Kurzweil: There's a big interest in
outcome studies, and we've done almost none of that.
You know, in terms of Google's philosophy that data is power, which is kind of a variation
of (indiscernible) knowledge is power, having that data is tremendously important.
Find people who have taken a particular supplement don't get a particular disease, that's really
valuable to know.
And that information is out there.
And it's going to be harvested now, maybe by Google, but certainly -- or by the companies
here.
>>Tim O'Reilly: Let me ask you another question: You have, you know, famously been, you know,
quoted as saying that, you know, you think that it will be possible at some point for
humans to live forever.
What are the moral implications of that?
>>Ray Kurzweil: Well, it's never forever.
I mean -- >>Tim O'Reilly: Not forever.
>>Ray Kurzweil: But come to Google Zeitgeist and say, I've done it, I've lived forever.
>>Tim O'Reilly: But certainly -- >>Ray Kurzweil: I think the threshold we're
going for is to be at more than a year -- add more of a year to your remaining life expectancy.
And that's not a guarantee.
It's not going to come suddenly.
Bit by bit, as we overcome different diseases, reverse aging processes, all of which is feasible,
we will be extending human longevity.
Now, if there were the only thing we were doing, you could actually make a case that
isn't moral, because we're going to run out of resources.
But the same technologies that can extend longevity are going to extend resources.
I didn't get to discuss, for example, solar energy, which I worked on with Larry Page
at the National Academy of Engineering.
We noted that it's growing exponentially.
It's now a half a percent of the world's energy needs.
But it's doubling every two years, and it has been for 25 years.
And it's only eight doublings now from 100%.
And people tend to dismiss how it's half a percent, it's a fringe player, not important,
but -- and they ignore the exponential, just as they did with the genome and the Internet.
>>Tim O'Reilly: There are other issues, though, when you look at a world that's reshaped demographically
in that way.
There's a huge shift in power.
We see right now around the world young people without jobs.
We -- you know, the question is, do we really want to shift more people -- more power to
people who are older?
>>Ray Kurzweil: I don't think the statistics show that.
If you look, there's always a lot of political consequence on what happened, you know, this
month and this quarter.
If you look at it over a broad period of time, we have doubled the percentage of the population
working, and the jobs pay now ten times as much in constant dollars compared to a century
ago.
If I were (indiscernible) as a futurist in 1900, I would say a third of you work on farms,
a third of you work in factories.
But in a hundred years, the year 2000, that's going to be 3% and 3%.
And everyone would go, "Oh, my God, we're going to be out of work."
And I'd say, "Don't worry.
You'll get jobs in genetic sequencing and new search algorithms," and nobody would know
what I'm talking about.
Most of the jobs today didn't exist 50 years ago, and that will continue to be the case.
And we are investing more in education as a result.
We had 55,000 college students in 1870.
We have ten million today.
>>Tim O'Reilly: But still, I think the real implication is, there are enormous disruptions
ahead, disruptions that aren't just technological, but social and economic.
And we need to actually have innovators tackle all of those things.
>>Ray Kurzweil: What's amazing is how quickly we get used to change.
When things happen, it's like, wow, it's a search engine where you can find out any of
the information in the world in a few seconds.
We get used to it overnight.
>>Tim O'Reilly: That's right, we do.
Well, with that, we're going to have to wrap.
We're out of time.
Thank you very much, Ray.
And -- [ Applause ]
>>Tim O'Reilly: -- thank you, all for staying here.
[ Applause ]