Vice Magazine: Once we have hardware that far surpasses the human brain's
computational power, you predict that it will take about a decade to
reverse-engineer the subtleties and nuances of the way our minds work. Then
nanorobots will allow us to supplement our bodies, eventually resulting in
the emergence of nonbiological humans who are more machine than man. And
this will allow us to live as long as we want, raise our intelligence to
unimaginable heights, and control our senses. Any ideas what the world is
going to look like after this happens?

Ray Kurzweil: You can think of it in terms of virtual reality, another trend
that's been emerging for a while. For example, you can go on Second Life now
and have all these avatars, which represent biological people because they
are, for the most part, controlled by biological people. But there are
actually some avatars running around on Second Life that don't have real
biological people behind them. They're called bots, and sometimes these bots
will fool you. You think that this is a normal avatar and some biological
person, but actually it's a bot. People are experimenting with how long they
can get away with a bot running around and not being noticed as a bot.

Vice Magazine: Creepy.

Ray Kurzweil: Bots aren't up to human levels--yet. But by my calculations, a
computer will pass the Turing test [which determines if a computer has
reached a level of true AI] by 2029, using stringent definitions of the
rules. True AIs will then have a presence in virtual reality, and avatars in
virtual environments won't be cartoonish, like they are today. By the 2030s,
virtual reality is going to be as real and as compelling as "real" reality,
and we'll be doing it from within the nervous system. So the nanobots in
your brain--which will get to your brain through the bloodstream,
noninvasively and without surgery--will shut down the signals coming from
your real senses and replace them with senses that your brain will be
receiving from the virtual environment. Then it would feel like you're
really in that environment. You'll go to move your hand and it'll move your
virtual hand. You'll have a virtual body, but your virtual body doesn't have
to be the same as your real body. It can be different for every environment.
A couple could become each other in a virtual environment and experience a
relationship from the other's perspective. The AIs will have bodies, too, so
you could be walking around Second Life circa 2030 and run into a person,
and it may be a bot. Unlike today's bots, it will be as convincing as a real
person. It will be as intelligent as you, have the supple command of human
language, and look real.

Vice Magazine: Are we going to look like humans forever, or will we
eventually just become ghosts in the machine while our physical bodies
devolve into dwarves with lobster hands?

Ray Kurzweil: If we're in a virtual-reality environment, we're not going to
be happy being a disembodied intelligence. We're going to want bodies, and
these AI bots are going to be modeled, at least in large measure, on human
intelligence, and they will have bodies as well. Some will be humanlike
bodies, while some will be specialized bodies for special purposes. By the
2030s or 2040s, we'll have nanobot swarms, which can assemble themselves to
look like human bodies. They'll also be able to change their bodies quickly,
kind of like the Transformer concept. They'll have the same morphing
qualities that we will see in virtual realities but will also be in "real"
reality. Just as there won't be a clear distinction between nonbiological
and biological intelligence, there won't be a clear distinction between real
and virtual realities. It's going to be mixed up--we're going to have
augmented reality. You'll look at someone and there will be little pop-ups
and little virtual people who whisper in our ears and tell us what's going
on, or just remind us what people's names are.

Vice Magazine: So you're saying I could be sitting on the toilet and a
pop-up ad is going to materialize out of nowhere? That's very discomforting.

Ray Kurzweil: Well, you'll have control of it to the extent that you want,
just as you do now. We're all actually very close to our machines. They are
an extension of reality. A woman I know recently told me she went to see her
son, and he's sitting there on the computer. He's got five friends open in
different windows while she's standing there in a real doorway, and she's
just another window in his life. They're not just imaginary, they're real
people. There's not going to be a clear distinction between real people and
virtual people. In fact, "real people"--biological people of biological
origin, like myself--will be mostly nonbiological once we get through the
2030s. We'll have billions of nanobots going into our brains through
capillaries that will interact with our biological neurons. As soon as we do
that, we're a hybrid of biological and nonbiological intelligence. There
won't be a clear distinction. It's not like "Now I'm using my biological
intelligence, now I'm using my machine intelligence." We'll get to a point
where the biological portion of our intelligence is pretty insignificant.
And the nonbiological, the machine part, will fully comprehend the meager
biological part and be able to simulate and understand it.

Vice Magazine: Surely a significant number of people will find this
transition terrifying and attempt to resist it.

Ray Kurzweil: People say, "Gee, I don't want to be a machine." They're
thinking of the machines they know today, and that's not the kind of machine
I'm talking about. I'm talking about a machine--and we'll probably need a
different word by then--that's just as subtle and supple and emotional as
humans are today, and even more so.

Vice Magazine: Something that's deeply troubling about your vision of the
future is the risk of hyper-equality. What's the point of life if everyone
is perfect and super-smart? It seems like it will hinder diversity.

Ray Kurzweil: I think it's going to make people more diverse. We're actually
quite similar to each other today. We have less genetic diversity within all
human beings on earth than a typical group of baboons. We all have the same
organs and we're all constrained with a very similar brain that really can't
expand. I can't just double the neurons I have in my brain and reorganize
them usefully. Once we can break that barrier and not have our thinking
limited to what we can do with a hundred billion neurons in a constrained
small skull and begin to actually think with computation out on the "cloud"
by tapping into the web and all of its computational resources, we're going
to actually become more different. We'll be able to explore, in great depth,
different subjects and different skills.

Vice Magazine: Is the ultimate goal to transcend biology and choose how long
we would like to live?

Ray Kurzweil: Even if we perfect biology, it has inherent limitations. We
will have very powerful means, such as drugs finely pinpointed to reprogram
the information processes underlying biology, to get away from disease and
aging. When we can augment our immune systems with nanobots that are 1,000
times more capable than white blood cells at destroying pathogens and
keeping us healthy at the level of cells and molecules to combat disease,
that will be even more powerful. And ultimately, we will be able to actually
back up the information in our biological systems, including our brains.
That's sort of the last step.

Vice Magazine: What can your average Eddie Lunchpail do to be sure he lives
long enough to reach this era of unprecedented advances in health care?

Ray Kurzweil: A young person should take a balanced vitamin-mineral
supplement. There are some other things that are good to take:
phosphatidylcholine, a major component of biological membranes, will keep
your cells young and is actually very good for your skin. Coenzyme Q10 is
good for keeping your muscles healthy. Vitamin D will combat a lot of
diseases and it's very inexpensive. It's not costly to eat a healthy diet.
Vegetables are pretty inexpensive and that's the mainstay of our diet.
Exercise you can do on your own--buy some weights and some good walking or
running shoes. So this is not just a rich man or woman's pursuit. The
recommendations are actually pretty affordable, and they're well worth it in
terms of the implications for one's health. It's expensive to get sick. If
you lose your health, you really have nothing.

Vice Magazine: Is it fair to call the Singularity a belief system?

Ray Kurzweil: When I talk about being a Singularitarian, it's not a belief
system. While it does address some of the same issues that, say, religion
has addressed, it makes sense to update our ideas about things with insight
drawn from science and technology. Religions emerged in prescientific times.
What people did before there was any conceivable way to imagine really
extending human longevity significantly was to come up with ideas that were
like, "Well, death is really not such a bad thing." Now we actually can see
a way around this. The goal is to get to what Aubrey de Grey calls the
"longevity escape velocity," where we're adding more than a year every year
to our remaining life expectancies so that we may live long enough to get to
the point where we have the technology to expand human longevity
indefinitely. We are the species that changes who we are.

Vice Magazine: If we change who we are, how will we still be human?

Ray Kurzweil: People say, "If your brain's going to be 99 percent
nonbiological, then you're not human anymore." But it comes down to a
definition of the term. By my definition, human beings are exactly the
species that changes who they are. If you look at humans today, we didn't
stay on the ground, we didn't stay on the planet, we have not stayed within
the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 years 1,000
years ago. We've changed ourselves in lots of ways. I can take a device out
of my pocket and, in a few keystrokes, access all of human knowledge. What
other animal species has done that? So that is the nature of being human: to
go beyond our limitations.


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