Lex Fridman Podcast #321 Ray Kurzweil

 I’ve been familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s work since I was a child. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines was on the  bookshelves of my childhood home, and its message of technological future optimism was amazing and wondrous for my young imagination. To summarize his work, Kurzweil is an optimistic futurist and transhumanist. He places great faith in the power of exponential growth and improvement in computation, which has been the trend of the last 100 years, and he forecasts the same trend to continue into the future. If that is true, then it doesn’t take too many more doublings to reach a so-called Singularity, a moment beyond which forecasting is useless. The Singularity is a point at which the capabilities of humans and machines together reach a level like that of a god in speed, extent, depth, etc, and we can only guess what they might do. Kurzweil predicts that this will occur around the year 2045.

Transhumanism and the Singularity have a very religious or messianic character - if only we make it to the promised age to come, we will live in the kingdom of heaven. I often think about the Nitzchean observation that “God is dead” and consider many current belief systems to really be stand-ins for traditional religiosity, such as politics, technology, climate doom, etc. This transhumanism “religion” is relatively commonplace in the tech industry and as a motivating ideology it has its pros and cons. I think it is in some ways “anti-human” in that it posits that the current state of humanity is unacceptable and needs to be done away with (kind of strange given that we are all still humans and therefore have to be done away with). But it also constitutes a very empathic and optimistic mindset and goal, which is the salvation of humanity. 

There are two topics related to Kurzweil’s thinking that interest me at the moment. The first is not one he discusses, but is a reaction to his focus on intellect and technology that comes out of my own psychological journey. Kurzweil throws his whole lot behind technology and believes that technology is changing humanity for the better. At one point I agreed with this wholeheartedly, but recently I’ve come to reconsider this. I think my own psychology in my life up to the last couple years has been overly dominated by abstract intellectual/logical thinking and has been relatively bereft of the emotional and spiritual. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy reconnecting and developing these sides of myself and there have been tangible benefits for my level of happiness and understanding of myself, others, and the world around me, which is to say that I now view both types as important. In stating that consciousness and love are all that makes existence meaningful, Kurzweil himself in the conversation admitted that he essentially believes that the emotional side of the mind is very important, even if he doesn’t discuss it very much besides. If we go down the road the Kurzweil wants us to, then I worry humanity will no longer be connected to the emotional and spiritual and will become depressed. There are many signs that this is already occurring in the United States, as various measurements of psychological well being are not trending in the right direction - simply consider the increase in “deaths of despair,” which almost by definition cannot happen to people who are well in their emotional and spiritual dimensions. 

Aside from the tradeoff between logic and emotion within the depths of our minds, there is another field where the tradeoff is present, the extensive world without. Technological progress has always been fueled by accelerating exploitation of the resources of the natural world and come at the expense of the ecological systems. Ecological destruction (mass extinction, increasing monocultures, toxic pollution, etc) has an innate moral reprehensibility in my opinion, but that is because I have come to view myself as a natural organism - a body and not just a mind. I now see humanity as part of the overall ecology and our increasing separation from it as a source of increasing desperation and depression. This is putting aside the fact that ecological collapse endangers our bodily health due to risks like potential food system collapse. I see two possible solutions to the disconnect between humanity and the natural world - we either reconnect with it, which requires giving up some but not all of the technological features of our lives, or we transcend it, which requires a modification of our body to separate itself from the ecology. Either task is herculean, but Kurzweil is firmly in favor of the latter. It is likely the case that the hypothetical ceiling is higher in the former, but the latter is attractive. In the culture, broadly, I perceive that this awareness is very minimal - that of the fact that our lives are destructive to the ecology on which we depend for material and psychological well being. Even those who want to save the world from climate change rarely see this more general problem. 

When I refer to living in a manner that is integrated with the ecology, I don’t mean to suggest that we should “poop in the woods”, a tagline I see on some outdoorsy bumper stickers - I don’t think we need to give up much of our creature comforts and medicine. The natural world is cold, brutal, harsh. We have removed ourselves from the violence and death that is commonplace in the wild, and there is no reason to go back to that. We must however live in a more sustainable manner, one that has as one of its central goals (alongside increasing human well being) to permanently preserve the whole of the ecology. There are plenty of examples of animals and plants that change the environment around them to better suit their needs, and we should do the same, just with a principle of the least harm done to the rest. 

In the end, the reader can decide which is the preferable messainic vision - for humans to transcend the limits of their evolutionary setting and expand intelligence and consciousness across the universe, or for humans to harmoniously reconnect to the ecological systems of the whole of the living earth.

The second topic that strikes me with Kurzweil is his relationship with mortality. He has the outright goal of increasing human lifespan, particularly that of his own. To do this, he believes that medical technology will progress to a point where human life expectancy might increase more than one year every year, reaching a kind of “escape velocity” - escaping death, achieving immortality. Kurzweil believes this will occur in the 2030s and he is famous for his set of supplements and lifestyle choices that are designed to allow him to be alive at that inflection point. It at the same time has a kind of ancient fable quality to it, the archetypal quest for immortality, and therefore is smacks of folly in the way all the fables end with a moral about arrogance, etc. But I agree with Kurzweil that there is an unnecessary acceptance of death in the abstract in our society, which is in contrast to our hatred of the tragedy of any single death. I’ve thought a lot about my own mortality, and if Lex were to ask me about it I would admit that I experience panic attacks laying in bed at night when I allow myself to think about it. I feel trapped, facing an impending doom, like I am watching a disaster that has already passed a tipping point and is not yet hurting me, but will clearly do so in the future. I believe that the “folly” of seeking immortality is actually a worthwhile pursuit, and I do take some solace in my relative youth - Kurzweil himself touched on the cosmic unfairness that some people will be “grandfathered” into mortality, such as those who are today 80+, 90+ years old, in contrast to the youth of today who in his mind are assured a kind of immortality. Lex tends to romanticize death, which I think is wrong, but I agree with him that it is always lurking in the background and that its removal would be more profound than anything else.

One promise of the march towards the Singularity is the direct connection of human and machine intelligences, culminating in the ability to upload one’s mind into a machine, leaving behind the body and perhaps becoming immortal. This brings up an interesting philosophical question, similar to the ship of Theseus problem, summed up in a few questions: If one uploads one’s mind, is one copying or transferring the mind? Does the original consciousness die or live on? I believe the disturbing answer is that it may one day be possible to recreate one’s mind in a machine, but that this copy will be a distinct entity to the original bodily copy. There will either be two copies of the person from then on, or the bodily version will need to cease to exist. Since we currently in 2022 all are of the bodily variety, would this mean that instead of escaping death, a mind upload would ensure ourselves of that exact fate? I fear that the answer is we would in fact experience death. However, in processing this question, I considered a thought experiment, which is the example of waking up each morning. At the end of each day, we go to sleep and lose consciousness. The next morning, we awake. We believe that we are the same person as the one who went to sleep the night before, but what reason do we have for believing this? One could point out that many of our characteristics persist from the previous day to the next, especially those of our body, but in the final analysis the only real connection to the previous day are our memories. We identify with the person in our memories and consider that person to be ourself in the past, but in very real ways our identity in the present is entirely walled off from that person in the past, aside from the memories. Is this any different from a scenario in which the person of the previous day goes to sleep and dies, really dies, and then a new person is born the next day and is imbued with memories of the past? Would it be possible to exchange the set of memories with which one is imbued in the morning and would one be able to tell the difference? Similarly, would this be the experience of the mind upload? Consciousness has no particle or organ to which we can point and say “there it is.” So would there be some transcendent phenomenon whereby a mind upload would transmit the consciousness into a separate distinct mass of atoms, or perhaps to multiple at the same time? It is a very frightening and mind-boggling idea.