he American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence . His bestselling 2005 book,, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel,– and some of his predictions no longer seem so wacky.
You argue that the Turing test, wherein an AI can communicate by text indistinguishably from a human, will be passed by 2029. But to pass it,Humans are not that accurate and they don’t know a lot of things! You can ask an LLM today very specifically about any theory in any field and it will answer you very intelligently. But who can possibly do that? If a human answered like that, you’d know it was a machine.
Being wealthy allows you to afford these technologies at an early point, but also one where they don’t work very well. When phones were new they were very expensive and also did a terrible job. They had access to very little information and didn’t talk to the cloud. Now they are very affordable and extremely useful. About three quarters of people in the world have one. So it’s going to be the same thing here: this issue goes away over time.
We do have to work through certain types of issues. We have an election coming and “deepfake” videos are a worry. I think we can actually figure out but if it happens right before the election we won’t have time. On issues of bias, AI is learning from humans and humans have bias. We’re making progress but we’re not where we want to be.