Signature Event 2024 - Ray Kurzweil in Conversation with Michael Voss

[Music] welcome to the society for science fall signature event I am Maya OA president and CEO of society for Science and executive publisher of science news I am looking forward to what I'm certain will be a fascinating conversation between Michael Voss publisher of science news and Ray kerswell an inventor author and futurist and an Alum of the science Talent search one of the society's stem research programs but before I formally introduce them both I want to take a step back and talk to you about the society for science more than a hundred years ago the

society for science was founded by journalist ew scripts and zoologist William Ritter they were worried about disinformation in the news and St at science news today we are best known for our award-winning journalism in science news and Science News explorers our worldclass stem research competitions and our suite of programming that seeks to ensure that any young person with an interest in stem has an opportunity to pursue that passion I'm truly looking forward to this conversation today first let me introduce all of you to Ray kerswell principal researcher and AI Visionary at Google Ry has been

a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years longer than any other living person he's a prolific inventor Ray's inventions include the first CCD flat bed scanner the first print to speech reading machine for the Blind and the First music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments he has received multiple Awards and honors including a Grammy award and the national medal of Technology Ry has written five National best-selling books and his most recent book The Singularity is near was released in June 2024 and of course as I mentioned previously Ry is

an Alum of the science Talent search Ray will be joined by Michael Gordon Voss publisher of Science News Michael is a senior executive part of the leadership team of the news organization's business strategy and operations prior to joining Science News Michael was publisher of Stanford social Innovation review at Stanford University and co-led the organization with the publications's editor-in-chief previously Michael was vice president and Associate publisher at Scientific American Michael's career in digital and and traditional media has spanned more than two decades and includes Newsweek Meredith Corporation and George magazine I'm now so pleased to have

Ray kwell and Michael Gordon Vos welcome thank you Maya I'd like to Echo what you said in your introduction uh and thank our alumni and other guests for joining us for today's conversation uh and I'd especially like to thank Ry for participating in what we hope will be an engaging hour together so welcome Ray my pleasure um Ray have curated questions that our audience submitted during the registration process and added a few of my own so let's not waste any time and get right to them um let's start off right like many people in the

audience as Maya mentioned you're an alumnus of both the society's science Talent search and the what was at the time the National Science and Engineering fair is now as the international science and engineering fair you've said that you knew wanted to become an inventor when you were five tell us why how did you discover your calling and why did you become a futurist and more importantly did your experiences with STS and ISF influence your career trajectory thank you uh we could spend the entire hour on that question but I'll try to uh develop the highlights

of it um it actually goes back to my mother's mother's mother in 1868 she started a school uh that allowed women to go from kindergarten to 14th grade that was very significant because if you were lucky enough to get an education at all in 19th century Europe uh it went through most ninth grade this went from kindergarten to 14th grade uh it was really the first school that allowed people to do that uh her daughter which was my grandmother uh was one of the first women that got a PhD in chemistry and took over the

school and they ran the school for 70 years uh from 1868 to 1938 the beginning of uh the World War II uh she fled uh because she was Jewish in Austria uh and when I was I was born in 48 so when I was about 6 years old she showed me a typewriter she had written a a her autobiography and later on I became interested in the autobiography but I wasn't that interested at age six but I was very interested in the manual Ty writer I mean here was a device you could put a blank

piece of paper in and you could actually make it look like it came from a book I mean that was really pretty amazing and I was very fascinated with the the uh manual typewriter so I collected lots of objects from broken bicycles broken radios and I had this large thing six seven eight years old uh and I collected all this different mechanical objects and I felt if I could just figure out how to put them together I could solve any problem I could make people live longer overcome disease um hadn't really figured out how to

do that but I figured if I can actually put these things together I could solve any problem so I became an inventor without any inventions at 678 actually at8 years old I I I did actually create um a virtual reality Theater which was mechanical and I can have people come on stage you could lift their arms uh clouds could come by and I could control it all from Central Command station that you uh that I could operate and it was a very big hit in my third grade class um and I and other people were

wondering what they were going to be there going to be a teacher fireman uh I always had the idea I'm going to be an inventor and I had that since I was six years old uh the futurism actually comes from being an inventor because timing is very important you have to be able to uh present things and work on them at the right time so I worked on omn front optical character recognition in the 1970s and I worked on speech recognition in 1980s had I reversed that it wouldn't Avo worked so I actually had some

idea of when things were feasible uh and I was able to start Cal recognition a little bit before it became feasible so that's the key you have to start things before they're feasible but not 25 years before they're feasible like a few years before they're feasible and and I became interested in futurism as a result of that I think it's interesting you went from the way of like sharing ideas and thoughts through a manual typewriter which you can see over my shoulder I'm a fan of as well to a character recognition and speech recognition uh

an interesting Arc um and I also think it's interesting what you're saying about before but not so far before something is feasible um that reminds me of you in some ways about you know you've written about the idea you've written extensively about the idea uh the difference between what you refer to as linear and exponential thinking um exponential thinking is is Central to your predictions about the future as a futurist and and your career as an entrepreneur too can you explain uh for everyone what exponential thinking is and give us a real world example of

that well the best thing is if we could bring up my chart on the history of computation I mean I I've worked on this chart for over 40 years um this is about 85 years of the history of computers so each uh year it gives you the best computer that could provide the most computations per second per dollar so it starts in 1939 uh there was the zeusa 2 computer um it was actually shown to Hitler uh he was not a fan of Hitler but it got shown to Hitler and Hitler had actually no interest

in computation the third computer was done by Touring that was shown to Churchill Churchill developed a very strong interest and that she broke the German Enigma code with that computer um but and this lots of different stories about computers along this line it starts in 1939 uh that computer could do 0.000000 07 calculations per second per constant Dollar in at the upper right hand corner uh well actually we have 2023 2024 we have the Nidia B22 chip which does half a trillion calculations per second per dollar as you go up the chart it's an exponential

charts because each level is 10 times greater than the level below it this uh chart shows you 85 years of computers and a 75 quadrillion fold increase in 85 years uh for the same price so you can actually get something that's 75 quadrillion fold more powerful than it was 84 years ago uh and that's exponential growth and anything that has to do with computers or anything uh electronic has improved uh given this exponential growth um and what's very interesting is this is a straight line means exponential growth and it it doesn't matter whether you were

increasing relays at the leftand corner or integrated circuits at the upper right hand corner the amount of we basically doubles approximately every year the amount of computation uh that we could handle uh without uh increasing the cost and that's actually has an enormous effect on our economy and everything else uh is growing in this exponential Manner and it makes a very big difference people think linearly they think if something took 10 years in the past it's going to take 10 years in the future uh but exponential growth is quite remarkable if I count linearly 1

2 3 4 5 at step 30 I'm at 30 if I count exponentially 24816 the step 30 I'm at a billion and that's what we've seen already uh just think back you know 20 30 years ago things were a billion times less powerful for the same cost so let's focus in a little bit on AI um how do you think AI can help us think in a more exponential manner to better foresee upcoming disruptions well we're Gathering everything that human beings know uh we don't have AGI yet uh artificial general intelligence but based on the

graph I just showed you in 1999 I figured that would take place by 2029 within 30 years uh Stanford which had been following my uh projections was so alarmed by this they organized a conference several hundred uh AI experts came to the conference and they they were expecting that that would happen but uh they figured it would take a hundred years and some people thought it would take hundreds of years but the consensus was it would take a 100 years before we would have a computer that could handle everything that human beings know and I

was saying 30 years and a lot of people who were at that conference saying yes they said the 100 years but they were wrong and if if anything my projection of 2030 is uh considered conservative today but what we're doing is we're taking everything that human beings know we're Gathering that and computers already large language models can actually handle everything that human beings know you can ask at anything uh and any philosophical problem psychological problem medicine anything and it'll give you a reasonable answer and if you don't like that answer you can ask it again

and you'll get a different answer that's also correct no human being can do all of that um so we're Gathering everything that human beings know and we're actually using uh these things to come up with new things that we didn't know before um we we'll talk a little bit about that Ray one thing you've talked about in the past is you you've said that artificial intelligence isn't really artificial what do you mean by that well AI uh that's the term we know about uh artificial intelligence but it's not artificial it's real intelligence and we're going

actually put this inside our own mind and we're going to have ai as well as our own thinking power uh generating thoughts within ourselves we do that a little bit with our phone uh I don't know something I takes me maybe 15 seconds 30 seconds to get it from the phone that'll go inside our own minds so it won't be 15 seconds it'll be fraction of a second uh but it's real intelligence it's just as real as something coming from our own mind so it's real it's not artificial um people think artificial intelligence it's somehow

fake but it's it's actually uh it's going to guide us in the future question we got from a member of our audience are there any purely human emotional physical or intellectual behaviors that you think AI cannot mimic or execute or do you think given enough time there's nothing that AI couldn't learn uh my answer is yes we're g to AI is going to learn everything I mean how how could human beings do something that computers can't emulate uh and it's just happen already um in fact creativity um we uh tried to create a cure for

um covid um and we actually had generated it could be possibly about a billion different um uh possibilities we tried them all and the uh M madna actually had had this billion they actually tried every single one of them uh using biological simulation and they actually found the covid vaccine in two days uh and that's going to actually be the way in which we're going to cure cancer and Alzheimer and so on we've got several billion different possibilities we're going to try them all and we're doing that already and there's several things that are coming

out that we're actually testing so I believe in the next few years we'll actually make tremendous strides uh in biological simulation but also every other aspect so so there's nothing that human beings can do that computers can't do but it can actually help us we can work together overcoming problems so that's a key point right you're talking about the collaborative nature between human beings and AGI um but I think we can point to the growing awareness of the idea of of P Doom um uh amongst you know the tracking of negative sentiment around artificial intelligence

as evidence that there's a great deal of concern among people about what might happen when AI reaches human level intelligence um but you know obviously hearing from you you're very optimistic about this upcome I'd like to understand why that is um well if you read my book I mean I'm I certainly go through a lot of the problems and we have uh concern about human beings having too much intelligence uh atomic energy could wipe out all of human beings and that was before AI appeared when I was a small child uh we used to have

these um test to protect us against an atomic war we get under our desk put our hands behind our back and that would protect us from an atomic war right seemed to work we're still here but um so people are concerned about human beings having too much intelligence and human beings have done a lot of horrible things uh and we're basing AI on human beings and human beings can do horrible things so so can artificial intelligence um and people actually get a negative view of progress um for example um we we did a poll to

see whether or not poverty is getting better or worse so 31,000 people in 26 countries are ped and they were asked has poverty gotten better or worse in the last 20 years 2third thought it gotten it had gotten worse it actually had decreased 50% over the last 20 years and only 2% gets that and this polls like this on everything that's important to people um child poverty violence increasing income literacy education rates around the world everything is getting better despite the fact uh that the news is is all negative and the News might be correct

it's telling you things that are correct but it's not the the progress is like day by day and we don't actually focus on that but things are actually getting better uh through technology uh and AI is going at such a fantastic rate because of the uh acceleration of progress uh I mean just look at AI today compared to one year ago it's it's just amazing um and that's because of the acceleration of progress uh and basically things are going to get better uh as a result we're going to overcome for example cancer and and Alzheimer's

and other types of diseases really age I mean I think you know you can look at a variety of measures and we definitely live in a in a safer healthier world than even you know like 100 years ago or even 50 years ago not 20 years ago um yeah but that well look I mean bring up this chart you personal income but this is the average amount of money that a person in the United States and Europe have uh compared to about a century ago one century we uh We've increased the amount of us personal

income about tenfold and is this chart adjusted for inflation over the same time period this is adjusted for inflation so people were very very poor 100 years ago and uh even at any money you couldn't buy the kinds of things you that you can buy today uh of course of everything will drop as AI spreads I mean when I was college student which was doesn't seem that long ago to me uh we had we all shared one computer and based on today's uh in uh um level of income that would have cost about $30 million

uh today this is uh about a million times more powerful uh and it cost a few hundred dollars uh we don't actually take that into consideration with our economic statistics um but uh just based on uh uh the amount of money that each person has we're about 10 times more more uh 10 times as many dollars per year uh uh for the average person yeah I I want to Jan because you know part of that income obviously has to do with jobs um and I think you'd agree that one of the major concerns most people

have around the growth of AI is around jobs people fear that AI will make their jobs obsolete or replace the human who's doing that job right now um but I think you believe very differently about that can you talk about the impact that you imagine AI will have on employment in the future of work well first of all I mean this this concern started 200 years ago with a lite movement uh people had passed on Cotton weaving from generation to generation and uh things like the cotton Jenny came out uh and one person could do

the work of 10 and literally 200 years ago people thought that employment would only be enjoyed by a few people that could survive but actually employment went up and we did things that uh we couldn't even imagine 200 years ago um and that that's true today uh and people are doing things that that you couldn't do 10 years ago like being a social media influencer for example that didn't exist 10 years ago um and I know a lot of people are making good money at that um one difference I have people think that AI is

over here and we're over here and we're competing with AI as if this is an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars but actually it's coming from people uh and it's actually going to go inside ourselves with going to become smarter uh the whole idea of the singularity is that we're actually will bring this inside of ourselves and be a million times more capable of having things inside our body um using Nanobots that will connect with the cloud and we'll be able the AI won't be over there it'll be inside ourselves um so we're going to

become smarter uh going to create jobs that we can't even imagine today um and we're going to be be able to overcome problems that we have today like diseases uh and so on I want to zoom in on that for a second it's interesting though as you were describing that I was thinking about you know back in the 70s and 80s when people still thought about computers as this other thing before we realized that computers would end up being embedded in all of the devices around us um in much that same way that you're talking

about AI becoming part of our conscious I mean they're very close to us uh recently I I gave a speech and I asked people how many people have their phone everybody raised their hand 10 years ago that wasn't the case so and this is a root to all the the uh stuff that people have learned te yeah and you can access it very easily uh and you can actually do creativity this can actually run experiments instantly um and that's going to become more and more the case and it's not going this is a little bit

of a problem because you got to remember to bring it with you if you actually forget it you have to go back and get it uh it takes a little bit of time to actually get the answers from it this will actually go inside this uh and that's how we get to the singularity by 2045 uh it won't be outside it'll be inside our brains I want to start talking about the singularity in a moment but I just want to touch base or touch go back to something that you said a moment ago um and

ask you to just kind of tease out a little more how you see AI helping us um to overcome I think what many people see as see ly intractable challenges like climate change or Global poverty um if you can talk to that for a sec well so this is uh alternative electricity generation most so most uh specifically solar but also wind um solar is actually got 99.7% cheaper and uh in terms of the cost per watt since 1975 we've actually increased the amount 2 million folds increas used um and it's growing exponentially uh and we

actually only need to uh use one 10,000s in other words we only have to use one out of 10,000 solar that falls on the earth uh to meet all of our needs uh so we're going to do that with it'll take a little bit of time to actually adopt that but within 10 or 15 years we'll be able to use all of our energy from solar and wind without carbon dioxide emissions so solar's on track to dominate within a decade um and that's really the answer to global warming um and look at other types of

problems we're make uh same kind of exponential discovery that will overcome problems so you were starting to talk a little bit about the singularity a moment ago um and I think what was interesting between your book The Singularity is near and your new book The Singularity is nearer your timetable for the singularity has actually moved up um no it say the same I mean I expect uh AGI basically a computer that can do anything that a person can do but but actually uh greater than human beings by 2029 and we'll be able to bring this

within ourselves and expand our uh imagination about a millionfold by 24 are there physical or infrastructure needs related to the expansion of AGI and the singularity um including greater energy needs that need to happen in order for us to be able to reach that timeline for the singularity um well it doesn't require a lot of energy but we're revolutionizing energy as I just talked about uh and it's not going to increase our energy that much much we'll still be able to expand all of our energy needs within 10 to 15 years using solar and and

wind uh even with the energy requirements of AI so one thing that you know I think there's some concern about is that um AI can sometimes reflect the cognitive biases that it's the people developing it have um how do we work to prevent that and how does can AI itself actually help us to overcome our own mental glitches our own cognitive biases um once we reach the singularity well it's a very good question intelligence has problems we can create something that's could be bad for you human beings I mentioned atomic energy and that's not Ai

and they can wipe out every single person and they still exist it's not like we got rid of them uh we don't actually talk about them that much but still an an issue we have a moral imperative to realize the promise of tech while controlling the Peril uh and I believe a lot of people are working on that um but uh I mean there issues that you have to be mindful of we just had an election uh and you can actually take somebody that you know and it looks like they're actually talking and they're saying

something that's not that they never actually said um but it really looks quite real and you think that that might affect the election we did a pretty good job of that uh uh examples of that were we were able to figure them out um and I don't think it had a major effect on the election um you're talking about the research that was done showing that most people were able to identify deep fakes even if they couldn't explain why they could identify it as being not real and we also did some some work on deep

fakes so uh people were presented and we were able to say okay this is a deep fake and it had some effect but it it wasn't as bad as we thought it might be um so uh I think we're actually getting to be uh better at actually detecting uh misinformation but it's it's still it's still an issue and then beyond misinformation itself going back to like cognitive bias and you know the the simple things like human beings are famous for uh sort of confusing causality with um uh coincidence um is there a place that AI

is going to help us to be Beyond like you know identifying something that's false information is so it's going to help us to be more rational in how we make decisions overall that AI is going to be capable of helping us with I mean uh AI is able to do that much more than people can um but if you think about who's making the decisions that affects society today it's both humans and AI together the AI is not out uh in some parts that you can't access it's it's actually built into the way in which

we govern Society uh and it's um it can uh use proper human reasoning better than human beings can by combining human beings actions with AI we can actually make better decisions and we can see that already so I'm going to change topics because you are um known for uh your desire to see human lifespan expand um dramatically in many instances um I think you wrote that uh you believe we're currently at a point where Medical Science can add is it four months on to people's lives for every year that they live right now you go

through a year and you use up a year of your longevity and therefore you're year closer to whatever uh aging will uh allow you to live but we're also making progress in uh overcoming uh coming up with new cures and better ways of treating diseases you're getting back about four months so you lose a year but you get back about four months from scientific progress but the scientific progress is on an exponential climb so as we go forward that four months is going to become greater and about particularly if you're uh mindful of advances in

scientific progress by around 8 years from now you'll get back not four months but a full year so you use up a year of your longevity but you get back a year uh from scientific progress past that point you'll actually get back more than a year so you'll go backwards as far as uh aging is concerned so it's not a guarantee can have a 20-year-old you could compute his life expectancy it's being many decades and he could die tomorrow um so but being able to die from aging is actually uh going to become eclipsed by

the scientific progress uh we're making tremendous progress for example on cancer and Alzheimer's and other diseases which uh Rob us right now and that's I think going to be cured within a number of years being able to emulate science will will be able to try every possible C for example for cancer and that's being done right now and the number of things that are already coming out that look very promising um and I mean just just look at the recent um Nobel prizes ala Fall 2 found the shapes of 200 million proteins in one year

2022 Al all three is able to generate DNA RNA and molecules that come from those dnas Alpha proteo allows us to actually design new proteins that that bind to a given Target protein so you can actually design A protein that goes into a cancer cell tells whether or not it's cancerous and destroys it and that's actually been done now we have to actually make it and show that it works but uh this is going at tremendous speed uh so 8 years from now will be a very very different um set of of targets um so

if you go out 10 20 years uh we'll really have the ability to overcome basically everything that uh we now struggle with in terms of health I I I'm reticent to use the word immortality because it's seems so unrealistic and you're not technically saying immortality because people could still die accidental death and other things that emerge but what is that potential for that sort of dramatic increase in life expectancy mean for Human Society um especially if it's not equally accessible to everyone well first of all these things are quite accessible uh I mean this is

a this this alone is fantastically available everybody has it I walked on the street and the and a homeless person takes out his cell phone and is making a call uh and this has a everything that human beings know uh easily available um now this has been a major issue of humanity we look ahead and we can't imagine going Beyond uh what we see uh human life expectancy was 208,000 years ago there's 35 in Europe in 1800 48 in 1900 it's now pushing 80 it's going to go into high gear again people convince themselves that

they don't really want to live forever and say well I don't want to live past 95 first of all they're thinking about the 95 year olds that they know they don't want to be like that uh if we can actually be healthy um if you ask somebody that's saying oh well I don't want to live past 95 and they get to be 95 and you ask them do you want to wake up tomorrow they say yes uh particularly if they're in in pretty good health I guess guess I guess the the question I have is

we already and yes we've seen that the increase in life expectancy has actually been higher overall in certain parts of the world and even in the advanced world but also starting from a lower Baseline and I think it's the concern that people have that we already we see right now this um imbalanced access to Medical advances for various reasons but I think what you're saying is and this I believe also ties into when you talk about kind of like the noost econ of the future that as the cost to produce a lot of these breakthroughs

goes down and down and down then it makes more makes it easier for everyone to be able to benefit from it yes we've seen that already and we've seen that around the world I mean countries that were so poor they couldn't afford anything are actually developing pretty robust economies today um and that's going to become even more as AI becomes uh more prevalent uh I mean this is a very good example there's about five or six billion of these around it's almost one per person um that wasn't two three or four years ago I know

you are self AOW Optimist are there any potential new threats that also emerge as AGI becomes more prevalent especially from individuals or groups that are already trying to do things to like negatively impact the world I mean intelligence is both a positive and a negative we we can see both a drone uh you can see it it could bring new medications to a hospital or also could also bring bombs to that hospital and you can't tell the difference um so intelligence is both a positive and a negative thing so it's really just how it's like

any technology it's how it's applied or how the thinking behind it is is applied and we've actually seen that I mean I've got 50 different graphs that show the progress that's being made despite the fact that that we use it for negative things uh I mean look at Wars today uh we're very upset about wars that kill thousands of people and that's very very negative and nobody would uh hold say that's a good thing but compare that to uh the kinds of wars that my parents went through in the 1940s uh we had 100 million

people die in Europe and in Asia today we have thousands so that's that's that's progress even if it's negative if you were to meet Advanced AI from 50 years in the future what single qu or what would be the first question that you would ask it to understand human Humanity's future trajectory well you're saying you're saying 50 years from now so and you're you want to say like a 100 years from now whatever you think 50 years is pretty good because I'm projecting uh singularity in 20s something years years right so this is past that

uh we'll have dealt with diseases like cancer and heart disease and other things uh that will really be in the past will have be able to provide food and other types of living so we'll have everything that we care about I mean most of human history people have fought over food and uh lots of WS have been created in order to get food or other types of resources uh we fought over that and we'll actually have that for everybody so my question would be what is going to give us purpose and meaning uh if Food

and Health and so on is very easy to get by um how will we get purpose and meaning uh for for our lives and even I mean I would say creativity but even that AI can help us with because you can actually list for example you trying to find his disease and you and you figure it's probably one of these billion possibilities you can actually try all billi of them and see which one's better um so what's what's going to give us meaning uh at that point well that is definitely something to strive for um

I want to we're almost out of time so I want to end on a a question for that I hope would be of interest to especially our more recent alumni uh from the competitions who are in the audience today um so I guess my question is what advice I mean you had an interesting family background that led you to do the work that you do to study what you did generate the interest that you have but what advice do you have for young people in general for how to approach the future well that's a good

question uh let me say when I actually was one of the 40 people was that that time the Wesley House science Talent search um I think back to that period there was actually 60 years ago approximately uh but it seems like it was the beginning of my current Voyage it doesn't seem that long ago and I can remember it if I think back one more year then I was a child and that seems like another part of my life that I very hard to but if I actually think about going to Washington meeting President Johnson

uh that seems like the beginning of this life uh it interesting he became president because Kennedy was shot he actually won the election this was January 1965 so he just became president uh that month um and he was very optimistic and he actually gave us a speech about how he hoped we would never see war war was terrible thing to to be go through and he would hope that we would never see it and Vietnam hadn't started yet it was actually late at that year that he then sent half a million people to Vietnam I

became part of the anti-war movement but at that time he was popular and uh there was no war uh that was in the news at that time it wasn't brought down with reality I mean I had all this things that I gotten from broken radios and broken bicycles and and actually remember it was about six or seven talking to these very old girls I think they were about 10 and telling them uh if if you look at this I can actually put these together I can solve any problem could live forever and so on I

had these ideas back then didn't know how to do it we're actually working on that now 60 years later um and I don't actually have my collection of objects anymore but we're doing the same thing I imagined uh when I was young so that that's my advice think about things that you would like to create and don't worry about whether or not you can do it or not think about the effect it would have on people and then go back and figure out how we can actually make it happen that's great advice R any final

thoughts to share with the audience um before we wrap up today's conversation well um I asked earlier when the science Town search began I think he said 2042 1942 yeah uh I was born 1948 so it's a little bit older than I am and I think it's actually well placed because it's actually recognizing people that are trying to advance science at the at the very beginning uh and I think you should not worry so much about what's feasible but try to accomplish things that are uh will make life better for everybody whether or not we

can actually do it or not I wouldn't put that much effort on on what can't be done but trying to think about what can be done it's a great piece of advice for all of us R thank you so much for sharing that my pleasure as much as I hate to do this we are nearing the top of our time together uh so I just want to thank Ray kurtwell once again uh for joining us and for sharing your thoughts on a wide array of topics my pleasure um for everyone in our audience again raay

latest book The Singularity is near right here is available currently uh it goes much deeper into many of ideas that we touched upon here today um I want to thank all of you again for joining us um in just a moment we'll be putting up a QR codee if you'd like to discover more ways that you can get further involved with the society for science please scan it and that will share a wealth of opportunities with you um I'd also like to encourage if you aren't already a reader of science news please visit scien news.org

um our mission is to connect people uh of all ages all around the world to the power and Prospect of Science and introduce them to the diverse individ ual who are in science uh including people like Ray who I was in conversation with today um and with that I'd like to thank you all and uh hope you enjoy the rest of your day today [Music]