In this Peter Diamandis podcast, Ray Kurzweil says he gets 5-10 interview requests every day, almost all of which he turns down. He took this one, and talked to a panel of tech bros for over an hour, which is pretty cool. I forget Ray sometimes – amid all the doom and gloom, he is a relentlessly and consistently positive voice over decades. And he has credibility as a sort of renaissance man and public purveyor of forecasts which have turned out to be pretty accurate. Here are a few things I remember him saying in the podcast (no transcript – come on, that is something AI can do easily right?)

• robots that can do my dishes within two years!!! This may be the most exciting prediction ever.
• He sticks to his prediction, made in 1999, that artificial general intelligence will be achieved in 2029. He acknowledges that there is a lot of debate about the definition of AGI and therefore there will be a lot of debate over whether it has arrived. But over time he has refined his own definition of it to be more precise and in fact, more stringent. First, he says his definition is that AGI will be able to match the abilities of the top human expert in every field. Second, he says that while a few people believe we have achieved AGI already (it’s January 2026 as I type), by 2029 there will be near consensus that it has arrived.
• He predicts that 2032 will be the year humans achieve “longevity escape velocity”. In other words, life expectancy will increase by more than one year for each year we live. So in his view, we all just need to “hold on a few more years” and maybe death and aging will be become optional.
• He predicts that sometime in the 2030s (not so precise on this one), we (most countries?) will have some form of universal basic income.
• The arrival of AGI is not his definition of the singularity. He has refined his definition of the singularity to be that artificial intelligence is 1000 times smarter than (biological) human intelligence. He forecasts this for 2045. Again, he is relentlessly positive and sees humans tapping into this rather than being left behind.

I definitely think Kurzweil has credibility, and I have never felt that he has any political agenda. I read The Singularity is Near around 2012 or so, and I think it is a mind-blowing book absolutely everyone should read. (I haven’t read the sequel/update The Singularity is Nearer yet, so I don’t know if I would recommend that as a replacement or addition to the original.) Everyone should know this point of view is out there, backed by evidence and math, and give it some consideration. That said, if I were really 100% confident that Ray’s predictions are right, I would not go back to work on Monday morning. I would start drawing down my savings and enjoying life from now on, knowing that the age of scarcity will be over before my savings are gone. I could also abuse my body up to just short of the point of death, knowing that any damage I cause will be easily cured. I am way too risk averse to do any of these things, of course, nor do I recommend them to the reader. But maybe when the doom and gloom seems particularly thick around us these days, we can take some comfort in knowing that at least the possibility of a better future exists.