It is a tribute to the brilliance and humility of Roger Berkowitz
that in planning for his conference, that  it opens with a genuine star.
Ray Kurzweil is without question one of the
leading inventors or our time.
He was a developer of the first CCD flatbed  scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition
the first printed speech-to-speech reading machine for the blind
the first text-speech synthesiser,
and for those of us who are in the music world, the fist music synthesiser
capable of recreating both piano sounds and orchestral instruments.
And also the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition apparatus.
He is a recipient of the most prestigious prize in innovation - the Lemelson prize from MIT
and in 1999 received the National Medal of Technology, bestowed on him by President Clinton
And in 2002, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the Patent Office.
He had been called by the popular press the rightful heir to Thomas Edison -
I don't think Thomas Edison was nearly as smart,
and certainly as scientifically profound.
Whether Thomas Edison may have been a better marketer... (laughter)
And of course he is legendary in the field of popular culture
and revolutionary in the state of America.
When we think, or are told, that America is on the decline
and about the rise of other powers, you know just mention Ray Kurzweil and the story gets reversed.
He has received over twenty honorary degrees, and he has been honoured by Presidents of all parties.
He has written six books
four of which have been national bestsellers.
'The Age of Spiritual Machines' has been translated into nine languages,
and was for a long time the number one book on Amazon Prime.
His lastest book - that is most related to what you will hear him talk about today -
'The Singularity is Near'
was also a New York Times bestseller
and has been the number one book in Science and Philosophy on Amazon.
So without further ado, let me welcome Ray Kurzweil.
Thank you Roger, I enjoyed your comments very much Roger.
And I have been looking forward to this dialogue this morning
I enjoy talking on college campuses, because college campuses are devoted to what
Hannah Arendt was all about -
which was critical thinking, and there isn't enough critical thinking in the world
today, then certainly would Hannah Arendt have thought of having this.
Her primary mission, and the mission
of the Centre here
Having just looked at all the dialogue going on around the time of the Election
And I won't mention the issues, because I don't want to get sidetracked
into contemporary politics
but it always strikes me how little
people actually think about what they're saying
and where they are getting their views from
Very often you see that in Elections
of what people think
That's not just true in politics, but that's true in science
I've been involved in a stem-cell project, that's a whole stem-cell deal
with Kevin Weil and Dr Dee
about the way we identify we identify stem-cells with certain antigens on the surface
I've always felt that the evidence for that didn't make any sense
kept saying that
without actually thinking about whether there was any evidence for it
now after maybe a thousands
'Nature' did finally publish a paper saying
"Oh, that was wrong"
those those antigens had nothing to do with stem-cells
Anyway, there's one particular issue
that I continually remark at
how little people actually think about their ideas.
And how people can harbour inconsistent ideas also
I'll talk a little bit about the brain
We're actually learning a fair amount about it
I think one of the main benefits of the project to reverse engineer the brain
is to really understand how people think
and why they are capable of holding completely inconsistent thoughts
and I'll talk more about that.
Hannah Arendt is one of my favourite thinkers
My parents were Jewish, they fled Hitler,
they wanted a more universal religious upbringing
that actually focused on critical-thinking
So I was raised in Italian, the philosophy was mainly  passed to the truth
and let's look at all the books, cultural and religious traditions and see what we could learn from them.
so we would spend six months on Judaism, six months on Buddhism, and so on
and we belonged to this group called 'Liberal Religious Youth'
which is a national organisation - 'LRY'.
It has now changed its name to 'Young Religious Unitarian Universalism'
'Y-R-U-UX-' (laughter)
So I remember when I was 15, and we were talking about Hannah Arendt's work on the Eichmann Trial
and I remember being quite moved and stunned by her phrase
'banality of evil'
which I think is one of the greatest phrases of the 20th cenutry
It says a lot in just three words
one of which is not substantive
and it's linking evil with banality
which is quite startling
because you might think a lot of things about evil
but you wouldnt think it was banal
And, I was thinking about Hannah Arendt and the Holocaust
and I had just flown in from Vienna
where I went for the first time - which is where my parents grew up
They fled in 1938, and abandonned
the school they'd run for seventy-years.
And I saw the plaza where people came into Austria
where Hitler gave his now infamous speeh
in March of 1938
and you wouldn't think of the Nazi program programme and phenomena
and that arch of history as banal
but this really was a startling insight on two different levels
One level was that some people, and perhaps  most people, it comes from a lack of critical thinking
I mean that was her point about Eihman
that he carried out this progamme
of... he was in charge of the Holocaust
A really supreme example of evil
did it with the efficiency and thoughtfulness of someone
running the Department of Motor V\ |ehcles
really all of his thought was about how to carry out things efficiently and to keep records
\ \ '' and carry out his misison
To the extent that he thought about whether or not this made sense, whether this was a good idea to do this,
|he relied on thoughts and opinions and views and analysis
that just had been passed down to him, that was part of the popular culture,
that he belonged to.
And even though we see those views as extreme now, he never thought about them
And they weren't even that consistent with other views that Eichmann had
The human brain is quite capable of holding very inconsistent thoughts
We don't have a central repository where ideas comes in
and are filtered and catalogued
You know, it's this idea consistent with my overall philosophy and other ideas I have?
People have lots of ideas and they are not necessarily consistent
unless we do critical thinking, and that really is what universities are also about
and the deeper meaning of the 'banality of evil'
is that the lack of critical thinking can lead to all kinds of porbelms
evil is perhaps the most extreme example
but there are many examples
just the wrong political views, the wrong judgements, the wrong decisions
that someone makes in their life
the wrong decisions that a society makes
through just accepting some orthodoxy
of thought
You see that in every circle of industry
academe, governments
without this critical activity, which is critical thinking
and then the thoughts that Roger shared with us of HannaH Arendt
She was doing some critical thinking about the changes that we see
in technology
She had a sense that it was getting faster and faster
This alarmed her to some extent, but she also appreciated the role that
of science.
And I think these are... we do need to critical thinking about technology
I am known as an optimist,
but, in fact I've written extensively
about the downsides of technology - Chapter 8 of 'The Singularity is Near'
is called 'The Deeply Intertwined Promise vs Peril'
of  GNR, which is the principle about technological revolutions, and that leads onto technological revolutions and robotics,
technology has been a double-edged sword ever since we've had technology
ever since we've had stone tools, and fire, and the wheel
have been use creatively and to liberate humanity
and also to be destructive.
I was reminded of that in Vienna
my first trip there, since my family fled in 1938
and the tremendous amount of destruction that saw the world
and you can argue it's where did the destruction ideas of the Nazi programme came from
but certainly technology made the scale of destruction feasible e
there were a hundred and eighty million people who died in the warsm
of the 20th century
and, but in my view, if you ask 'What is humanity?'
thinking about the title of this series, 'Human Being in an Inhuman Age'
what does it mean to be... I mean let's do some critical thinking of the first two words
What does it mean to be a 'human being'?
Scientists have been very fond of trying to throw humanity off the perch
of specialness
'No, the universe does not go around the Earth'
the Earth is is just a third planet around a lump of star
in a mediocre galaxy
No, we are not descended from the Gods
we are descended from monkeys, and before that descended from worms
and we are just another species, and there is nothing special about human beings
in my view there is something special
Yes. we descended from other spceis
but we reached a certain threshold in that evolutionary path
where we had two key thresholds achieved.
One is that we neocrotex
that can do critical thinking
and that can do symbolic and higher-optical thinking
I can take a whole bunch of ideas, and I can give that a name
and give it a symbol, a word,
and I can use that symbol with some other ideas and create another idea
and give that a name, a symbol
and I can use that symbol with some other ideas.
We build up this hierarchy of ideas, called knowledge
and we have a brain region that can do that kind of symbolic hierarchical thinking,
it's the Neocortex.
Only Mammals have one and
the mouse's is the size of the postage stamp
and in the human it's about the size of a table napkin
that was a critical threshold, having a neocortex
the size of a table-napkin, allows us to do
critical thinking
we can actually think about changing the world
and it's concesequnces and implications
we can handle about ten different levels of abstraction
and only the Neocortex does that.
Primates are close,
you know there are a lot of studies that show that
primates can do some kind of language
but really to handle the complexity of human language
and of technology, which is inherently our own,
we need the size and scope and depth of
the human Neocortex.
We also have this opposable appendage
you might think the other primates have that too, because the hands of certain
apes and so on, look similar,  or chimp, to a human hand
But actually if you watch a chimp
handel a steak, they are very clumsy
they really don't have the binaural coordination
that would allow them to really create toold
Yes, there are some primates that can kind of take a steak and fashion it a little bit
and make neat holes in the ground with it
but they really can't create tools that can create other tools, that can create other tools
and create a whole other evolutionary process.
We were able to imagine other possibilities,
'oh I could take that branch down, and I could take off the leaves
and I could fashion it, and I could chop off the end, and i could create a tool'.
And then we had opposable appendage that actually allowed us to change the world.
