<small>Renowned theoretical physicist and string field theory co-founder, Professor Michio Kaku, predicts the convergence of quantum computing, advanced AI and other exponential technologies will change life as we know it—sooner and in more amazing ways than you may think.
Overnight, millions of people gained immediate and direct access to spectacularly powerful AI tools that had previously been the domain of a select, trained few—with all the good, bad and unknowns that came along with them. The event sparked thrill, terror and broader questions about the potential and proximity of other exponential technologies. The implications of quantum computing, once believed by many to be a distant concern, now felt unsettlingly close.
There are few people alive as qualified to explain the significance of this inflection point, and what lies beyond, than Professor Michio Kaku. Co-founder of string field theory (a subset of string theory), renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, and one of Science magazine’s “10 Most Influential Scientists on the Planet,” Professor Kaku is also the bestselling author of six books, including his latest, Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.
At a recent Maven Live event in New York City, this legendary science luminary sat down with The Maven Reports Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Bumba and a packed audience of business and IT leaders—many of them lifelong followers of his work—to share his perspectives, observations and predictions on some
of the most urgent technological and philosophical questions of our time. In a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from halting the aging process and solving the climate crisis to making alien contact and reading the mind of God, Professor Kaku awed, inspired, alarmed—then reassured—and definitely raised a few eyebrows.1
The following article contains brief excerpts that offer a glimpse of this vitally relevant discussion that attendees called “amazing,” “memorable” and “mind-opening.” The full interview is an experience you don’t want to miss—and you don’t have to! Watch it here.
1“Michio Kaku: Silicon Valley Will Become a Rust Belt in Quantum’s Wake,” Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, informationweek.com, May 2023.
“Let’s ask a computer the following two questions: first, ‘Have you ever been kissed?’ and second, ‘What did you have for dinner last night?’ The most advanced chatbot would go berserk.
It can’t answer these two simple questions because the chatbot, no matter how sophisticated it is, mines the entire internet like a tape recorder. It simply regurgitates what was already written by somebody else and packages it and passes it off as its own... the Turing test has not yet been surpassed by a sophisticated tape recorder.”
“A quantum computer, in principle, has enough power, once it’s fully operational, to break any known digital code. It would take hundreds of years for a digital computer to do that. A quantum computer could just do it like that, which means that the crown jewels of any nation, any security agency, the secrets, the nuclear codes, everything is susceptible to being cracked... We have to make sure there are safeguards so the technology doesn’t go crazy...”
“Every time we think we have a machine that can do a lot of tasks the brain does, we find more things the brain does that the computer cannot... Perhaps we’ll get robots that are comparable to human intelligence in all aspects within this century, but it may take a few centuries before we make contact with intelligent life in the universe.”
“Your bathroom will be your basic laboratory. Every time you use a toilet, it’ll be flushed and analyzed by a quantum computer, and your quantum computer will say, ‘You have cancer; you’ve got ten years to do something about it...’ You will get a medical checkup three times a day without even thinking about it.”
“We have leads now, solid leads. It’s not speculation like it was. We now know where aging takes place in a cell.3 If we can then reverse the aging process in the mitochondria, we can live forever. I’m not saying we can do that yet. We can’t. Otherwise, there’d be advertisements everywhere for immortality. But we’re hot on the trail...”
