Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity
Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil - to my knowledge - is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”
According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.
What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:
an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.
Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.
Ray Kurzweil and the Law of Accelerating Returns
Take a look at this chart. The horizontal axis measures time elapsed, and the vertical axis measures the elapsed time between events. Both are displayed logarithmically. When events - what Kurzweil called “paradigm shifts” - are plotted on this chart, one can spot a negatively sloped, linear trend among them. In essence this graph shows that human inventions, discoveries, and even evolution have proceeded at an ever-quickening pace.
So where does that line lead?
According to Kurzweil’s Singularity theory, the pace of human invention is on such a trajectory that within this century, computers will be more powerful that the human mind, quantitatively speaking. He further argues that within the same period we will have been able to reverse engineer - or, hack - the human brain sufficiently enough to be able to copy and paste it into a machine. With this evidence, Kurzweil claims that humans will be able to exit their finite bodies and achieve immortality.
To Kurzweil, this is not some theory that he muses about. He believes in it religiously. From a recent WIRED article:
[Kurzweil] takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.
When you piece together Kurzweil’s evidence, it’s not hard to imagine the possibility that the Singularity - or something similar to it - will occur. There are so many questions though. Would it be ethical to clone the human mind and put it into a computer? Do we really want to be immortal? Can the brain live outside the body? At what point are we no longer human?
What do you believe? Do you think the Singularity is possible? Is it inevitable? Is it wrong? Is it our destiny?
Image of Kurzweil used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user jdlasica. Graphs courtesy of Singularity.com.
The trouble with Kurzweil’s first graph is that he needs some way to determine which turning points in technological development are significant enough to include. The development of language, art, cities, and computers are all obvious choices. Even so, he may be giving us a false picture of technological change by omitting significant events in the past. Things would look different if, for instance, he had decided a slew of Renaissance accomplishments should be added between his points for “city states” and “printing.” The more events we add during any given period the shorter the amount of time elapsed between significant events will be, and that’s why picking the “correct” historical turning points is so crucial to his argument. The trouble is that there is no set of points that is obviously correct.
I think that Kurzweil is taking some plausible and interesting observations and then using numbers and graphs to lend them a false credibility.
Good point, Lincoln. Kurzweil actually responds to that criticism with this graph, using lists of “paradigm shift” events and their dates from fifteen other sources. I didn’t use it in the post because it is important to look at the chart beneath the graph at that link. The references include Carl Sagan, the American Museum of Natural History, and Encyclopedia Britannica. While obviously there is no authoritative source on paradigm-changing events, it is interesting that these all seem to correlate in a similar way…
One of the issues other scientific thinkers have with Kurzweil’s projections is that computing already exceeds the capacity of the human mind, quantitatively speaking. Even the massive, hundreds-of-cubic-feet mainframe computers out-computed the human brain exponentially. I think Kurzweil himself admits, though, that the human brain cannot be measured in terms of mere computing capacity. I like his writings and the concept of the Singularity as an abstract (though still quite grounded) explanation of the ride of computing power; the devil here is in the details, when one tries to apply it too strictly.
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!