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.
