Ray Kurzweil is a thinker for the daring of mind and the courageous of heart. In his book “The Singularity Is Near” Kurzweil gives a perspective of the world and a future that can either inspire and encourage one’s life or destroy one’s worldview and prompt shivers of revulsion. What is either so terrifying or reassuring about his vision is that he is not easily dealt with or written off. Kurzweil writes not just to his cadre of like thinkers, but comes equipt to deal with the hard skeptic.
Kurzweil has the history and experience to back up his vision too. He’s founded ten companies whose specializations include artificial intelligence, speech recognition software, and educational programming. He’s one of the five members of the Army Science Advisory Group which acts to advise the US Army on issues of science research, and has decades worth of awards and commendations for his work as an inventor and futurist.
Has his predictions always been spot on? Arguably no. Have they been close or at least reflect the correct tendencies? Yes. (With perhaps his prediction of an American economy booming through to 2019–) To read Singularity is to take a trip with an earnest and enthusiatic prophet surely, but not one who’s wearing the Nikes and readying for Hale-Bopp. So concerned with credibility is he, that almost the first quarter of the book founds his basic premises and throughout the book he reiterates his points (all well cited) and devotes a weighty chunk at the end to deal with skeptics and detractors.
So what is all this about?
In a word, it is about the cataclysm of change which is due to the planet in just a few short decades. It is a statement of what the human species is and is becoming.
What is the Singularity?
Well, that depends on who you ask. But, in Kurzweil’s case how he explains it is something like this. Imagine a graph depicting developments in technology–their refinements and their ability to bear more and more of the human work load both physical and cognitive. Just as fire cooking offloaded some of our stomachs’ work in digestion, language (especially written) opened the boundaries of our brains to a giant degree. Because of technological improvements being recursively self improving and building upon the last generation, technological ability grows exponentially. The leap from your Nintendo to Super Nintendo reflected one big jump, but that step was not incremental–nor has video gaming sophistication since.
This upswelling wave of technological capacity (think processors, chips, speed, bandwidth) says Kurzweil is due for an explosion of growth of a size we are yet not able to imagine. This explosion is the Singularity. Or Singularities. Just like the Protestant Reformation was really a series of reformations, so too can we figure that there may be a number of events whose impact will forever radically change the course of the human species. This I imagined would be like pouring different colored dyes into a sink where separate colors represented biotech, artificial intelligence, information technologies, energy technologies, etc. As the sink plug was pulled, these colors would converge and gather speed on each other as they drained out. This is how we can expect our future developments to occur also. All of these technologies will inform each other and cross pollenate the best ideas and applications so that in a number of areas of life, we will see transformational change. Such events could include development of solar capture panels that harness enough of the Sun’s light that all people on Earth would have abundant carbon neutral energy, or a refined cloning technique that allows an individual to replenish their body to stave off death indefinitely. These events and more will be occurring says Kurzweil and will be aided by perhaps the most important event to come: the invention of machines that can out perform the human brain.
Aren’t predictions of the future foolhardy?
Yes, there have been a lot of mistakes made in predictions. Just ask anybody in the horseracing or religion business. However, there are some predictions that are made on more surefooting than others given more data about past events and current directions. We can look through any back issue of Popular Mechanics and see the flying cars and personal jetpacks that have yet to fill our grocery store aisles. But to accept Kurzweil’s basic thesis, one needs only to understand the industries and sciences he is charting (primarily Genetics, Nanotechnologies, Robotics, Strong and Wide Artificial Intelligence).
I do believe that the type of discussion that Kurzweil invites is absolutely necessary. So much so, that if his predictions are off by many decades, we still benefit from having careful and intentional dialogues about the course we are setting with our technologies. We need to concern ourselves with what makes a human a human and what beings we are ethically obligated to respecting and feeling compassion with as sentient beings. We need to consider what an immortal existence could mean to humanity. We need to ask the questions of the “not yet” because by exploring questions of possibility, we can make our current systems of ethics more robust and less apt to shock and kneejerk reactions.
When Kurzweil says the Singularity is near, how ‘near’ are we talking?
Here’s some of the predicted dates of events Kurzweil gives in “The Singularity is Near” but I would wish that like me, you would not take the dates as rigid lines in the sand. We can expect them sooner or later I believe, and again: even if they are much later, we need to begin the conversation about their effects, challenges, and opportunities now so that our theologies, values, practices and habits, can be better prepared for the radical changes.
2020′s: Nanobots throughout the brain will create a highly detailed portait of brain activity.
2020′s: Nanobots will regularly course through our blood, for surveillance and replacing red and white blood cells.
Late 2020′s: nonbiological brains will meet and exceed human brains in all manner including emotional intelligence.
2029: The Turing Test will be passed.
2040: Individual human consciousness will be uploaded into a machine.
2045: A nonbiological intelligence one billion times more powerful than all of humanity.
2050: A thousand-dollar computer will exceed the processing capacity of all humanity.
Isn’t all this techno SciFi stuff a little cold? Where’s the humanity?
Exactly. What is humanity and what do we expect from ourselves? Let’s ask that question of the way we live our lives right now. Many of us seem to accept hunger, poverty, death and illness on grand scales right now. We have made classism, racism, and war policies of our nations. Please show me a current utopia so I can move there and corrupt them a la Kevin Bacon in Footloose. Kurzweil appears quite concerned with human and animal suffering and he details how both can and will be largely solved through technology. Kurzweil appears to know the truth of it: a new iPhone is meaningless without love, compassion, and deep connection in one’s life.
Each one of us needs to come to the hard facts of the course our species is charting. Nothing is written in stone. We see the milestones we are quickly passing by and they point to a future I believe will be much like what Ray Kurzweil is portraying. What is missing largely from his predictions is the cultural, ethical, and religious variables. Each of us is able to day by day decide the values we want to encourage or discourage for our families’ futures. Will greed, graft, and corruption continue to rule our politics? Will our faith communities continue to define themselves by the people they exclude? Will our fears and narrow vision keep us bound to nationalism and colonialism?
I’ve brought before you just a first snapshot of Ray Kurzweil’s understanding of the Singularity and I hope to bring more specific issues and details of his writings to light and consideration in the future.
This post was written after reading:
Ray Kurzweil “The Singularity Is Near” (New York: Penguin. 2005)
Check Out These Helpful Sites To Continue Your Reading:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
