For those looking to understand the ways in which human life might be impacted by developments in AI and nanotechnology, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology provides a thought-provoking vision. While some of its key claims are controversial and uncomfortable to contemplate, it would be a mistake to ignore them. The purpose of this article is to review its claims for readers new to these ideas.
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology – Kurzweil’s “Singularity” Vision
In this book about AI, Kurzweil defends the view that there will come a point in history he calls the “Singularity” in which human beings become indistinguishable from machines.
The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.
He believes that this will be a good thing for humanity, and urges the development of the technologies that he expects will make this possible. This includes a range of technologies which he acknowledges to pose serious risks to humanity, including strong AI and nanotechnology.
According to Kurzweil, the Singularity involves a range of principles, which are summarized below.
Acceleration of Technological Innovation and Paradigm Shifts
One idea that Kurzweil emphasizes early on in The Singularity is Near is that technology accelerates faster than many of us – including experts – predict. This is because the power, price-performance, speed, capacity, and bandwidth of information technologies grows exponentially. This accelerating pace of technological development means that the rate of “paradigm shifts,” which occur when we fundamentally rethink our understanding of life, accelerates as well. While the Singularity may seem like an event in the distant future, Kurzweil argues that it will creep up on us faster than we would expect. In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil predicts that the date for the Singularity will occur in the 2040s:
I set the date for the Singularity – representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability – as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.
Emulation of the Human Brain and the Development of Nonbiological Intelligence
Kurzweil takes a strong interest in human brain scanning as a technology that is laying the foundation for the fundamental shifts he expects to occur in the coming decades. The project he believes is needed is to reverse engineer the human brain so that advanced hardware of the future will be able to emulate human intelligence. He predicts that computers will pass the Turing test by the end of the 2020s, which is the standard of machine intelligence that is indistinguishable from that of biological humans. Kurzweil anticipates that computers will be able to combine the strengths of human and machine intelligence, to be able to perform a broad range of functions, including:
- recognizing patterns based on subtle, invariant properties
- learning new knowledge by applying insights and inferring principles from experience
- creating mental models of reality and conducting ‘what if’ experiments by varying aspects of the models
- remembering billions of facts precisely and recalling them instantly
- performing repetitive skills repeatedly with accuracy and at high speed without tiring
- sharing knowledge at an extremely high speed
- downloading skills from other machines and from humans
- having access via the internet to all the knowledge of human-machine civilization
Human Enhancement
Another area that Kurzweil argues will be crucial in the coming decades is human enhancement. He expects that we will be able to reengineer all the organs and systems in the human body and brain to make them more capable and resilient. He argues that these developments will come about using nanotechnology, which will make possible the manipulation of physical reality at the molecular level. He writes:
Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells). Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).
He sees what many will find to be a far-fetched human enhancement possibilities becoming reality:
- the use of nanobots which interact with biological neurons to extend human experience by creating virtual reality from within the nervous systems
- billions of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain that extend
human intelligence - the machine intelligence in our brains growing exponentially and at least doubling in power each year
Virtual Reality
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology argues that, as human enhancement unfolds, we can expect more of human experience to occur in virtual reality. Virtual reality environments accessed from within the nervous system will, Kurzweil argues, become competitive with real reality in terms of resolution and believability. As our experiences increasingly take place in virtual environments, our interaction with machine intelligence with virtual bodies will also occur in these environments.
Spread of Intelligence
One of the more far-reaching – and arguably “quasi-religious” – aspects of Kurzweil’s program is that he upholds the value of intelligence “spreading” throughout the universe to “saturate” it:
Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current “dumb,” simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics.”
This is a telling passage, as it suggests that there is a kind of enthusiasm that drives Kurzweil’s investigations that goes beyond a scientific interest. It illustrates the ways in which the shape of the technological advancement that he foresees (and that has been occurring since the book was released in 2005) comes down to matters of value, and of the unique personalities of those who are driving these technological changes.
Human Values
We further see the connection between individual values and technological change as we read the more philosophical segments of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil presents (philosophically controversial) views about the value of human life and about death. He regards a person as a “as a profound pattern (a form of knowledge).” He claims that the purpose of life in general, and our lives in particular, is to “create and appreciate ever-greater knowledge, to move toward greater ‘order.'” The order that he has in mind typically takes the form of “increasing complexity,” but can also take the form of a reduction of complexity as a result of a “profound insight.” When it comes to death, Kurzweil claims that the “pattern” that is the person is lost, since we do not yet have the means to “back up this knowledge.” He expects that future technologies will enable the uploading and back up of such knowledge, thereby transforming our understanding of death.
Consciousness
Another area of philosophical controversy that Kurzweil enters is that of consciousness. He asks whether future machines will be capable of conscious experience. He writes:
They—we—will claim to be human and to have the full range of emotional and spiritual experiences that humans claim to have. And these will not be idle claims; they will evidence the sort of rich, complex, and subtle behavior associated with such feelings. But how will these claims and behaviors—compelling as they will be— relate to the subjective experience of nonbiological humans?
Kurzweil argues that there is no objective test to determine conclusively whether consciousness is present. Answering such a question is beyond the objective means of science, he claims, since “the very nature of objectivity is that you cannot measure subjective.” We are limited to being able to measure correlates of consciousness, such as behavior. Even though we will not be able to definitively answer the question of machine consciousness, Kurzweil suggests that the question will remain essential. This is because the legal and moral foundations of society are built on the idea of human beings’ having subjective feelings that need to be respected.
Risks and Relinquishment
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology acknowledges risks of the technologies of the future. For example, nanotechnology carries with it existential risks to humanity, coming from the possibility of hostile actors and self-replicating nanobots that become widely destructive. Kurzweil argues that full relinquishment of the pursuit of these technologies is not desirable. This would be incompatible with his valuing of the Singularity state of affairs he would like to bring about. Rather, he argues for “fine-grained” relinquishment. For example, there is the suggestion that nanotechnologists should agree to “relinquish the development of physical entities that can self-replicate in a natural environment.” However, Kurzweil is hesitant to go even this far, since he argues that to guard against the existential risks there will need to be a “nanotechnology-based planetary immune system” in the natural environment, which would itself need to be self-replicating in order to be able to perform the intended function.
Conclusions
Most of us have been struck by the power of existing artificial intelligence technology. Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a sweeping and forward-thinking look at the way the future might unfold if this technology comes into closer contact with human beings and the line between humans and machines blurs in new and unexpected ways.
