The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil: dislike it (2/5)

Too optimistic, too wacky, too wrong.

The full title of this book is “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” and like its title, the book is verbose and very, very speculative. I know, I know. What should I expect from futurist Ray Kurzweil other than futuristic foo from the future? How about a book with a coherent structure? How about a book that doesn’t repeat its fundamental premises multiple times in each chapter? Maybe a book that leaves out a few unsupported theoretical assumptions stated as foregone conclusions? Singularity has a few fascinating passages, some really interesting ideas, and a collection of delightfully eclectic quotes. Sadly, all the good stuff is surrounded by a repetitious screed with nearly as much substance in the footnotes as in the text.

Kurzweil starts off on the wrong foot with some wrong predictions for technological advances to appear “by the end of the decade.” Given that the book was published in 2005, and as I write this it is 2011, we should be able to fact-check some of these predictions. “We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with supercomputers…” Nope. “Computers… will become essentially invisible: woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture and environment…” Nuh uh. Yes, lots of smart devices exist now, but wearable computing turned into the smartphone, and pervasive computing isn’t all that pervasive. There’s also a claim that the Web will become the “worldwide mesh… once all of its linked devices become communicating web servers….” The only real approximation of this is botnets, created with malware and harnessed by malcontents. While a few impressive networked computing projects currently exist, most folks still don’t give up their CPU’s background cycles to anything productive.

After a rocky start predicting the near future, how are we expected to follow along as Kurzweil turns us into mind linked cyborgs with nanobot blood who can merge and reform our identities at will? One example: virtual reality. Over and over again we are reminded that we will soon be using fully immersive virtual reality. “By early in the 2nd decade of this century” we will have fully immersive 3D environments beamed into our eyeballs, and shortly thereafter we will be plugged in using devices that directly stimulate our sense centers in the brain. But who is going to build these environments? Are we doomed to socialize using virtual meeting places as bizarre as Second Life, furries and ambulatory vegetation and penises everywhere you look, only with more fidelity than we can currently imagine and plugged in to our brains? Who wants that?

There’s a lot more way-out-there stuff I could bring up from the book, but that’s really not its worst failing. The thing that bothered me most about it was the repetition. It’s almost as though Kurzweil at some point abandoned a reasoned thesis for truth by repetition. He goes on and on again and again about how we will know the brain’s inmost secrets, and how nanobots will solve ecological problems, and how superintelligent sentient machines will treat us wetware humans with respect and care. It’s all very Pollyanna, and in some cases more than a little disturbing. Kurzweil’s vision of the ultimate goal of humanity is a nanobot swarm with superintelligent AI flying at near the speed of light and colonizing wherever it lands without regard for existing life of any kind. If that’s my future, I want out.