The Singularity is Near

by Ray Kurzweil

If all the AI systems in the world suddenly stopped functioning, our economic infrastructure would grind to a halt. Your bank would cease doing business. Most transportation would be crippled. Most communications would fail. This was not the case a decade ago. Of course, our AI systems are not smart enough—yet—to organize such a conspiracy.

We’re going to merge with our technology. We’re already starting to do that in 2004, even if most of the machines are not yet inside our bodies and brains. Our machines nonetheless extend the reach of our intelligence. Extending our reach has always been the nature of being human.

It was the fate of bacteria to evolve into a technology-creating species. And it’s our destiny now to evolve into the vast intelligence of the Singularity.

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. —JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. —RICHARD FEYNMAN

The only things you can be sure of, so the saying goes, are death and taxes—but don’t be too sure about death. —JOSEPH STROUT, NEUROSCIENTIST

I have dreamed of taking these hundreds of thousands of records and scanning them into a massive personal database, which would allow me to utilize powerful contemporary search-and-retrieve methods on them. I even have a name for this venture—DAISI (Document and Image Storage Invention)—and have been accumulating ideas for it for many years.

Of course my own archival needs are only a microcosm of the exponentially expanding knowledge base that human civilization is accumulating. It is this shared specieswide knowledge base that distinguishes us from other animals. Other animals communicate, but they don’t accumulate an evolving and growing base of knowledge to pass down to the next generation.

Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it.

Already our knowledge to control disease and aging is advanced to the point that your attitude toward your own longevity is now the most important influence on your long-range health.

Technology typically starts out with unaffordable products that don’t work very well, followed by expensive versions that work a bit better, and then by inexpensive products that work reasonably well. Finally the technology becomes highly effective, ubiquitous, and almost free.

The portion of a manufactured product’s cost attributable to the information processes used in its creation varies from one category of product to another but is increasing across the board, rapidly approaching 100 percent. By the late 2020s the value of virtually all products—clothes, food, energy, and of course electronics—will be almost entirely in their information. As is the case today, proprietary and open-source versions of every type of product and service will coexist.

Each industry will need to continually reinvent its business models, which will require as much creativity as the creation of the IP itself.

The ability to do nearly anything with anyone from anywhere in any virtual-reality environment will make obsolete the centralized technologies of office buildings and cities.

By the 2020s, full-immersion virtual reality will be a vast playground of compelling environments and experiences. Initially VR will have certain benefits in terms of enabling communications with others in engaging ways over long distances and featuring a great variety of environments from which to choose. Although the environments will not be completely convincing at first, by the late 2020s they will be indistinguishable from real reality and will involve all of the senses, as well as neurological correlations of our emotions. As we enter the 2030s there won’t be clear distinctions between human and machine, between real and virtual reality, or between work and play.

John Smart has suggested in what he calls the “transcension” scenario that once civilizations saturate their local region of space with their intelligence, they create a new universe (one that will allow continued exponential growth of complexity and intelligence) and essentially leave this universe.91 Smart suggests that this option may be so attractive that it is the consistent and inevitable outcome of an ETI’s having reached an advanced stage of its development, and it thereby explains the Fermi Paradox.

Leonard Susskind, the discoverer of string theory, and Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist and expert on quantum gravity, have suggested that universes give rise to other universes in a natural, evolutionary process that gradually refines the natural constants. In other words it is not by accident that the rules and constants of our universe are ideal for evolving intelligent life but rather that they themselves evolved to be that way. In Smolin’s theory the mechanism that gives rise to new universes is the creation of black holes, so those universes best able to produce black holes are the ones that are most likely to reproduce. According to Smolin a universe best able to create increasing complexity—that is, biological life—is also most likely to create new universe-generating black holes. As he explains, “Reproduction through black holes leads to a multiverse in which the conditions for life are common—essentially because some of the conditions life requires, such as plentiful carbon, also boost the formation of stars massive enough to become black holes.”

This large difference in timespans—hundreds of years versus billions of years (to saturate the universe with our intelligence)—demonstrates why the issue of circumventing the speed of light will become so important. It will become a primary preoccupation of the vast intelligence of our civilization in the twenty-second century. That is why I believe that if wormholes or other circumventing means are feasible, we will be highly motivated to find and exploit them.

The Singularity is the sweetest music, the deepest art, the most beautiful mathematics. . ..

In a myriad of statements and comments people typically evidence the common wisdom that human life is short, that our physical and intellectual reach is limited, and that nothing fundamental will change in our lifetimes. I expect this narrow view to change as the implications of accelerating change become increasingly apparent, but having more people with whom to share my outlook is a major reason that I wrote this book.

Taking supplements and medications is not a last resort to be reserved only for when something goes wrong. There is already something wrong. Our bodies are governed by obsolete genetic programs that evolved in a bygone era, so we need to overcome our genetic heritage. We already have the knowledge to begin to accomplish this, something I am committed to doing.

My body is temporary. Its particles turn over almost completely every month. Only the pattern of my body and brain have continuity.

We should strive to improve these patterns by optimizing the health of our bodies and extending the reach of our minds. Ultimately, we will be able to vastly expand our m...

Information is not knowledge. The world is awash in information; it is the role of intelligence to find and act on the salient patterns. For example, we have hundreds of megabits of information flowing through our senses every second, the bulk of which is intelligently discarded. It is only the key recognitions and insights (all forms of knowledge) that we retain. Thus intelligence selectively destroys information to create knowledge.

In my view the purpose of life—and of our lives—is to create and appreciate ever-greater knowledge, to move toward greater “order.”

I will acknowledge that many of you do seem conscious to me, but I should not be too quick to accept this impression. Perhaps I am really living in a simulation, and you are all part of it. Or, perhaps it’s only my memories of you that exist, and these actual experiences never took place. Or maybe I am only now experiencing the sensation of recalling apparent memories, but neither the experience nor the memories really exist. Well, you see the problem.

Despite these dilemmas my personal philosophy remains based on patternism—I am principally a pattern that persists in time. I am an evolving pattern, and I can influence the course of the evolution of my pattern. Knowledge is a pattern, as distinguished from mere information, and losing knowledge is a profound loss. Thus, losing a person is the ultimate loss.

The universe is not conscious—yet. But it will be. Strictly speaking, we should say that very little of it is conscious today. But that will change and soon.

Interesting. You know, that’s essentially the opposite of the view that there was a conscious creator who got everything started and then kind of bowed out. You’re basically saying that a conscious universe will “bow in” during Epoch Six.

The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they . . . have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position. —PATRICK MOORE

The Web is an extraordinary research tool. In my own experience, research that used to require a half day at the library can now be accomplished typically in a couple of minutes or less. This has enormous and obvious benefits for advancing beneficial technologies, but it can also empower those whose values are inimical to the mainstream of society.

Broad relinquishment would require a totalitarian system to implement, and a totalitarian brave new world is unlikely because of the democratizing impact of increasingly powerful decentralized electronic and photonic communication. The advent of worldwide, decentralized communication epitomized by the Internet and cell phones has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information.

Only technology, with its ability to provide orders of magnitude of improvement in capability and affordability, has the scale to confront problems such as poverty, disease, pollution, and the other overriding concerns of society today.

Should we tell the millions of people afflicted with cancer and other devastating conditions that we are canceling the development of all bioengineered treatments because there is a risk that these same technologies may someday be used for malevolent purposes? Having posed this rhetorical question, I realize that there is a movement to do exactly that, but most people would agree that such broad-based relinquishment is not the answer.

Although software pathogens remain a concern, the danger exists today mostly at a nuisance level. Keep in mind that our success in combating them has taken place in an industry in which there is no regulation and minimal certification for practitioners. The largely unregulated computer industry is also enormously productive. One could argue that it has contributed more to our technological and economic progress than any other enterprise in human history.