The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

In making sense of our identity, it is awe-inspiring to consider the extraordinary chain of unlikely events that enabled each one of us to come into being. Not only did your parents have to meet and make a baby, but the exact sperm had to meet the exact egg to result in you. It’s hard to estimate the likelihood of your mother and father having met and deciding to have a baby in the first place, but just in terms of the sperm and the egg, the probability that you would be created was one in two million trillion. As very rough approximations, the average man produces as many as two trillion sperm in his lifetime, and the average woman starts with about one million eggs.[51] Thus, to the extent that your identity hinges on the exact sperm and egg that made you, the odds of this happening were about one in two quintillion. While all these sex cells aren’t genetically unique, numerous factors like age can affect epigenetics, so if your father produced two chromosomally identical sperm at age twenty-five and age forty-five, they wouldn’t give precisely the same contribution to the formation of a baby.[52] Thus, as an approximation we must regard each sperm and egg as effectively unique. In addition to that, the comparable event had to take place for both sets of grandparents, and for all four sets of great-grandparents, and eight sets of great-great-grandparents, and so on…well, not quite ad infinitum—just to the beginning of life on earth nearly four billion years ago.[53] A go...

Some might call this astonishingly bad luck.