The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

It’s unsurprising that humans who evolved for subsistence-level life in hunter-gatherer bands didn’t evolve a better instinct for thinking about gradual positive change. For most of human history, improvements in quality of life were so small and fragile that they would hardly be noticeable even over a full lifetime. In fact, this Stone Age state of affairs lasted all the way through the Middle Ages. In England, for example, estimated GDP per capita (in 2023 British pounds) in the year 1400 was £1,605.[22] If someone born that year lived to eighty, GDP per capita at the time of their death was exactly the same.[23] For someone born in 1500, GDP per capita at their birth had dipped to £1,586, and eighty years later it had rebounded to only £1,604.[24] Compare that with a person born in 1900, whose eighty-year life span saw a jump from £6,734 to £20,979.[25] So it’s not only that our biological evolution has not attuned us to gradual progress, but our cultural evolution hasn’t, either. There’s nothing in Plato or Shakespeare reminding us to heed gradual material progress in society, because it wasn’t noticeable back when they lived.