The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

I noticed, of course, many parallels among the world’s religious traditions, but even the inconsistencies were illuminating.

The moral of these tales was simple: the right idea had the power to overcome a seemingly overwhelming challenge.

no matter what quandaries we face—business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time—there is an idea that can enable us to prevail. Furthermore, we can find that idea. And when we find it, we need to implement it.

progenitors

poignant

empirical

impending merger of our biological thinking with the nonbiological intelligence

we are creating.

What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

For example, computers are diagnosing electrocardiograms and medical images, flying and landing airplanes, controlling the tactical decisions of automated weapons, making credit and financial decisions, and being given responsibility for many other tasks that used to require human intelligence. The performance of these systems is increasingly based on integrating multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI).

This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral

intelligence of the human brain itself.

There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.4

First we build the tools, then they build us. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN

epoch

quanta,

codification

anthropic

idiosyncrasies.

We will have effective software models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s. With both the hardware and software needed to fully emulate human intelligence, we can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s.30 When

tiring. Perhaps most important, machines can share their knowledge at extremely high speed, compared to the very slow speed of human knowledge-sharing through language. Nonbiological intelligence will be able to download skills and knowledge from other machines, eventually also from humans. Machines will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light about three hundred million meters per second), compared to about one hundred meters per second for the electrochemical signals used in biological mammalian brains.31

capacity. Once machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology as humans do, only at far higher speeds and capacities, they will have access to their own designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them. Humans are now accomplishing something similar through biotechnology (changing the genetic and other

Since the signals have less distance to travel, they will also be able to operate at terahertz (trillions of operations per second) speeds compared to the few gigahertz (billions of operations per second) speeds of current chips. The rate of technological change will not be limited to human mental speeds. Machine intelligence will improve its own abilities in a feedback cycle that

unaided human intelligence will not be able to follow. This cycle

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). Nanobots

industrialization. Nanobots called foglets that can manipulate image and sound waves will bring the morphing qualities of virtual reality to the real world.34 The

foglets)

Foglets are nanobots—robots the size of blood cells—that can connect themselves to replicate any physical structure. Moreover, they can direct visual and auditory information in such a way as to bring the morphing qualities of virtual reality into real reality.38 MOLLY 2004: I’m sorry I asked. But, as I think about

The further backward you look, the further forward you can see. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire.

paradigm

three-dimensional molecular computing,

In biological evolution, one source of diversity is the mixing and matching of gene combinations through sexual reproduction.

fovea,

The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as Moore’s Law. In the mid-1970s, Gordon Moore, a leading inventor of integrated circuits and later chairman of Intel, observed that we could squeeze twice as many transistors onto an integrated circuit every twenty-four months (in the mid-1960s, he had estimated twelve months). Given that the electrons would consequently have less distance to travel, circuits would also run faster, providing an additional boost to overall computational power. The result is exponential growth in the price-performance of computation. This doubling rate—about twelve months—is much faster than the doubling rate for paradigm shift that I spoke about earlier, which is about ten years. Typically, we find that the doubling time for different measures—price-performance, bandwidth, capacity—of the capability of information technology is about one year. The primary driving force of Moore’s Law is a reduction of semiconductor feature sizes, which shrink

the exponential growth will continue with three-dimensional molecular computing, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.

prodigious

paradigms,

salient

inexorably

Wolfram postulates that the universe itself is a giant cellular-automaton computer.

There are three great philosophical questions. What is life? What is consciousness and thinking and memory and all that? And how does the universe work?…[The]

That implies that information rather than matter and energy may be regarded as the more fundamental reality.65

Wolfram’s

ubiquitous

poignant

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The English word “you” can be singular or plural. I meant it in the sense of “all of you.”

I wouldn’t call it a portfolio. I’m just dabbling with the technologies you’re talking about.