The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can’t get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

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.

apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our

One concept of complexity is the minimum amount of meaningful, non-random, but unpredictable information needed to characterize a system or process.

2042, approximately the time frame I’ve estimated for the Singularity

data

Ed Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli presented a comprehensive review of the idea of reversible computing.50 The fundamental concept is that if you keep all the intermediate results and then run the algorithm backward when you’ve finished your calculation, you end up where you started, have used no energy, and generated no heat.

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

The actual speed ratio between contemporary electronics and the electrochemical signaling in biological interneuronal connections is at least one million to one.

The brain tends to use self-organizing, chaotic, holographic processes (that is, information not located in one place but distributed throughout a region). It is also massively parallel and utilizes hybrid digital-controlled analog techniques.

Turing test, which I believe will take place by 2029.

As noted above, the differences are found in protein signaling factors, which include short RNA fragments and peptides, which we are now beginning to understand.64 By manipulating these proteins, we can influence gene expression and trick one type of cell into becoming another.

Another approach to converting the abundant sugar found in the natural world into electricity has been demonstrated by Swades K. Chaudhuri and Derek R. Lovley at the University of Massachusetts. Their fuel cell, which incorporates actual microbes (the Rhodoferax ferrireducens bacterium), boasts a remarkable 81 percent efficiency and uses almost no energy in its idling mode. The bacteria produce electricity directly from glucose with no unstable intermediary by-products.

Computer science professor and AI entrepreneur Ben Goertzel has written a series of books and articles that describe strategies and architectures for combining the diverse methods underlying intelligence. His Novamente architecture is intended to provide a framework for general-purpose AI.179

Warfare will move toward nanobot-based weapons, as well as cyber-weapons. Learning will first move online, but once our brains are online we will be able to download new knowledge and skills. The role of work will be to create knowledge of all kinds, from music and art to math and science. The role of play will be, well, to create knowledge, so there won’t be a clear distinction between work and play.