The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

I’d like to express my deep appreciation to my mother, Hannah, and my father, Fredric, for supporting all of my early ideas and inventions without question, which gave me the freedom to experiment; to my sister Enid for her inspiration; and to my wife, Sonya, and my kids, Ethan and Amy, who give my life meaning, love, and motivation.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT

To this day, I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: 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. My life has been shaped by this imperative. The power of an idea—this is itself an idea.

Over the last twenty years, I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

Consider J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories from this perspective. These tales may be imaginary, but they are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now. Essentially all of the Potter “magic” will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book. Playing quid-ditch and transforming people and objects into other forms will be feasible in full-immersion virtual-reality environments, as well as in real reality, using nanoscale devices. More dubious is the time reversal (as described in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), although serious proposals have even been put forward for accomplishing something along these lines (without giving rise to causality paradoxes), at least for bits of information, which essentially is what we comprise. (See the discussion in chapter 3 on the ultimate limits of computation.)

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

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. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future.

the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. (See the “Linear vs. Exponential Growth” graph on p. 10.) Consider this parable: a lake owner wants to stay at home to tend to the lake’s fish and make certain that the lake itself will not become covered with lily pads, which are said to double their number every few days. Month after month, he patiently waits, yet only tiny patches of lily pads can be discerned, and they don’t seem to be expanding in any noticeable way. With the lily pads covering less than 1 percent of the lake, the owner figures that it’s safe to take a vacation and leaves with his family. When he returns a few weeks later, he’s shocked to discover that the entire lake has become covered with the pads, and his fish have perished. By doubling their number every few days, the last seven doublings were sufficient to extend the pads’ coverage to the entire lake. (Seven doublings extended their reach 128-fold.) This is the nature of exponential growth.

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. 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. We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of paradigm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the “knee of the curve,” which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trend quickly becomes explosive. Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology—which will be indistinguishable from ourselves—will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity. The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in...

Many scientists and engineers have what I call “scientist’s pessimism.” Often, they are so immersed in the difficulties and intricate details of a contemporary challenge that they fail to appreciate the ultimate long-term implications of their own work, and the larger field of work in which they operate. They likewise fail to account for the far more powerful tools they will have available with each new generation of technology. Scientists are trained to be skeptical, to speak cautiously of current research goals, and to rarely speculate beyond the current generation of scientific pursuit. This may have been a satisfactory approach when a generation of science and technology lasted longer than a human generation, but it does not serve society’s interests now that a generation of scientific and technological progress comprises only a few years.

Or consider the skepticism expressed in the mid-1980s that the Internet would ever be a significant phenomenon, given that it then included only tens of thousands of nodes (also known as servers). In fact, the number of nodes was doubling every year, so that there were likely to be tens of millions of nodes ten years later. But this trend was not appreciated by those who struggled with state-of-the-art technology in 1985, which permitted adding only a few thousand nodes throughout the world in a single year.6

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

Epoch Five: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence. Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch. It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremely slow connections.14 The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to act on our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. —IRVING JOHN GOOD, “SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE,” 1965

The Singularity involves the following principles, which I will document, develop, analyze, and contemplate throughout the rest of this book: • The rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, right now doubling every decade.28 • The power (price-performance, speed, capacity, and bandwidth) of information technologies is growing exponentially at an even faster pace, now doubling about every year.29 This principle applies to a wide range of measures, including the amount of human knowledge. • For information technologies, there is a second level of exponential growth: that is, exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth (the exponent). The reason: as a technology becomes more cost effective, more resources are deployed toward its advancement, so the rate of exponential growth increases over time. For example, the computer industry in the 1940s consisted of a handful of now historically important projects. Today total revenue in the computer industry is more than one trillion dollars, so research and development budgets are comparably higher. • Human brain scanning is one of these exponentially improving technologies. As I will show in chapter 4, the temporal and spatial resolution and bandwidth of brain scanning are doubling each year. We are just now obtaining the tools sufficient to begin serious reverse engineering (decoding) of the human brain’s principles of operation. We already have impressive models and simulations of a couple dozen of the...

Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection. Most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological. By the end of this century, it will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than human intelligence.

RAY: Still, you represent only a tiny fraction of the available matter and energy. Keeping you biological won’t appreciably change the order of magnitude of matter and energy available to the Singularity. It will be well worth it to maintain the biological heritage.

RAY: 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

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. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. —CARL SAGAN Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …. [T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious.” Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious. —ELIEZER S. YUDKOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996

(Paradigm shifts are major changes in methods and intellectual processes to accomplish tasks; examples include written language and the computer.)

For example, the evolution of DNA allowed for more complex organisms, whose biological information processes could be controlled by the DNA molecule’s flexible data storage. The Cambrian explosion provided a stable set of animal body plans (in DNA), so that the evolutionary process could concentrate on more complex cerebral development.

“Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.

Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose.

Simply having more information does not necessarily result in a better fit. Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.

An important example of this concept is one that represented a key step in the evolution of hominids: the shift in the thumb’s pivot point, which allowed more precise manipulation of the environment.8 Primates such as chimpanzees can grasp but they cannot manipulate objects with either a “power grip,” or sufficient fine-motor coordination to write or to shape objects. A change in the thumb’s pivot point did not significantly increase the complexity of the animal but nonetheless did represent an increase in order, enabling, among other things, the development of technology. Evolution has shown, however, that the general trend toward greater order does typically result in greater complexity.9 Thus improving a solution to a problem—which usually increases but sometimes decreases complexity—increases order.

To summarize, evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity (but usually does). A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or of technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order, with ever more sophisticated means of recording and manipulating information.

Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage.

Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

An evolutionary process is not a closed system; evolution draws upon the chaos in the larger system in which it takes place for its options for diversity. Because evolution also builds on its own increasing order, in an evolutionary process order increases exponentially.

A half millennium ago, the product of a paradigm shift such as the printing press took about a century to be widely deployed. Today, the products of major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the World Wide Web, are widely adopted in only a few years’ time. • A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem; for example, shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as a way to make more powerful computers) generates exponential growth until its potential is exhausted. When this happens, a paradigm shift occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue. The Life Cycle of a Paradigm. Each paradigm develops in three stages: 1. Slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth) 2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth), as seen in the S-curve figure below 3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures

Farsighted Evolution. There are many ramifications of the increasing order and complexity that have resulted from biological evolution and its continuation through technology. Consider the boundaries of observation. Early biological life could observe local events several millimeters away, using chemical gradients. When sighted animals evolved, they were able to observe events that were miles away. With the invention of the telescope, humans could see other galaxies millions of light-years away. Conversely, using microscopes, they could also see cellular-size structures. Today humans armed with contemporary technology can see to the edge of the observable universe, a distance of more than thirteen billion light-years, and down to quantum-scale subatomic particles.

The human brain uses a very inefficient electrochemical, digital-controlled analog computational process. The bulk of its calculations are carried out in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about two hundred calculations per second (in each connection), which is at least one million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, 191142 Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

Our brains also operate digitally, through discrete firings of our neurons. The wiring of our interneuronal connections can be digitally described, and the design of our brains is specified by a surprisingly small digital genetic code.57 Indeed, all of biology operates through linear sequences of 2-bit DNA base pairs, which in turn control the sequencing of only twenty amino acids in proteins. Molecules form discrete arrangements of atoms. The carbon atom, with its four positions for establishing molecular connections, is particularly adept at creating a variety of three-dimensional shapes, which accounts for its central role in both biology and technology. Within the atom, electrons take on discrete energy levels. Other subatomic particles, such as protons, comprise discrete numbers of valence quarks.

Physicist-mathematician Stephen Wolfram provides extensive evidence to show how increasing complexity can originate from a universe that is at its core a deterministic, algorithmic system (a system based on fixed rules with predetermined outcomes).

Wolfram goes on to describe how simple computational mechanisms can exist in nature at different levels, and he shows that these simple and deterministic mechanisms can produce all of the complexity that we see and experience. He provides myriad examples, such as the pleasing designs of pigmentation on animals, the shape and markings of shells, and patterns of turbulence (such as the behavior of smoke in the air). He makes the point that computation is essentially simple and ubiquitous. The repetitive application of simple computational transformations, according to Wolfram, is the true source of complexity in the world.

RAY: Well, biology at this level is evolving so slowly that it hardly counts. I mentioned that evolution works through indirection. It turns out that the older paradigms such as biological evolution do continue but at their old speed, so they are eclipsed by the new paradigms. Biological evolution for animals as complex as humans takes tens of thousands of years to make noticeable, albeit still small, differences. The entire history of human cultural and technological evolution has taken place on that timescale. Yet we are now poised to ascend beyond the fragile and slow creations of biological evolution in a mere several decades. Current progress is on a scale that is a thousand to a million times faster than biological evolution. NED LUDD: What if not everyone wants to go along with this? RAY: I wouldn’t expect they would. There are always early and late adopters. There’s always a leading edge and a trailing edge to technology or to any evolutionary change. We still have people pushing plows, but that hasn’t slowed down the adoption of cell phones, telecommunications, the Internet, biotechnology, and so on. However, the lagging edge does ultimately catch up. We have societies in Asia that jumped from agrarian economies to information economies, without going through industrialization.77

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. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS,” MAN AND SUPERMAN, 1903 All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. —SAMUEL BUTLER, NOTEBOOKS, 1912 If I were just setting out today to make that drive to the West Coast to start a new business, I would be looking at biotechnology and nanotechnology. —JEFF BEZOS, FOUNDER AND CEO OF AMAZON.COM

It is important to point out that we are progressing toward the “new” knowledge-based economy exponentially but nonetheless gradually.80 When the so-called new economy did not transform business models overnight, many observers were quick to dismiss the idea as inherently flawed. It will be another couple of decades before knowledge dominates the economy, but it will represent a profound transformation when it happens.

It is important to point out that a key implication of nanotechnology is that it will bring the economics of software to hardware—that is, to physical products. Software prices are deflating even more quickly than those of hardware (see the figure below).

Expanding access to knowledge is also changing power relationships. Patients increasingly approach visits to their physician armed with a sophisticated understanding of their medical condition and their options. Consumers of virtually everything from toasters, cars, and homes to banking and insurance are now using automated software agents to quickly identify the right choices with the optimal features and prices. Web services such as eBay are rapidly connecting buyers and sellers in unprecedented ways.

As Sun Tzu pointed out, “knowledge is power,” and another ramification of the law of accelerating returns is the exponential growth of human knowledge, including intellectual property.

Nanotubes Are Still the Best Bet. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, I cited nanotubes—using molecules organized in three dimensions to store memory bits and to act as logic gates—as the most likely technology to usher in the era of three-dimensional molecular computing. Nanotubes, first synthesized in 1991, are tubes made up of a hexagonal network of carbon atoms that have been rolled up to make a seamless cylinder.7 Nanotubes are very small: single-wall nanotubes are only one nanometer in diameter, so they can achieve high densities. They are also potentially very fast. Peter Burke and his colleagues at the University of California at Irvine recently demonstrated nanotube circuits operating at 2.5 gigahertz (GHz). However, in Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, Burke says the theoretical speed limit for these nanotube transistors “should be terahertz [1 THz = 1,000 GHz], which is about 1,000 times faster than modern computer speeds.”8 One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.9

Emulating Biology. The idea of building electronic or mechanical systems that are self-replicating and self-organizing is inspired by biology, which relies on these properties. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described the construction of self-replicating nanowires based on prions, which are self-replicating proteins.

The ultimate self-replicating molecule from biology is, of course, DNA. Duke University researchers created molecular building blocks called “tiles” out of self-assembling DNA molecules.24 They were able to control the structure of the resulting assembly, creating “nanogrids.” This technique automatically attaches protein molecules to each nanogrid’s cell, which could be used to perform computing operations. They also demonstrated a chemical process that coated the DNA nanoribbons with silver to create nanowires. Commenting on the article in the September 26, 2003, issue of the journal Science, lead researcher Hao Yan said, “To use DNA self-assembly to template protein molecules or other molecules has been sought for years, and this is the first time it has been demonstrated so clearly.”25 Computing with DNA. DNA is nature’s own nanoengineered computer, and its ability to store information and conduct logical manipulations at the molecular level has already been exploited in specialized “DNA computers.” A DNA computer is essentially a test tube filled with water containing trillions of DNA molecules, with each molecule acting as a computer.

The key to the power of DNA computing is that it allows for testing each of the trillions of strands simultaneously. In 2003 Israeli scientists led by Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute of Science combined DNA with adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the natural fuel for biological systems such as the human body.27 With this method, each of the DNA molecules was able to perform computations as well as provide its own energy. The Weizmann scientists demonstrated a configuration consisting of two spoonfuls of this liquid super-computing system, which contained thirty million billion molecular computers and performed a total of 660 trillion calculations per second (6.6 X 1014 cps). The energy consumption of these computers is extremely low, only fifty millionths of a watt for all thirty million billion computers.

There’s a limitation, however, to DNA computing: each of the many trillions of computers has to perform the same operation at the same time (although on different data), so that the device is a “single instruction multiple data” (SIMD) architecture. While there are important classes of problems that are amenable to a SIMD system (for example, processing every pixel in an image for image enhancement or compression, and solving combinatorial-logic problems), it is not possible to program them for general-purpose algorithms, in which each computer is able to execute whatever operation is needed for its particular mission.

Computing with Spin. In addition to their negative electrical charge, electrons have another property that can be exploited for memory and computation: spin. According to quantum mechanics, electrons spin on an axis, similar to the way the Earth rotates on its axis. This concept is theoretical, because an electron is considered to occupy a point in space, so it is difficult to imagine a point with no size that nonetheless spins. However, when an electrical charge moves, it causes a magnetic field, which is real and measurable. An electron can spin in one of two directions, described as “up” and “down,” so this property can be exploited for logic switching or to encode a bit of memory.

One form of spintronics is already familiar to computer users: magneto-resistance (a change in electrical resistance caused by a magnetic field) is used to store data on magnetic hard drives. An exciting new form of nonvolatile memory based on spintronics called MRAM (magnetic random-access memory) is expected to enter the market within a few years. Like hard drives, MRAM memory retains its data without power but uses no moving parts and will have speeds and rewritability comparable to conventional RAM.