The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

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