The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

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...