The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! For now, though, we must rely on our representatives in the lowlands to tell us what water is really like. Our representatives on the foothills of chess and theorem-proving report signs of intelligence. Why didn’t we get similar reports decades before, from the lowlands, as computers surpassed humans in arithmetic and rote memorization? Actually, we did, at the time. Computers that calculated like thousands of mathematicians were hailed as “giant brains,” and inspired the first generation of AI research. After all, the machines were doing something beyond any animal, that needed human intelligence, concentration and years of training. But it is hard to recapture that magic now. One reason is that computers’ demonstrated stupidity in other areas biases our judgment. Another relates to our own ineptitude. We do arithmetic or keep records so painstakingly and externally that the small mechanical steps in a long calculation are obvious, while the big picture often escapes us. Like Deep Blue’s builders, we...

The education of AIs will be much faster than that of unenhanced humans. The twenty-year time span required to provide a basic education to biological humans could be compressed into a matter of weeks or less. Also, because nonbiological intelligence can share its patterns of learning and knowledge, only one AI has to master each particular skill. As I pointed out, we trained one set of research computers to understand speech, but then the hundreds of thousands of people who acquired our speech-recognition software had to load only the already trained patterns into their computers.

FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM, 2 BILLION B.C.: So tell me again about these ideas you have about the future. FUTURIST BACTERIUM, 2 BILLION B.C.: Well, I see bacteria getting together into societies, with the whole band of cells basically acting like one big complicated organism with greatly enhanced capabilities. FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM: What gives you that idea? FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Well already, some of our fellow Daptobacters have gone inside other larger bacteria to form a little duo.221 It’s inevitable that our fellow cells will band together so that each cell can specialize its function. As it is now, we each have to do everything by ourselves: find food, digest it, excrete by-products. FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM: And then what? FUTURIST BACTERIUM: All these cells will develop ways of communicating with one another that go beyond just the swapping of chemical gradients that you and I can do. FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Okay, now tell me again the part about that future superassembly often trillion cells. FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Yes, well, according to my models, in about two billion years a big society often trillion cells will make up a single organism and include tens of billions of special cells that can communicate with one another in very complicated patterns. FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM: What sort of patterns? FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Well, “music,” for one thing. These huge bands of cells will create musical patterns and communicate them to all the other bands ...

“Playing God” is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to “play God,” the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today. A few million humans would live in savannahs and forests, eking out a hunter-gatherer existence, without writing or history or mathematics or an appreciation of the intricacies of their own universe and their own inner workings. —RAMEZ NAAM

Cosmetic baby, plug into me And never, ever find another. And I realize no one’s wise To my plastic fantastic lover. —JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, “PLASTIC FANTASTIC LOVER” Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines. —RODNEY BROOKS

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “SAILING TO BYZANTIUM”

Although version 2.0 of the human body is an ongoing grand project that will ultimately result in the radical upgrading of all our physical and mental systems, we will implement it one small, benign step at a time. Based on our current knowledge, we can describe the means for accomplishing each aspect of this vision.

If this seems futuristic, keep in mind that intelligent machines are already making their way into our bloodstream. There are dozens of projects under way to create bloodstream-based BioMEMS for a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications.4 As mentioned, there are several major conferences devoted to these projects.5 BioMEMS devices are being designed to intelligently scout out pathogens and deliver medications in very precise ways.

At that stage of technological development, we will be able to eat whatever we want, whatever gives us pleasure and gastronomic fulfillment, exploring the culinary arts for their tastes, textures, and aromas while having an optimal flow of nutrients to our bloodstream. One possibility to achieve this would be to have all the food we eat pass through a modified digestive tract that doesn’t allow absorption into the bloodstream. But this would place a burden on our colon and bowel functions, so a more refined approach would be to dispense with the conventional function of elimination. We could accomplish that by using special elimination nanobots that act like tiny garbage compactors. As the nutrient nanobots make their way into our bodies, the elimination nanobots go the other way. Such an innovation would also enable us to out-grow the need for the organs that filter the blood for impurities, such as the kidneys.

Version 2.0 will provide substantially greater reserves, enabling us to be separated from metabolic resources for greatly extended periods of time.

Programmable Blood. One pervasive system that has already been the subject of a comprehensive conceptual redesign based on reverse engineering is our blood. I mentioned earlier Rob Freitas’s nanotechnology-based designs to replace our red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells.11 Like most of our biological systems our red blood cells perform their oxygenating function very inefficiently, so Freitas has redesigned them for optimal performance. Because his respirocytes (robotic red blood cells) would enable one to go hours without oxygen,12 it will be interesting to see how this development is dealt with in athletic contests. Presumably the use of respirocytes and similar systems will be prohibited in events like the Olympics, but then we will face the prospect of teenagers (whose bloodstreams will likely contain respirocyte-enriched blood) routinely outperforming Olympic athletes. Although prototypes are still one to two decades in the future, their physical and chemical requirements have been worked out in impressive detail. Analyses show that Freitas’s designs would be hundreds or thousands of times more capable of storing and transporting oxygen than our biological blood.

In human body version 2.0 hormones and related substances (to the extent that we still need them) will be delivered via nanobots, controlled by intelligent biofeedback systems to maintain and balance required levels. Since we will be eliminating most of our biological organs, many of these substances may no longer be needed and will be replaced by other resources required by the nanorobotic systems.

The human skeleton version 2.0 will be very strong, stable, and self-repairing. We will not notice the absence of many of our organs, such as the liver and pancreas, since we do not directly experience their operation. But the skin, which includes our primary and secondary sex organs, may prove to be an organ we will actually want to keep, or we may at least want to maintain its vital functions of communication and pleasure. However, we will ultimately be able to improve on the skin with new nanoengineered supple materials that will provide greater protection from physical and thermal environmental effects while enhancing our capacity for intimate communication. The same observation holds for the mouth and upper esophagus, which constitute the remaining aspects of the digestive system that we use to experience the act of eating.

We Are Becoming Cyborgs. The human body version 2.0 scenario represents the continuation of a long-standing trend in which we grow more intimate with our technology. Computers started out as large, remote machines in air-conditioned rooms tended by white-coated technicians. They moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now into our pockets. Soon, we’ll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. By the 2030s we will become more nonbiological than biological. As I discussed in chapter 3, by the 2040s nonbiological intelligence will be billions of times more capable than our biological intelligence.

Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we “urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain, so that computers can add to human intelligence, rather than be in opposition.”25 Hawking can take comfort that the development program he is recommending is well under way.

Human Body Version 3.0. I envision human body 3.0—in the 2030s and 2040s—as a more fundamental redesign. Rather than reformulating each subsystem, we (both the biological and nonbiological portions of our thinking, working together) will have the opportunity to revamp our bodies based on our experience with version 2.0. As with the transition from 1.0 to 2.0, the transition to 3.0 will be gradual and will involve many competing ideas. One attribute I envision for version 3.0 is the ability to change our bodies. We’ll be able to do that very easily in virtual-reality environments (see the next section), but we will also acquire the means to do this in real reality. We will incorporate MNT-based fabrication into ourselves, so we’ll be able to rapidly alter our physical manifestation at will.

J. Storrs Hall has described nanobot designs he calls “foglets” that are able to link together to form a great variety of structures and that can quickly change their structural organization. They’re called “foglets” because if there’s a sufficient density of them in an area, they can control sound and light to form variable sounds and images. They are essentially creating virtual-reality environments externally (that is, in the physical world) rather than internally (in the nervous system). Using them a person can modify his body or his environment, though some of these changes will actually be illusions, since the foglets can control sound and images.26 Hall’s foglets are one conceptual design for creating real morphable bodies to compete with those in virtual reality.

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. —JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM

The 2030 Scenario. Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. We already have the technology for electronic devices to communicate with neurons in both directions, yet requiring no direct physical contact with the neurons. For example, scientists at the Max Planck Institute have developed “neuron transistors” that can detect the firing of a nearby neuron, or alternatively can cause a nearby neuron to fire or suppress it from firing.31 This amounts to two-way communication between neurons and the electronic-based neuron transistors. As mentioned above, quantum dots have also shown the ability to provide noninvasive communication between neurons and electronics.32

Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body. After all, the brain does not experience the body directly.

Become Someone Else. In virtual reality we won’t be restricted to a single personality, since we will be able to change our appearance and effectively become other people. Without altering our physical body (in real reality) we will be able to readily transform our projected body in these three-dimensional virtual environments. We can select different bodies at the same time for different people. So your parents may see you as one person, while your girlfriend will experience you as another.

Nonbiological intelligence should still be considered human, since it is fully derived from human-machine civilization and will be based, at least in part, on reverse engineering human intelligence. I address this important philosophical issue in the next chapter. The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and nonbiological thinking mediums, but more important, one of method and organization of thinking, one that will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way.

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. —RICHARD FEYNMAN Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in. —WINSTON CHURCHILL Immortality first! Everything else can wait. —CORWYN PRATER Involuntary death is a cornerstone of biological evolution, but that fact does not make it a good thing. —MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

Evolution, the process that produced humanity, possesses only one goal: create gene machines maximally capable of producing copies of themselves. In retrospect, this is the only way complex structures such as life could possibly arise in an unintelligent universe. But this goal often comes into conflict with human interests, causing death, suffering, and short life spans. The past progress of humanity has been a history of shattering evolutionary constraints. —MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

Historically, the only means for humans to outlive a limited biological life span has been to pass on values, beliefs, and knowledge to future generations. We are now approaching a paradigm shift in the means we will have available to preserve the patterns underlying our existence. Human life expectancy is itself growing steadily and will accelerate rapidly, now that we are in the early stages of reverse engineering the information processes underlying life and disease.

A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow, … and when it becomes great enough, and looks back … what fellow feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more. —VERNOR VINGE The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

Do not go gentle into that good night, … Rage, rage against the dying of the light. —DYLAN THOMAS

Smart Dust. DARPA is developing devices even tinier than birds and bumblebees called “smart dust”—complex sensor systems not much bigger than a pinhead. Once fully developed, swarms of millions of these devices could be dropped into enemy territory to provide highly detailed surveillance and ultimately support offensive warfare missions (for example, releasing nanoweapons). Power for smart-dust systems will be provided by nanoengineered fuel cells, as well as by conversion of mechanical energy from their own movement, wind, and thermal currents. Want to find a key enemy? Need to locate hidden weapons? Massive numbers of essentially invisible spies could monitor every square inch of enemy territory, identify every person (through thermal and electromagnetic imaging, eventually DNA tests, and other means) and every weapon and even carry out missions to destroy enemy targets. Nanoweapons. The next step beyond smart dust will be nanotechnology-based weapons, which will make obsolete weapons of larger size. The only way for an enemy to counteract such a massively distributed force will be with its own nanotechnology. In addition, enhancing nanodevices with the ability to self-replicate will extend their capabilities but introduces grave dangers, a subject I address in chapter 8. Nanotechnology is already being applied to a wide range of military functions. These include nanotech coatings for improved armor; laboratories on a chip for rapid chemical and biological-agent detectio...

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. —IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804)

Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course offerings—for free on the Web.56 These have already had a major impact on education around the world. For example, Brigitte Bouissou writes, “As a math teacher in France, I want to thank MIT … for [these] very lucid lectures, which are a great help for preparing my own classes.” Sajid Latif, an educator in Pakistan, has integrated the MIT OCW courses into his own curriculum. His Pakistani students regularly attend—virtually—MIT classes as a substantial part of their education.57 MIT intends to have every one of its courses online and open source (that is, free of charge for noncommercial use) by 2007. The U.S. Army already conducts all of its nonphysical training using Web-based instruction. The accessible, inexpensive, and increasingly high-quality courseware available on the Web is also fueling a trend toward homeschooling.

The nature of education will change once again when we merge with nonbiological intelligence. We will then have the ability to download knowledge and skills, at least into the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. Our machines do this routinely today. If you want to give your laptop state-of-the-art skills in speech or character recognition, language translation, or Internet searching, your computer has only to quickly download the right patterns (the software). We don’t yet have comparable communication ports in our biological brains to quickly download the interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning. That is one of many profound limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity.

If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, if the shuttle could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, nor masters slaves. —ARISTOTLE

Before the invention of writing, almost every insight was happening for the first time (at least to the knowledge of the small groups of humans involved). When you are at the beginning, everything is new. In our era, almost everything we do in the arts is done with awareness of what has been done before and before. In the early post-human era, things will be new again because anything that requires greater than human ability has not already been done by Homer or da Vinci or Shakespeare. —VERNOR VINGE59

Now part of [my consciousness] lives on the Internet and seems to stay there all the time…. A student may have a textbook open. The television is on with the sound off…. They’ve got music on headphones … there’s a homework window, along with e-mail and instant messaging…. One multi-tasking student prefers the online world to the face-to-face world. “Real life,” he said, “...

Intellectual Property. If the primary value of products and services resides in their information, then the protection of information rights will be critical to supporting the business models that provide the capital to fund the creation of valuable information. The skirmishes today in the entertainment industry regarding illegal downloading of music and movies are a harbinger of what will be a profound struggle, once essentially everything of value is composed of information. Clearly, existing or new business models that allow for the creation of valuable intellectual property (IP) need to be protected, otherwise the supply of IP will itself be threatened. However, the pressure from the ease of copying information is a reality that is not going away, so industries will suffer if they do not keep their business models in line with public expectations. In music, for example, rather than provide leadership with new paradigms, the recording industry stuck rigidly (until just recently) with the idea of an expensive record album, a business model that has remained unchanged from the time my father was a young, struggling musician in the 1940s. The public will avoid wide-scale pirating of information services only if commercial prices are kept at what are perceived to be reasonable levels. The mobile-phone sector is a prime example of an industry that has not invited rampant piracy. The cost of cell-phone calls has fallen rapidly with improving technology. If the mobile-phone in...

Decentralization. The next several decades will see a major trend toward decentralization. Today we have highly centralized and vulnerable energy plants and use ships and fuel lines to transport energy. The advent of nanoengineered fuel cells and solar power will enable energy resources to be massively distributed and integrated into our infrastructure. MNT manufacturing will be highly distributed using inexpensive nanofabrication minifactories. The ability to do nearly anything with anyone from anywhere in any virtual-reality environment will make obsolete the centralized technologies of office buildings and cities.

Although the speed with which these steps are being taken is hastening, mainstream acceptance generally follows rapidly. Consider new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, which were controversial at first but quickly became widely used and accepted. On the other hand, change will always produce fundamentalist and Luddite counteractions, which will intensify as the pace of change increases. But despite apparent controversy, the overwhelming benefits to human health, wealth, expression, creativity, and knowledge quickly become apparent.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it. —MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. —HELEN KELLER

By the 2020s, full-immersion virtual reality will be a vast playground of compelling environments and experiences. Initially VR will have certain benefits in terms of enabling communications with others in engaging ways over long distances and featuring a great variety of environments from which to choose. Although the environments will not be completely convincing at first, by the late 2020s they will be indistinguishable from real reality and will involve all of the senses, as well as neurological correlations of our emotions. As we enter the 2030s there won’t be clear distinctions between human and machine, between real and virtual reality, or between work and play.

What is the universe doing questioning itself via one of its smallest products? —D. E. JENKINS, ANGLICAN THEOLOGIAN

In 1959 astrophysicist Freeman Dyson proposed a concept of curved shells around a star as a way to provide both energy and habitats for an advanced civilization. One conception of the Dyson Sphere is quite literally a thin sphere around a star to gather energy.76 The civilization lives in the sphere, and gives off heat (infrared energy) outside the sphere (away from the star). Another (and more practical) version of the Dyson Sphere is a series of curved shells, each of which blocks only a portion of the star’s radiation. In this way Dyson Shells can be designed to have no effect on existing planets, particularly those, like the Earth, that harbor an ecology that needs to be protected.

However, it would be sufficient for the probes to be self-replicating nanobots (note that a nanobot has nanoscale features but that the overall size of a nanobot is measured in microns).79 We could send swarms of many trillions of them, with some of these “seeds” taking root in another planetary system and then replicating by finding the appropriate materials, such as carbon and other needed elements, and building copies of themselves. Once established, the nanobot colony could obtain the additional information it needs to optimize its intelligence from pure information transmissions that involve only energy, not matter, and that are sent at the speed of light. Unlike large organisms such as humans, these nanobots, being extremely small, could travel at close to the speed of light. Another scenario would be to dispense with the information transmissions and embed the information needed in the nanobots’ own memory. That’s an engineering decision we can leave to these future superengineers.

Yet another faster-than-the-speed-of-light phenomenon is the speed with which galaxies can recede from each other as a result of the expansion of the universe. If the distance between two galaxies is greater than what is called the Hubble distance, then these galaxies are receding from one another at faster than the speed of light.82 This does not violate Einstein’s special theory of relativity, because this velocity is caused by space itself expanding rather than the galaxies moving through space. However, it also doesn’t help us transmit information at speeds faster than the speed of light.

Uri Yurtsever

John Smart has suggested in what he calls the “transcension” scenario that once civilizations saturate their local region of space with their intelligence, they create a new universe (one that will allow continued exponential growth of complexity and intelligence) and essentially leave this universe.91 Smart suggests that this option may be so attractive that it is the consistent and inevitable outcome of an ETI’s having reached an advanced stage of its development, and it thereby explains the Fermi Paradox.

Seth Shostak comments that “the reasonable probability is that any extraterrestrial intelligence we will detect will be machine intelligence, not biological intelligence like us.”

It appears that our solar system has not yet been turned into someone else’s computer. And if this other civilization is only observing us for knowledge’s sake and has decided to remain silent, SETI will fail to find it, because if an advanced civilization does not want us to notice it, it would succeed in that desire. Keep in mind that such a civilization would be vastly more intelligent than we are today. Perhaps it will reveal itself to us when we achieve the next level of our evolution, specifically merging our biological brains with our technology, which is to say, after the Singularity. However, given that the SETI assumption implies that there are billions of such highly developed civilizations, it seems unlikely that all of them have made the same decision to stay out of our way.

Gardner writes that “we and other living creatures throughout the cosmos are part of a vast, still undiscovered transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs who are collectively engaged in a portentous mission of truly cosmic importance. Under the Biocosm vision, we share a common fate with that community—to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind.” To Gardner the laws of nature, and the precisely balanced constants, “function as the cosmic counterpart of DNA: they furnish the ‘recipe’ by which the evolving cosmos acquires the capacity to generate life and ever more capable intelligence.”

Once a planet yields a technology-creating species and that species creates computation (as has happened here), it is only a matter of a few centuries before its intelligence saturates the matter and energy in its vicinity, and it begins to expand outward at at least the speed of light (with some suggestions of circumventing this limit). Such a civilization will then overcome gravity (through exquisite and vast technology) and other cosmological forces—or, to be fully accurate, it will maneuver and control these forces—and engineer the universe it wants. This is the goal of the Singularity.

Again, if it is at all possible to circumvent the speed-of-light limitation, the vast intelligence we will have with solar system-scale intelligence will be able to design and implement the requisite engineering to do so. If I had to place a bet, I would put my money on the conjecture that circumventing the speed of light is possible and that we will be able to do this within the next couple of hundred years. But that is speculation on my part, as we do not yet understand these issues sufficiently to make a more definitive statement. If the speed of light is an immutable barrier, and no shortcuts through wormholes exist that can be exploited, it will take billions of years, not hundreds, to saturate the universe with our intelligence, and we will be limited to our light cone within the universe. In either event the exponential growth of computation will hit a wall during the twenty-second century. (But what a wall!)