The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

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 of cells. FRIEND OF FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Music? FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Yes, patterns of sound.

FUTURIST BACTERIUM: Okay, look at it this way. These supercell societies will be complicated enough to understand their own organization. They will be able to improve their own design, getting better and better, faster and faster. They will reshape the rest of the world in their image.

RAY: We’re going to merge with our technology. We’re already starting to do that in 2004, even if most of the machines are not yet inside our bodies and brains. Our machines nonetheless extend the reach of our intelligence. Extending our reach has always been the nature of being human.

RAY: It’s true that a contemporary human is a collection of cells, and that we are a product of evolution, indeed its cutting edge. But extending our intelligence by reverse engineering it, modeling it, simulating it, reinstantiating it on more capable substrates, and modifying and extending it is the next step in its evolution. It was the fate of bacteria to evolve into a technology-creating species. And it’s our destiny now to evolve into the vast intelligence of the Singularity.

The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. —RAINER MARIA RILKE

One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create. —MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

“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 ...

In our brains, the massively distributed nanobots will interact with our biological neurons. This will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, as well as neurological correlates of our emotions, from within the nervous system. More important, this intimate connection between our biological thinking and the nonbiological intelligence we are creating will profoundly expand human intelligence.

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.

As we approach this limit in our corner of the galaxy, the intelligence of our civilization will expand outward into the rest of the universe, quickly reaching the fastest speed possible. We understand that speed to be the speed of light, but there are suggestions that we may be able to circumvent this apparent limit (possibly by taking shortcuts through wormholes, for example).

Sex has largely been separated from its biological function. For the most part, we engage in sexual activity for intimate communication and sensual pleasure, not reproduction. Conversely, we have devised multiple methods for creating babies without physical sex, albeit most reproduction does still derive from the sex act. This disentanglement of sex from its biological function is not condoned by all sectors of society, but it has been readily, even eagerly, adopted by the mainstream in the developed world.

We now live in an era of great material abundance, at least in technologically advanced nations. Most work requires mental effort rather than physical exertion.

Many of today’s job categories, ranging from flight controller to Web designer, simply didn’t exist a century ago. Circa 2004 we have the opportunity to continue to contribute to our civilization’s exponentially growing knowledge base—which is, incidentally, a unique attribute of our species—well past our child-rearing days. (As a baby boomer myself, that is certainly my view.)

We have devices to replace our hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists, jaws, teeth, skin, arteries, veins, heart valves, arms, legs, feet, fingers, and toes, and systems to replace more complex organs (for example, our hearts) are beginning to be introduced. As we learn the operating principles of the human body and brain, we will soon be in a position to design vastly superior systems that will last longer and perform better, without susceptibility to breakdown, disease, and aging.

We already have a comprehensive picture of the components of the food we eat. We know how to enable people who cannot eat to survive, using intravenous nutrition. However, this is clearly not a desirable alternative, since our technologies for getting substances in and out of the bloodstream are currently quite limited.

In an intermediate phase nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, order additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local-area network, and send the rest of the matter on to be eliminated.

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.

Future designs are also expected to deliver drugs to precise locations in the brain.

Nutrients will be introduced directly into the bloodstream by special metabolic nanobots, while sensors in our bloodstream and body, using wireless communication, will provide dynamic information on the nutrients needed at each point in time. This technology should be reasonably mature by the late 2020s.

A key question in designing such systems will be, How will nanobots be introduced into and removed from the body?

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.

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.

If we find breathing itself pleasurable, we can develop virtual ways of having this sensual experience.

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.

“Rather than treat the brain like soup, adding chemicals that enhance or suppress certain neurotransmitters,” says Rick Trosch, an American physician helping to pioneer these therapies, “we’re now treating it like circuitry.”

A variety of techniques is also being developed to provide the communications bridge between the wet analog world of biological information processing and digital electronics.

The compelling benefits of overcoming profound diseases and disabilities will keep these technologies on a rapid course, but medical applications represent only the early-adoption phase. As the technologies become established, there will be no barriers to using them for vast expansion of human potential.

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.

biological evolution is restricted to building everything from a very limited class of materials—namely, proteins, which are folded from one-dimensional strings of amino acids. It is restricted to thinking processes (pattern recognition, logical analysis, skill formation, and other cognitive skills) that use extremely slow chemical switching. And biological evolution itself works very slowly, only incrementally improving designs that continue to apply these basic concepts.

Biological evolution did create a species that could think and manipulate its environment. That species is now succeeding in accessing—and improving—its own design and is capable of reconsidering and altering these basic tenets of biology.

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.

Even with our mostly nonbiological brains we’re likely to keep the aesthetics and emotional import of human bodies, given the influence this aesthetic has on the human brain.

That is, human body version 3.0 is likely still to look human by today’s standards, but given the greatly expanded plasticity that our bodies will have, ideas of what constitutes beauty will be expanded upon over time. Already, people augment their bodies with body piercing, tattoos, and plastic surgery, and social acceptance of these changes has rapidly increased. Since we’ll be able to make changes that are readily reversible, there is likely to be far greater experimentation.

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).

Part of our humanness is our limitations. We don’t claim to be the fastest entity possible, to have memories with the biggest capacity possible, and so on. But there is an indefinable, spiritual quality to being human that a machine inherently doesn’t possess.

Humans are already replacing parts of their bodies and brains with nonbiological replacements that work better at performing their “human” functions.

Better only in the sense of replacing diseased or disabled organs and systems. But you’re replacing essentially all of our humanness to enhance human ability, and that’s inherently inhuman.

Then perhaps our basic disagreement is over the nature of being human. To me, the essence of being human is not our limitations—although we do have many—it’s our ability to reach beyond our limitations. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t even stay on the plane...

We have to use these technological powers with great discretion. Past a certain point, we’re losing some ineffable...

I think we’re in agreement that we need to recognize what’s important in our humanity. But there is no reaso...

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.

Computers arriving at the beginning of the next decade will become essentially invisible: woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture and environment. They will tap into the worldwide mesh (what the World Wide Web will become once all of its linked devices become communicating Web servers, thereby forming vast supercomputers and memory banks) of high-speed communications and computational resources. We’ll have very high-bandwidth, wireless communication to the Internet at all times. Displays will be built into our eyeglasses and contact lenses and images projected directly onto our retinas.

The Department of Defense is already using technology along these lines to create virtual-reality environments in which to train soldiers.27 An impressive immersive virtual reality system already demonstrated by the army’s Institute for Creative Technologies includes virtual humans that respond appropriately to the user’s actions.

Virtual personalities that overlay the real world will help us with information retrieval and our chores and transactions. These virtual assistants won’t always wait for questions and directives but will step forward if they see us struggling to find a piece of information.

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.

If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment.

The Web will provide a panoply of virtual environments to explore. Some will be re-creations of real places; others will be fanciful environments that have no counterpart in the physical world. Some, indeed, would be impossible, perhaps because they violate the laws of physics. We will be able to visit these virtual places and have any kind of interaction with other real, as well as simulated, people (of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two), ranging from business negotiations to sensual encounters. “Virtual-reality environment designer” will be a new job description and a new art form.

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.

So your parents may see you as one person, while your girlfriend will experience you as another. However, the other person may choose to override your selections, preferring to see you diff...

Romantic couples can choose whom they wish to be, even to become each other. These are all easily changeable decisions.