The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Using signal-processing technology, my voice was transformed into a woman’s voice and also controlled the movements of Ramona’s lips. So it appeared to the TED audience as if Ramona herself were giving the presentation.

In addition to encompassing all of the senses, these shared environments can include emotional overlays. Nanobots will be capable of generating the neurological correlates of emotions, sexual pleasure, and other derivatives of our sensory experience and mental reactions.

Some emotions and secondary reactions involve a pattern of activity in the brain rather than the stimulation of a specific neuron, but with massively distributed nanobots, stimulating these patterns will also be feasible.

The most important application of circa-2030 nanobots will be literally to expand our minds through the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence. The first stage will be to augment our hundred trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobot communication.36 This will provide us with the opportunity to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of nonbiological intelligence. The technology will also provide wireless communication from one brain to another.

Full-immersion virtual reality doesn’t seem very inviting. I mean, all those nanobots running around in my head, like little bugs.

MOLLY 2004: Okay, now run this virtual sex by me again. How does it work exactly? RAY: You’re using your virtual body, which is simulated. Nanobots in and around your nervous system generate the appropriate encoded signals for all of your senses: visual, auditory, tactile of course, even olfactory. From the perspective of your brain, it’s real because the signals are just as real as if your senses were producing them from real experiences. The simulation in virtual reality would generally follow the laws of physics, although that would depend on the environment you selected. If you go there with another person or persons, then these other intelligences, whether of people with biological bodies or otherwise, would also have bodies in this virtual environment. Your body in virtual reality does not need to match your body in real reality. In fact, the body you choose for yourself in the virtual environment may be different from the body that your partner chooses for you at the same time. The computers generating the virtual environment, virtual bodies, and associated nerve signals would cooperate so that your actions affect the virtual experience of the others and vice versa.

MOLLY 2004: So I would experience sexual pleasure even though I’m not actually, you know, with someone? RAY: Well, you would be with someone, just not in real reality, and, of course, the someone may not even exist in real reality. Sexual pleasure is not a direct sensory experience, it’s akin to an emotion. It’s a sensation generated in your brain, which is reflecting on what you’re doing and thinking, just like the sensation of humor or anger. MOLLY 2004: Like the girl you mentioned who found everything hilarious when the surgeons stimulated a particular spot in her brain?

In either case we’ll be able to shape and enhance our emotional reactions as part of our virtual-reality experiences.

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.

Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.

However, if we are diligent in maintaining our mind file, making frequent backups, and porting to current formats and mediums, a form of immortality can be attained, at least for software-based humans. Later in this century it will seem remarkable to people that humans in an earlier era lived their lives without a backup of their most precious information: that contained in their brains and bodies.

But is that person based on my mind file, who migrates across many computational substrates and who outlives any particular thinking medium, really me? This consideration takes us back to the same questions of consciousness and identity that have been debated since Plato’s dialogues (which we examine in the next chapter). During the course of the twenty-first century these will not remain topics for polite philosophical debates but will have to be confronted as vital, practical, political, and legal issues.

I have dreamed of taking these hundreds of thousands of records and scanning them into a massive personal database, which would allow me to utilize powerful contemporary search-and-retrieve methods on them. I even have a name for this venture—DAISI (Document and Image Storage Invention)—and have been accumulating ideas for it for many years.

Extensive research is going into designing swarm intelligence.51 Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex behaviors can arise from large numbers of individual agents, each following relatively simple rules.52 Swarms of insects are often able to devise intelligent solutions to complex problems, such as designing the architecture of a colony, despite the fact that no single member of the swarm possesses the requisite skills.

Another key trend is to move personnel away from combat to improve soldiers’ rates of survival. This can be done by allowing humans to drive and pilot systems remotely. Taking the pilot out of a vehicle allows it to take part in riskier missions and to be designed to be far more maneuverable. It also allows the devices to become very small by dispensing with the extensive requirements for supporting human life. The generals are moving even farther away.

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

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.

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.

Smart Weapons. We’ve already moved from dumb missiles launched with hopes they will find their targets to intelligent cruise missiles that use pattern recognition to make thousands of tactical decisions on their own. Bullets, however, have remained essentially small dumb missiles, and providing them with a measure of intelligence is another military objective.

Once machine intelligence catches up with biological human intelligence, many more systems will be fully autonomous.

VR. Virtual-reality environments are already in use to control remotely guided systems such as the U.S. Air Force’s Armed Predator UAV.55 Even if a soldier is inside a weapons system (such as an Abrams tank), we don’t expect him or her to just look outside the window to see what is going on. Virtual-reality environments are needed to provide a view of the actual environment and allow for effective control.

When everything is information, the ability to control your own information and disrupt your enemy’s communication, command, and control will be a primary determinant of military success.

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

virtual-reality environments will be full immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing.

Now part of [my consciousness] lives on the Internet and seems to stay there all the time….

Musicians typically make most of their money with live performances, but that model will also come under attack early in the next decade, when we will have full-immersion virtual reality. Each industry will need to continually reinvent its business models, which will require as much creativity as the creation of the IP itself.

Personal services will largely move to virtual-reality environments, especially when virtual reality begins to encompass all of the senses.

The next several decades will see a major trend toward decentralization.

With version 3.0 bodies able to morph into different forms at will and our largely nonbiological brains no longer constrained to the limited architecture that biology has bestowed on us, the question of what is human will undergo intensive examination. Each transformation described here does not represent a sudden leap but rather a sequence of many small steps. Although the speed with which these steps are being taken is hastening, mainstream acceptance generally follows rapidly.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it. —MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER

Play is just another version of work and has an integral role in the human creation of knowledge in all of its forms.

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.

What is the universe computing? As far as we can tell, it is not producing a single answer to a single question…. Instead the universe is computing itself. Powered by Standard Model software, the universe computes quantum fields, chemicals, bacteria, human beings, stars, and galaxies. As it computes, it maps out its own spacetime geometry to the ultimate precision allowed by the laws of physics. Computation is existence. —SETH LLOYD AND Y. JACK NG62

Rather than use wires, communication may rely on exotic mediums such as gravity waves. However, even in this case, although the electromagnetic means of communication may no longer be the cutting edge of an ETI’s communication technology, it is likely to continue to be used for at least some applications (in any case, fL does take into consideration the possibility that a civilization would stop such transmissions).

Many SETI advocates who have studied it carefully argue that it implies that there must be significant numbers of radio-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy alone.

The assumption behind SETI is that life—and intelligent life—is so prevalent that there must be millions if not billions of radio-capable civilizations in the universe (or at least within our light sphere, which refers to radio-broadcasting civilizations that were sending out radio waves early enough to reach Earth by today). Not a single one of them, however, has made itself noticeable to our SETI efforts thus far. So let’s consider the basic SETI assumption regarding the number of radio-capable civilizations from the perspective of the law of accelerating returns.

Computation is already a widely distributed—rather than centralized—resource, and my expectation is that the trend will continue toward greater decentralization. However, as our civilization approaches the densities of computation envisioned above, the distribution of the vast number of processors is likely to have characteristics of these conceptual designs.

Again, the mental experiment we should perform now is not whether contemporary human scientists, such as we are, can perform these engineering feats but whether or not a human civilization that has expanded its intelligence by trillions of trillions will be able to do so. For now we can say that ultrahigh levels of intelligence will expand outward at the speed of light, while recognizing that our contemporary understanding of physics suggests that this may not be the actual limit of the speed of expansion or, even if the speed of light proves to be immutable, that this limit may not restrict reaching other locations quickly through wormholes.

The Fermi Paradox Revisited. Recall that biological evolution is measured in millions and billions of years. So if there are other civilizations out there, they would be spread out in terms of development by huge spans of time.

The SETI assumption implies that there should be billions of ETIs (among all the galaxies), so there should be billions that lie far ahead of us in their technological progress. Yet it takes only a few centuries at most from the advent of computation for such civilizations to expand outward at ...

The conclusion I reach is that it is likely (although not certain) that there are no such other civilizations. In other words, we are in the lead. That’s right, our humble civilization with its pickup trucks, fast food, and persistent conflicts (and computation!) is in th...

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.

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.

How can anyone believe that something so messy is the unique prediction of string theory? It amazes me that people can have such blinkered vision, that they can concentrate just on the final state of the universe, and not ask how and why it got there.

So only in a universe that allowed for increasing complexity could the question even be asked. Stronger versions of the anthropic principle state that there must be more to it; advocates of these versions are not satisfied with a mere lucky coincidence. This has opened the door for advocates of intelligent design to claim that this is the proof of God’s existence that scientists have been asking for.

The Multiverse. Recently a more Darwinian approach to the strong anthropic principle has been proposed. Consider that it is possible for mathematical equations to have multiple solutions. For example, if we solve for x in the equation x2 = 4, x may be 2 or -2. Some equations allow for an infinite number of solutions. In the equation (a-b) x x = 0, x can take on any one of an infinite number of values if a = b (since any number multiplied by zero equals zero). It turns out that the equations for recent string theories allow in principle for an infinite number of solutions. To be more precise, since the spatial and temporal resolution of the universe is limited to the very small Planck constant, the number of solutions is not literally infinite but merely vast. String theory implies, therefore, that many different sets of natural constants are possible.

This has led to the idea of the multiverse: that there exist a vast number of universes, of which our humble universe is only one. Consistent with string theory, each of these univers...

“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.”

Stephen Hawking’s conception of transmissions from a black hole involves particle-antiparticle pairs that are created near the event horizon (the point of no return near a black hole, beyond which matter and energy are unable to escape). When this spontaneous creation occurs, as it does everywhere in space, the particle and antiparticle travel in opposite directions. If one member of the pair travels into the event horizon (never to be seen again), the other will fly away from the black hole.

Assuming that Hawking’s new position is indeed correct, the ultimate computers that we can create would be black holes. Therefore a universe that is well designed to create black holes would be one that is well designed to optimize its intelligence.