The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Whether our civilization infuses the rest of the universe with its creativity and intelligence quickly or slowly depends on its immutability. In any event the “dumb” matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence, which will constitute the sixth epoch in the evolution of patterns of information. This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe.

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities—on a still-shorter time scale.

We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.

“Singularity” is an English word meaning a unique event with, well, singular implications. The word was adopted by mathematicians to denote a value that transcends any finite limitation, such as the explosion of magnitude that results when dividing a constant by a number that gets closer and closer to zero. Consider, for example, the simple function y = 1/x. As the value of x approaches zero, the value of the function (y) explodes to larger and larger values.

The next field to adopt the word was astrophysics. If a massive star undergoes a supernova explosion, its remnant eventually collapses to the point of apparently zero volume and infinite density, and a “singularity” is created at its center. Because light was thought to be unable to escape the star after it reached this infinite density,16 it was called a black hole.17 It constitutes a rupture in the fabric of space and time.

The first reference to the Singularity as an event capable of rupturing the fabric of human history is John von Neumann’s statement quoted above. In the 1960s, I. J. Good wrote of an “intelligence explosion” resulting from intelligent machines’ designing their next generation without human intervention.

In 1993 Vinge presented a paper to a NASA-organized symposium that described the Singularity as an impending event resulting primarily from the advent of “entities with greater than human intelligence,” which Vinge saw as the harbinger of a runaway phenomenon.

From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces. It represents the nearly vertical phase of exponential growth that occurs when the rate is so extreme that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed.

I emphasize the word “currently” because one of the salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in the nature of our ability to understand. We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology.

Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity). They would change their own thought processes to enable them to think even faster. When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today’s terms).

The rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, right now doubling every decade.

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 brain’s several hundred r...

We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with supercomputers by the end of this decade and with personal-computer-size devices by the end of the following decade. We will have effectiv...

With both the hardware and software needed to fully emulate human intelligence, we can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from th...

When they achieve this level of development, computers will be able to combine the traditional strengths of human intelligence with the strengths of machine intelligence.

The traditional strengths of human intelligence include a formidable ability to recognize patterns. The massively parallel and self-organizing nature of the human brain is an ideal architecture for recognizing patterns that are based on subtle, invariant properties. Humans are also capable of learning new knowledge by applying insights and inferring principles from experience, including information gathered through language. A key capability of human intelligence is the ability to create mental models of reality and to conduct mental “what-if” experiments by varying aspects of these models.

The traditional strengths of machine intelligence include the ability to remember billions of facts preci...

Another advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that once a skill is mastered by a machine, it can be performed repeatedly at high speed, ...

Perhaps most important, machines can share their knowledge at extremely high speed, compared to the very slow speed of human ...

Nonbiological intelligence will be able to download skills and knowledge from other machines, ...

Machines will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light (about three hundred million meters per second), compared to about one hundred meters per second for the electrochemical signals used in biological mammalian...

Machines will have access via the Internet to all the knowledge of our human-machine civilization and will be able...

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling ...

The combination of these traditional strengths (the pattern-recognition ability of biological human intelligence and the speed, memory capacity and accuracy, and knowledge and skill-sharing abiliti...

Machine intelligence will have complete freedom of design and architecture (that is, they won’t be constrained by biological limitations, such as the slow switching speed of our interneuronal connections or a fixed s...

Once nonbiological intelligence combines the traditional strengths of both humans and machines, the nonbiological portion of our civilization’s intelligence will then continue to benefit from the double exponential...

Once machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology as humans do, only at far higher speeds and capacities, they will have access to their own designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them. Humans are now accomplishing something similar through biotechnology (changing the genetic and other information processes underlying our biology), but in a much slower...

Biology has inherent limitations. For example, every living organism must be built from proteins that are folded from one-dimensional strings of amino acids. Protein-based mechanisms are lacking in strength and speed. We will be able to reengineer all of the organs and...

human intelligence does have a certain amount of plasticity (ability to change its structure), more so than had previously been understood. But the architecture of the human brain is nonetheless profoundly limited.

there is room for only about one hundred trillion interneuronal connections in each of our skulls. A key genetic change that allowed for the greater cognitive ability of humans compared to that of our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.

This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent limit to the brain’s capacity. Machines will be able to reformulate their own designs and augment their own capacities without limit. By using nanotechnology-based designs, their capabilities will b...

Machines will also benefit from using very fast three-dimensional molecular circuits. Today’s electronic circuits are more than one million times faster than the electrochemical switching used in mammalian brains. Tomorrow’s molecular circuits will be based on devices such as nanotubes, which are tiny cylinders of carbon atoms that measure about ten atoms across and are five hundred times smaller than today’s silicon-based transistors. Since the signals have less distance to travel, they will also be able to operate at teraher...

The rate of technological change will not be limited to human mental speeds. Machine intelligence will improve its own abilities in a feedback cycle that unaided h...

This cycle of machine intelligence’s iteratively improving its own design will become faster and faster. This is in fact exactly what is predicted by the formula for continued acceleration of the rate of paradigm shift. One of the objections that has been raised to the continuation of the acceleration of paradigm shift is that it ultimately becomes much too fast for humans to follow, and so therefore, it’s argued, it cann...

Along with the accelerating improvement cycle of nonbiological intelligence, nanotechnology will enable the manipulation of phys...

Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will n...

Nanobots will interact with biological neurons to vastly extend human experience by creating virtual reality ...

Billions of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain will also vastly ext...

Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year. In contrast, biological intelligence is effectively of fixed capa...

Nanobots will also enhance the environment by reversing pollution from ear...

Nanobots called foglets that can manipulate image and sound waves will bring the morphing qualities of virtu...

The human ability to understand and respond appropriately to emotion (so-called emotional intelligence) is one of the forms of human intelligence that will be understood and mastered by future machine intelligence. Some of our emotional responses are tuned to optimize our intelligence in the context of our limited and frail biological bodies. Future machine intelligence will also have “bodies” (for example, virtual bodies in virtual reality, or projections in real reality using foglets) in order to interact with the world, but these nanoengineered bodies will be far more capable and durable than biological h...

As virtual reality from within the nervous system becomes competitive with real reality in terms of resolution and believability, our experiences will increasingly take place in virtual environments.

In virtual reality, we can be a different person both physically and emotionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a different body for you than you might select for yourself (and vice versa).

The law of accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelligence comes close to “saturating” the matter and energy in our vicinity of the universe with our human-machine intelligence. By saturating, I mean utilizing the matter and energy patterns for computation to an optimal degree, based on our understanding of the physics of computation. As we approach this limit, the intelligence of our civilization will continue its expansion in capability by spreading outward towar...

Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. (See chapter 6.) We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current “dumb,”...

The length of time it will take the universe to become intelligent to this extent depends on whether or not the speed of light is an immutable limit. There are indications of possible subtle exceptions (or circumventions) to this limit, which, if they exist, the vast intel...

This, then, is the Singularity. Some would say that we cannot comprehend it, at least with our current level of understanding. For that reason, we cannot look past its event horizon and make complete sense of what lies beyond. Th...