The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. —JAMES WATSON AND FRANCIS CRICK3 After three billion years of evolution, we have before us the instruction set that carries each of us from the one-cell egg through adulthood to the grave. —DR. ROBERT WATERSTON, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN GENOME SEQUENCING CONSORTIUM4 Underlying all of the wonders of life and misery of disease are information processes, essentially software programs, that are surprisingly compact. The entire human genome is a sequential binary code containing only about eight hundred million bytes of information. As I mentioned earlier, when its massive redundancies are removed using conventional compression techniques, we are left with only thirty to one hundred million bytes, equivalent to the size of an average contemporary software program.5 This code is supported by a set of biochemical machines that translate these linear (one-dimensional) sequences of DNA “letters” into strings of simple building blocks called amino acids, which are in turn folded into three-dimensional proteins, which make up all living creatures from bacteria to humans. (Viruses occupy a niche in between living and nonliving matter but are also composed of fragments of DNA or RNA.) This machinery is essentially a self-replicating nanoscale replicator that builds the elaborate hierarchy of structures and increasingly complex systems that a living creature comprises.