The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT

I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can’t get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

The massive parallelism of the human brain is the key to its pattern-recognition ability, which is one of the pillars of our species’ thinking.

The brain is imperfect. It is the nature of complex adaptive systems that the emergent intelligence of its decisions is suboptimal. (That is, it reflects a lower level of intelligence than would be represented by an optimal arrangement of its elements.) It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche

Brain-scanning studies are also revealing mechanisms to inhibit unneeded and undesirable memories, a finding that would gratify Sigmund Freud.70 Using fMRI, Stanford University scientists asked study subjects to attempt to forget information that they had earlier memorized. During this activity, regions in the frontal cortex that have been associated with memory repression showed a high level of activity, while the hippocampus, the region normally associated with remembering, was relatively inactive. These findings “confirm the existence of an active forgetting process and establish a neurobiological model for guiding inquiry into motivated forgetting,” wrote Stanford psychology professor John Gabrieli and his colleagues. Gabrieli also commented, “The big news is that we’ve shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism, and it has a biological basis. It gets you past the possibility that there’s nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory—that it was all a misunderstood fiction.”

Interestingly, we are able to predict or anticipate our own decisions. Work by physiology professor Benjamin Libet at the University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to initiate an action actually occurs about a third of a second before the brain has made the decision to take the action. The implication, according to Libet, is that the decision is really an illusion, that “consciousness is out of the loop.” The cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the phenomenon as follows: “The action is originally precipitated in some part of the brain, and off fly the signals to muscles, pausing en route to tell you, the conscious agent, what is going on (but like all good officials letting you, the bumbling president, maintain the illusion that you started it all).”114

Bernoulli’s principle: a gas (such as air) travels more quickly over a curved surface than over a flat surface. Thus, air pressure over a curved surface is lower than over a flat surface. By understanding, focusing, and amplifying the implications of this subtle observation, our engineering created all of aviation.

“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

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

Is death desirable? The “inevitability” of death is deeply ingrained in human thinking. If death seems unavoidable, we have little choice but to rationalize it as necessary, even ennobling. The technology of the Singularity will provide practical and accessible means for humans to evolve into something greater, so we will no longer need to rationalize death as a primary means of giving meaning to life.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. —H. L. MENCKEN

A primary role of traditional religion is deathist rationalization—that is, rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing. Malcolm Muggeridge articulates the common view that “if it weren’t for death, life would be unbearable.” But the explosion of art, science, and other forms of knowledge that the Singularity will bring will make life more than bearable; it will make life truly meaningful.

Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do. —CARL JUNG