The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

I still recall the time in 1968 when I was allowed into the secure, cavernous chamber housing what was then the most powerful computer in New England, a top-of-the-line IBM 360 Model 91, with a remarkable million bytes (one megabyte) of “core” memory, an impressive speed of one million instructions per second (one MIPS), and a rental cost of only one thousand dollars per hour. I had developed a computer program that matched high-school students to colleges, and I watched in fascination as the front-panel lights danced through a distinctive pattern as the machine processed each student’s application.3 Even though I was quite familiar with every line of code, it nonetheless seemed as if the computer were deep in thought when the lights dimmed for several seconds at the denouement of each such cycle. Indeed, it could do flawlessly in ten seconds what took us ten hours to do manually with far less accuracy.

As an inventor in the 1970s, I came to realize that my inventions needed to make sense in terms of the enabling technologies and market forces that would exist when the inventions were introduced, as that world would be a very different one from the one in which they were conceived. I began to develop models of how distinct technologies—electronics, communications, computer processors, memory, magnetic storage, and others—developed and how these changes rippled through markets and ultimately our social institutions. 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.

Our progress in reverse engineering the human brain, a key issue that I will describe in detail in this book, demonstrates that we do indeed have the ability to understand, to model, and to extend our own intelligence. This is one aspect of the uniqueness of our species: our intelligence is just sufficiently above the critical threshold necessary for us to scale our own ability to unrestricted heights of creative power—and we have the opposable appendage (our thumbs) necessary to manipulate the universe to our will.

Consider J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories from this perspective. These tales may be imaginary, but they are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now. Essentially all of the Potter “magic” will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book. Playing quid-ditch and transforming people and objects into other forms will be feasible in full-immersion virtual-reality environments, as well as in real reality, using nanoscale devices.

One might object to this metaphor by pointing out that Hogwartian incantations are brief and therefore do not contain much information compared to, say, the code for a modern software program. But the essential methods of modern technology generally share the same brevity. The principles of operation of software advances such as speech recognition can be written in just a few pages of formulas. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula. The same observation holds for the “inventions” of biological evolution: consider that the genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans, for example, is only a few hundred thousand bytes of information. Although chimps are capable of some intellectual feats, that tiny difference in our genes was sufficient for our species to create the magic of technology.

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR S

CHOPENHAUER (Kindle won't let me highlight the whole word for some reason.)

Consider this parable: a lake owner wants to stay at home to tend to the lake’s fish and make certain that the lake itself will not become covered with lily pads, which are said to double their number every few days. Month after month, he patiently waits, yet only tiny patches of lily pads can be discerned, and they don’t seem to be expanding in any noticeable way. With the lily pads covering less than 1 percent of the lake, the owner figures that it’s safe to take a vacation and leaves with his family. When he returns a few weeks later, he’s shocked to discover that the entire lake has become covered with the pads, and his fish have perished. By doubling their number every few days, the last seven doublings were sufficient to extend the pads’ coverage to the entire lake. (Seven doublings extended their reach 128-fold.) This is the nature of exponential growth.

Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

In the 1950s John von Neumann, the legendary information theorist, was quoted as saying that “the ever-accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

Many scientists and engineers have what I call “scientist’s pessimism.” Often, they are so immersed in the difficulties and intricate details of a contemporary challenge that they fail to appreciate the ultimate long-term implications of their own work, and the larger field of work in which they operate. They likewise fail to account for the far more powerful tools they will have available with each new generation of technology. Scientists are trained to be skeptical, to speak cautiously of current research goals, and to rarely speculate beyond the current generation of scientific pursuit. This may have been a satisfactory approach when a generation of science and technology lasted longer than a human generation, but it does not serve society’s interests now that a generation of scientific and technological progress comprises only a few years.

The converse conceptual error occurs when certain exponential phenomena are first recognized and are applied in an overly aggressive manner without modeling the appropriate pace of growth. While exponential growth gains speed over time, it is not instantaneous. The run-up in capital values (that is, stock market prices) during the “Internet bubble” and related telecommunications bubble (1997–2000) was greatly in excess of any reasonable expectation of even exponential growth. As I demonstrate in the next chapter, the actual adoption of the Internet and e-commerce did show smooth exponential growth through both boom and bust; the overzealous expectation of growth affected only capital (stock) valuations. We have seen comparable mistakes during earlier paradigm shifts—for example, during the early railroad era (1830s), when the equivalent of the Internet boom and bust led to a frenzy of railroad expansion.

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.

Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linear view of the future. That’s why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored).

A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, atoms began to form, as electrons became trapped in orbits around nuclei consisting of protons and neutrons. The electrical structure of atoms made them “sticky.” Chemistry was born a few million years later as atoms came together to create relatively stable structures called molecules. Of all the elements, carbon proved to be the most versatile; it’s able to form bonds in four directions (versus one to three for most other elements), giving rise to complicated, information-rich, three-dimensional structures.

The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work—the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. 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. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the human point of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. —VERNOR VINGE, “THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY,” 1993

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. —IRVING JOHN GOOD, “SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE,” 1965

MOLLY 2004: And what about this Epoch Six? If I stay biological, I’ll be using up all this precious matter and energy in a most inefficient way. You’ll want to turn me into, like, a billion virtual Mollys and Georges, each of them thinking a lot faster than I do now. Seems like there will be a lot of pressure to go over to the other side. RAY: Still, you represent only a tiny fraction of the available matter and energy. Keeping you biological won’t appreciably change the order of magnitude of matter and energy available to the Singularity. It will be well worth it to maintain the biological heritage. GEORGE 2048: Absolutely. RAY: Just like today we seek to preserve the rain forest and the diversity of species.

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …. [T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious.” Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious. —ELIEZER S. YUDKOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996

An important example of this concept is one that represented a key step in the evolution of hominids: the shift in the thumb’s pivot point, which allowed more precise manipulation of the environment.8 Primates such as chimpanzees can grasp but they cannot manipulate objects with either a “power grip,” or sufficient fine-motor coordination to write or to shape objects. A change in the thumb’s pivot point did not significantly increase the complexity of the animal but nonetheless did represent an increase in order, enabling, among other things, the development of technology.

Generally, by the time a paradigm approaches its asymptote in price-performance, the next technical paradigm is already working in niche applications. For example, in the 1950s engineers were shrinking vacuum tubes to provide greater price-performance for computers, until the process became no longer feasible. At this point, around 1960, transistors had already achieved a strong niche market in portable radios and were subsequently used to replace vacuum tubes in computers.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. —POPULAR MECHANICS, 1949

You could buy one transistor for a dollar in 1968; in 2002 a dollar purchased about ten million transistors.

Moore’s paradigm won’t be the last. When Moore’s Law reaches the end of its S-curve, now expected before 2020, the exponential growth will continue with three-dimensional molecular computing, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.

It is important to distinguish between the S-curve that is characteristic of any specific technological paradigm and the continuing exponential growth that is characteristic of the ongoing evolutionary process within a broad area of technology, such as computation. Specific paradigms, such as Moore’s Law, do ultimately reach levels at which exponential growth is no longer feasible. But the growth of computation supersedes any of its underlying paradigms and is for present purposes an ongoing exponential.

As has been discussed, while technology progresses exponentially, we experience it in the linear domain. From the perspective of most observers, nothing was happening in this area until the mid-1990s, when seemingly out of nowhere the World Wide Web and e-mail exploded into view. But the emergence of the Internet into a worldwide phenomenon was readily predictable by examining exponential trend data in the early 1980s from the ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.

In his book A New Kind of Science, Wolfram offers a comprehensive analysis of how the processes underlying a mathematical construction called “a cellular automaton” have the potential to describe every level of our natural world.59 (A cellular automaton is a simple computational mechanism that, for example, changes the color of each cell on a grid based on the color of adjacent or nearby cells according to a transformation rule.) In his view, it is feasible to express all information processes in terms of operations on cellular automata, so Wolfram’s insights bear on several key issues related to information and its pervasiveness. Wolfram postulates that the universe itself is a giant cellular-automaton computer. In his hypothesis there is a digital basis for apparently analog phenomena (such as motion and time) and for formulas in physics, and we can model our understanding of physics as the simple transformations of a cellular automaton.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. —SAMUEL BUTLER, NOTEBOOKS, 1912

We saw the same phenomenon in the Internet and telecommunications boom-and-bust cycles. The booms were fueled by the valid insight that the Internet and distributed electronic communication represented fundamental transformations. But when these transformations did not occur in what were unrealistic time frames, more than two trillion dollars of market capitalization vanished. As I point out below, the actual adoption of these technologies progressed smoothly with no indication of boom or bust.

In 1846 we believe there was not a single garment in our country sewed by machinery; in that year the first American patent of a sewing machine was issued. At the present moment thousands are wearing clothes which have been stitched by iron fingers, with a delicacy rivaling that of a Cashmere maiden. —SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 1853