The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

no matter what quandaries we face—business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time—there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.

veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.

Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

Over the last twenty years, I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

“the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

A story can be regarded as a meaningful pattern of information,

the destiny of the human-machine civilization, a destiny we have come to refer to as the Singularity.

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

What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.

within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.

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.

There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods.

First we build the tools, then they build us. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN

“Singularity” is an English word meaning a unique event with, well, singular implications.

The Singularity involves the following principles, which I will document, develop, analyze, and contemplate throughout the rest of this book: • The rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, right now doubling every decade.28 • 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...

The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process.

(Paradigm shifts are major changes in methods and intellectual processes to accomplish tasks; examples include written language and the computer.)

One concept of complexity is the minimum amount of meaningful, non-random, but unpredictable information needed to characterize a system or process.

Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose.

We can summarize the principles of the law of accelerating returns as follows: • Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As described in the previous chapter, each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage. Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. By the time of the Singularity, there won’t be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution. Progress (further increases in order) will then be based on thinking processes that occur at the speed of light rather than in very slow electrochemical reactions. Each stage of evolution builds on the fruits of the last stage, so the rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases at least exponentially over time. Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases. • An evolutionary process is not a closed system; evolution draws upon the chaos in the larger sys...

quantum computer contains a series of qubits, which essentially are zero and one at the same time. The qubit is based on the fundamental ambiguity inherent in quantum mechanics. In a quantum computer, the qubits are represented by a quantum property of particles—for example, the spin state of individual electrons. When the qubits are in an “entangled” state, each one is simultaneously in both states. In a process called “quantum decoherence” the ambiguity of each qubit is resolved, leaving an unambiguous sequence of ones and zeroes. If the quantum computer is set up in the right way, that decohered sequence will represent the solution to a problem. Essentially, only the correct sequence survives the process of decoherence.

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

There are a number of other key ways in which the brain differs from a conventional computer: • The brains circuits are very slow. Synaptic-reset and neuron-stabilization times (the amount of time required for a neuron and its synapses to reset themselves after the neuron fires) are so slow that there are very few neuron-firing cycles available to make pattern-recognition decisions. Functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) and magneto-encephalography (MEG) scans show that judgments that do not require resolving ambiguities appear to be made in a single neuron-firing cycle (less than twenty milliseconds), involving essentially no iterative (repeated) processes. Recognition of objects occurs in about 150 milliseconds, so that even if we “think something over,” the number of cycles of operation is measured in hundreds or thousands at most, not billions, as with a typical computer. • But it’s massively parallel. The brain has on the order of one hundred trillion interneuronal connections, each potentially processing information simultaneously. These two factors (slow cycle time and massive parallelism) result in a certain level of computational capacity for the brain, as we discussed earlier. Today our largest supercomputers are approaching this range. The leading supercomputers (including those used by the most popular search engines) measure over 1014 cps, which matches the lower range of the estimates I discussed in chapter 3 for functional simulation. It is not necessa...

Intelligence will inherently find a way to influence the world, including creating its own means for embodiment and physical manipulation.

As the Singularity approaches we will have to reconsider our ideas about the nature of human life and redesign our human institutions.

We Are Becoming Cyborgs. The human body version 2.0 scenario represents the continuation of a long-standing trend in which we grow more intimate with our technology. Computers started out as large, remote machines in air-conditioned rooms tended by white-coated technicians. They moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now into our pockets. Soon, we’ll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. By the 2030s we will become more nonbiological than biological.

Is all what we see or seem, but a dream within a dream? —EDGAR ALLAN POE

To me, being a Singularitarian means many things, of which the following is a small sampling. These reflections articulate my personal philosophy, not a proposal for a new doctrine. • We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever.2 Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life-extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won’t make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging processes in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene. • In this spirit I am aggressively reprogramming my biochemistry, which is now altogether different than it would otherwise be.3 Taking supplements and medications is not a last resort to be reserved only for when something goes wrong. There is already something wrong. Our bodies are governed by obsolete genetic programs that evolved in a bygone era, so we need to overcome our genetic heritage. We already have the knowledge to begin to accomplish this, something I am committed to doing. • My body is temporary. Its particles turn over almost completely every month. Only the pattern of my body and brain have continuity. • We should strive to improve these patterns by optimizing the health of our bodies and extending the reach of our minds. Ultimately, we will be able to vastly expand our mental faculties by merging with our technology. • We need a body, but once ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. —CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Technology has always been a mixed blessing, bringing us benefits such as longer and healthier lifespans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many novel creative possibilities on the one hand, while introducing new dangers. Technology empowers both our creative and destructive natures.

Strong AI promises to continue the exponential gains of human civilization.

But the dangers it presents are also profound precisely because of its amplification of intelligence. Intelligence is inherently impossible to control,

Eliezer Yudkowsky has extensively analyzed paradigms, architectures, and ethical rules that may help assure that once strong AI has the means of accessing and modifying its own design it remains friendly to biological humanity and supportive of its values. Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to “get it right the first time,” and that its initial design must have “zero nonrecoverable errors.”

Decentralization. One profound trend already well under way that will provide greater stability is the movement from centralized technologies to distributed ones and from the real world to the virtual world discussed above. Centralized technologies involve an aggregation of resources such as people (for example, cities, buildings), energy (such as nuclear-power plants, liquid-natural-gas and oil tankers, energy pipelines), transportation (airplanes, trains), and other items. Centralized technologies are subject to disruption and disaster. They also tend to be inefficient, wasteful, and harmful to the environment. Distributed technologies, on the other hand, tend to be flexible, efficient, and relatively benign in their environmental effects. The quintessential distributed technology is the Internet. The Internet has not been substantially disrupted to date, and as it continues to grow, its robustness and resilience continue to strengthen. If any hub or channel does go down, information simply routes around it.

Human Centrality. A common view is that science has consistently been correcting our overly inflated view of our own significance. Stephen Jay Gould said, “The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.”