What Kurzwil did was to chart a
number of proxies for technological development. As with Moore
Thus certain obvious objectives
are now in sight. Recall that in 1970,
myself and others had no difficulty anticipating the desktop by 1980, and the
internet, if not what form it would take, before the turn of the century. I understood the latter would lead
immediately to an explosion in research results as the knowledge industry
suddenly stopped duplication of effort and became near instantaneous. We are living through that now.
For me, the pleasant surprise is
that we have not broken pace since 1970 and are today closer to 2045 that
1970. I no longer think we will break
pace. The next twenty years will see a
doubling of human talent applied to technology in general. By then we will have machine supported
research underway.
It is reasonable to presume that by
2045 we will have the GOD machine in place and it will be communicating with
its equivalent operating outside of Earth.
Long before that we will have our own magnetic field exclusion vessels (MFEV)
with which to visit already existing space habitats in the Solar System.
Read the following to provide
some sense of just how fast this is all happening. This is a must read if you expect to be alive
thirty five years from now.
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
By LEV
GROSSMAN Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
Technologist Raymond Kurzweil has a radical vision for humanity's immortal
future
Photo-Illustration by Ryan Schude for TIME
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student
named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got
a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short
musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an
unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America
On the show (see the clip on
YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the
comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.(See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a
desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The
panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's
age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs.
Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been
President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out
what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities
we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're
not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity,
the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is
to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic
intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it.
Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that
we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just
intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our
bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly
transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent.
According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is
about 35 years away.(See the best inventions of 2010.)
Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are
getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting
faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there
might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable
to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be
put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they
create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing
piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions,
appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.
If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very
smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason
to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on
developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of
development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their
own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer
scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work
incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It
wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.
Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these
smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share
the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there
are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become
super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities
the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the
artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong
our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into
computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the
computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these
theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something
that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This
transformation has a name: the Singularity.(Comment on this story.)
The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the
Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no
more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a
serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual
gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves
super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while
the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea
that rewards sober, careful evaluation.
People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old
The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the
British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an
"intelligence explosion":
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.
The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers
to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the
rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction
novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At
a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will
have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after,
the human era will be ended."
By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been
busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes
as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software
company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first
print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No.
1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music
synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary
doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of
Technology.(See pictures of adorable robots.)
But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has
been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20
years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller
when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil,
Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January.
(Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one,
less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.
In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could
pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in
Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he
speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public
lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all
the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's
good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring
you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this
is what they say, so what else can I tell you?
Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980
largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of
technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before
their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing
was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that
the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project,"
he says. "So it's like skeet shooting — you can't shoot at the target."
He knew about Moore
As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore
Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key
technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the
rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He
looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost
of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of
Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing:
exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these
trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom
times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns:
technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.
Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains."
Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully
reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade,
computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date
of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year,
he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions
in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be
about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.(See how robotics are changing the future of medicine.)
The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those
people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a
subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the
Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but
intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as
Singularitarians.
Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room
inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the
Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But
Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they
believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest
in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're
walking around living your life and watching TV as if the
artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely
everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's
distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and
Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their
mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard
ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of
humanity. Expect turbulence.
In addition to the Singularity
University , which Kurzweil co-founded,
there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco Summit
At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there
were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists,
nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a
professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the
professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The
atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of
seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing
politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed
out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.
After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010
summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as
permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but
solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other,
and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian
ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny
it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.
For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical
degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of
DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres
get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore
and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process;
it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular
non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School
Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension
researchers and a Singularity Summit Cambridge
Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he
was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's
genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35.
Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine,
Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which
involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is
essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological
perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.
But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.
It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In
"Sailing to Byzantium
Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a
fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of
the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and
backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the
question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.
The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this
question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we
associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or
Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain,
like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an
extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties.
They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly
narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called
strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.
Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially
growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are
things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter
how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates
the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and
analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of
the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit
Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones.
Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable
from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing
test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in
a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human
being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially
mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine
with no ghost in it? And how would we know?
Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still
staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness
into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics
of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line
between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience
and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we
have lost our essential humanity?
Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated
with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't
know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly
created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel
like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity
Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but
also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg
to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is
a basic Darwinian error.(Comment on this story.)
If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers
whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the
Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical
and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to
implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just
drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who
we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the
tools."
Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He
relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond
to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.
Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth."
This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among
Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005
the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at
the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne , Switzerland
By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our
linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about
it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him
kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people
look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and
harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept,
yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some
point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to
really look."
In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the
power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the
molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's
worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin
We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual
existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of
space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human
intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the
universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species.(See the costs of living a long life.)
Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action
will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of
the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just
continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.
But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all
around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more
you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five
years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives
over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you
didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were
going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld
network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable
step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?
Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants.
Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than
2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan
A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be
the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding
Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as
hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast
as the future.
But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about
the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You
may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you
should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is
grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its
own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after
another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a
millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more
powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40
years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out,
you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think
further inside it than anyone ever has before.
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