Motus Mentis

In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”.

The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, and then technological — which, if extrapolated into the future, predicts that something extraordinary is about to happen.

Kurzweil was one of the many speakers at this weekend’s inaugural World Science Festival here in New York. He has an impressive track record:

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century’ blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year ”” Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,’ he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.

The Singularity has been on a lot of people’s minds lately, including my own. If Kurzweil is right, the convergence of accelerating accomplishments in nanotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, computer science, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence will soon result in a cascading series of mutually supportive breakthroughs that will amount to a discontinuous historical disruption, the anthropological equivalent of the “singularities” at the heart of black holes. And, to pursue the metaphor further: just as has been suggested for black holes, the technological Singularity will be a wormhole to an utterly different human universe. As Kurzweil imagines it, our mastery of biology will make us immortal, and with the prosthetic enhancements made possible by information-processing and neurobiological breakthroughs, our brains — and the minds that they are host to — will be transformed beyond imagining. Our generation will be the last to age, to die. It will be the end — the swift and sudden end — of our race’s long childhood, and those who cross the bridge will be as different from 20th-century man as he in turn was from his Paleocene ancestors.

Not everyone is buying all this pie in the sky, of course. Nobody disputes that Kurzweil is a mighty smart cookie, however — and that as a haruspex, so far he’s been as reliable as they come. But he does make some large assumptions.

First, he is confident that it is in principle possible to create not only artificial intelligence, but also artificial consciousness. This is far from given, though; I think that, despite the claims of functionalist AI, there may well be physical properties of biological brains that are necessary for consciousness in some way that we do not yet understand. That being said, however, there is in principle no reason we couldn’t design and build those ourselves too, once we have the necessary theoretical understanding and technical skill. To create conscious machinery of our own design, whether built of biological material or on some other substrate, would be the first step toward re-embodying our own minds as our bodies fail.

His second, and much larger, assumption is that the Singularity would be a benign event. But one can imagine — and indeed the notion has been a staple of science fiction for decades — that it might lead to any number of catastrophic outcomes; one popular example is the sudden emergence of a conscious, artificial Mind that sees fit to enslave or annihilate us.

But it is hard to resist Kurzweil’s main point, which is that the pace of change is accelerating in an obvious and predictable way, and that something is bound to happen. He estimates it will be upon us in another twenty to thirty years. For those of us who can live that long, he assures us, there is a good chance that we may never die.

I’d certainly like to be around, I have to say, if for no other reason than to see what how things turn out. I’m only 52, so I ought to make it, one would think — but I have a tendency to hypertension, am far from abstemious as regards dining and drink, and own a body that has been through a lot of what is romantically called “hard livin'”. I’ve scoffed at the suggestion that one might eke out a few more years of life by giving up everything that would make one want a few more years of life — but a couple of decades of ascetic self-denial in exchange for a millennia-long re-enlistment as some sort of godlike Ubermensch would be a different equation altogether. Will the Singularity make us any wiser? No, and therein lies one of its greatest perils. But it may at last give us the lifespan to have a chance to be.

To some, the whole idea is repugnant: hubristic, grotesquely unnatural, and even sinful. That we should be tampering with affairs in this way here on Earth — playing God, it seems to some — when our real chance at eternal life awaits us after death, seems the darkest and most misguided of all possible ambitions. But readers will probably already know that this isn’t how I view the world at all: I think that we are utterly, entirely on our own, and that if we are ever going to get to Heaven, we are going to have to build it ourselves.

You can read the article in the Times here (there are more links on the story’s sidebar), read an interesting profile of Kurzweil here, and have a look at Wikipedia’s article on the Singularity here.