Kurzweil's Singularity

[Balder]

It looks like Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, is being made into a movie and will be released later this year:

 

"The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future, based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times best selling book, will be a full-length motion picture slated for theatrical release in 2010. The movie intertwines a fast-paced A-line documentary with a B-line narrative story."

 

Here's an excerpt from a Q&A overview of Kurzweil's singularity thesis:

 

So what is the Singularity?

 

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of

human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of

information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their

knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and

our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity,

full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”),

"experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human

intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating

species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

 

And that’s the Singularity?

 

No, that’s just the precursor. Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own

design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll

get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence

will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.

 

When will that occur?

 

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.

 

Why is this called the Singularity?

 

The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics

community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we

also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can

we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its

intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless,

just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual

thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful

enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. That’s what

I’ve tried to do in this book.

 

Okay, let’s break this down. It seems a key part of your thesis is that we will be

able to capture the intelligence of our brains in a machine.

 

Indeed.

 

So how are we going to achieve that?

 

We can break this down further into hardware and software requirements. In the book, I

show how we need about 10 quadrillion (1016) calculations per second (cps) to provide a

functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. Some estimates are lower than this

by a factor of 100. Supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (1014) cps, and will hit 1016

cps around the end of this decade. Several supercomputers with 1 quadrillion cps are

already on the drawing board, with two Japanese efforts targeting 10 quadrillion cps

around the end of the decade. By 2020, 10 quadrillion cps will be available for around

$1,000. Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on

this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is now pretty much of a

mainstream view among informed observers. Now the controversy is focused on the

algorithms.

 

And how will we recreate the algorithms of human intelligence?

 

To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the

human brain. Here, progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and

temporal (time) resolution of brain scanning is also progressing at an exponential rate,

roughly doubling each year, like most everything else having to do with information. Just

recently, scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections, and watch them

fire in real time. Already, we have mathematical models and simulations of a couple

dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the

neurons in the brain. IBM is now creating a simulation of about 10,000 cortical neurons,

including tens of millions of connections. The first version will simulate the electrical

activity, and a future version will also simulate the relevant chemical activity. By the

mid 2020s, it’s conservative to conclude that we will have effective models for all of the

brain.

 

So at that point we’ll just copy a human brain into a supercomputer?

 

I would rather put it this way: At that point, we’ll have a full understanding of the

methods of the human brain. One benefit will be a deep understanding of ourselves, but

the key implication is that it will expand the toolkit of techniques we can apply to create

artificial intelligence. We will then be able to create nonbiological systems that match

human intelligence in the ways that humans are now superior, for example, our patternrecognition

abilities. These superintelligent computers will be able to do things we are

not able to do, such as share knowledge and skills at electronic speeds.

 

By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more

powerful than a human brain. Keep in mind also that computers will not be organized as

discrete objects as they are today. There will be a web of computing deeply integrated

into the environment, our bodies and brains.

 

You mentioned the AI tool kit. Hasn’t AI failed to live up to its expectations?

 

There was a boom and bust cycle in AI during the 1980s, similar to what we saw recently

in e-commerce and telecommunications. Such boom-bust cycles are often harbingers of

true revolutions; recall the railroad boom and bust in the 19th century. But just as the

Internet “bust” was not the end of the Internet, the so-called “AI Winter” was not the end

of the story for AI either. There are hundreds of applications of “narrow AI” (machine

intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks) now permeating

our modern infrastructure. Every time you send an email or make a cell phone call,

intelligent algorithms route the information. AI programs diagnose electrocardiograms

with an accuracy rivaling doctors, evaluate medical images, fly and land airplanes, guide

intelligent autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for over a trillion

dollars of funds, and guide industrial processes. These were all research projects a couple

of decades ago. If all the intelligent software in the world were to suddenly stop

functioning, modern civilization would grind to a halt. Of course, our AI programs are

not intelligent enough to organize such a conspiracy, at least not yet.

 

Why don’t more people see these profound changes ahead?

 

Hopefully after they read my new book, they will. But the primary failure is the inability

of many observers to think in exponential terms. Most long-range forecasts of what is

technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future

developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history

rather than the “historical exponential” view. My models show that we are doubling the

paradigm-shift rate every decade. Thus the 20th century was gradually speeding up to the

rate of progress at the end of the century; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to

about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of

progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years.

 

To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological

advance in the 21st century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress

(again, when measured by the rate of progress in 2000), or about 1,000 times greater than

what was achieved in the 20th century.

 

The exponential growth of information technologies is even greater: we’re doubling the

power of information technologies, as measured by price-performance, bandwidth,

capacity and many other types of measures, about every year. That’s a factor of a

thousand in ten years, a million in twenty years, and a billion in thirty years. This goes

far beyond Moore’s law (the shrinking of transistors on an integrated circuit, allowing us

to double the price-performance of electronics each year). Electronics is just one

example of many. As another example, it took us 14 years to sequence HIV; we recently

sequenced SARS in only 31 days.

 

So this acceleration of information technologies applies to biology as well?

 

Absolutely. It’s not just computer devices like cell phones and digital cameras that are

accelerating in capability. Ultimately, everything of importance will be comprised

essentially of information technology. With the advent of nanotechnology-based

manufacturing in the 2020s, we’ll be able to use inexpensive table-top devices to

manufacture on-demand just about anything from very inexpensive raw materials using

information processes that will rearrange matter and energy at the molecular level.

 

We’ll meet our energy needs using nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture

the energy in .03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to

meet our projected energy needs in 2030. We’ll store the energy in highly distributed

fuel cells.

 

I want to come back to both biology and nanotechnology, but how can you be so

sure of these developments? Isn’t technical progress on specific projects

essentially unpredictable?

 

Predicting specific projects is indeed not feasible. But the result of the overall complex,

chaotic evolutionary process of technological progress is predictable.

 

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

periods. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace of

change increases over time, unexamined intuition leaves one with the impression that

change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. From the

mathematician’s perspective, the reason for this is that an exponential curve looks like a

straight line when examined for only a brief duration. As a result, even sophisticated

commentators, when considering the future, typically use the current pace of change to

determine their expectations in extrapolating progress over the next ten years or one

hundred years. This is why I describe this way of looking at the future as the “intuitive

linear” view. But a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that

technological change is exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary

process, of which technology is a primary example.

 

As I show in the book, this has also been true of biological evolution. Indeed,

technological evolution emerges from biological evolution. You can examine the data in

different ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies, ranging

from electronic to biological, as well as for their implications, ranging from the amount

of human knowledge to the size of the economy, and you get the same exponential—not

linear—progression. I have over forty graphs in the book from a broad variety of fields

that show the exponential nature of progress in information-based measures. For the

price-performance of computing, this goes back over a century, well before Gordon

Moore was even born.

 

Aren’t there are a lot of predictions of the future from the past that look a little

ridiculous now?

 

Yes, any number of bad predictions from other futurists in earlier eras can be cited to

support the notion that we cannot make reliable predictions. In general, these

prognosticators were not using a methodology based on a sound theory of technology

evolution. I say this not just looking backwards now. I’ve been making accurate

forward-looking predictions for over twenty years based on these models....

 

What will the impact of these developments be?

 

Radical life extension, for one.

 

Sounds interesting, how does that work?

 

In the book, I talk about three great overlapping revolutions that go by the letters “GNR,”

which stands for genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Each will provide a dramatic

increase to human longevity, among other profound impacts. We’re in the early stages of

the genetics—also called biotechnology—revolution right now. Biotechnology is

providing the means to actually change your genes: not just designer babies but designer

baby boomers. We’ll also be able to rejuvenate all of your body’s tissues and organs by

transforming your skin cells into youthful versions of every other cell type. Already, new

drug development is precisely targeting key steps in the process of atherosclerosis (the

cause of heart disease), cancerous tumor formation, and the metabolic processes

underlying each major disease and aging process. The biotechnology revolution is

already in its early stages and will reach its peak in the second decade of this century, at

which point we’ll be able to overcome most major diseases and dramatically slow down

the aging process.

 

That will bring us to the nanotechnology revolution, which will achieve maturity in the

2020s. With nanotechnology, we will be able to go beyond the limits of biology, and

replace your current “human body version 1.0” with a dramatically upgraded version 2.0,

providing radical life extension.

 

And how does that work?

 

The “killer app” of nanotechnology is “nanobots,” which are blood-cell sized robots that

can travel in the bloodstream destroying pathogens, removing debris, correcting DNA

errors, and reversing aging processes.

 

Human body version 2.0?

 

We’re already in the early stages of augmenting and replacing each of our organs, even

portions of our brains with neural implants, the most recent versions of which allow

patients to download new software to their neural implants from outside their bodies. In

the book, I describe how each of our organs will ultimately be replaced. For example,

nanobots could deliver to our bloodstream an optimal set of all the nutrients, hormones,

and other substances we need, as well as remove toxins and waste products. The

gastrointestinal tract could be reserved for culinary pleasures rather than the tedious

biological function of providing nutrients. After all, we’ve already in some ways

separated the communication and pleasurable aspects of sex from its biological function.

 

And the third revolution?

 

The robotics revolution, which really refers to “strong” AI, that is, artificial intelligence

at the human level, which we talked about earlier. We’ll have both the hardware and

software to recreate human intelligence by the end of the 2020s. We’ll be able to

improve these methods and harness the speed, memory capabilities, and knowledgesharing

ability of machines.

 

We’ll ultimately be able to scan all the salient details of our brains from inside, using

billions of nanobots in the capillaries. We can then back up the information. Using

nanotechnology-based manufacturing, we could recreate your brain, or better yet

reinstantiate it in a more capable computing substrate.

 

Which means?

 

Our biological brains use chemical signaling, which transmit information at only a few

hundred feet per second. Electronics is already millions of times faster than this. In the

book, I show how one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be about one hundred

million times more powerful than the human brain. So we’ll have more powerful means

of instantiating our intelligence than the extremely slow speeds of our interneuronal

connections.

 

So we’ll just replace our biological brains with circuitry?

 

I see this starting with nanobots in our bodies and brains. The nanobots will keep us

healthy, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide

direct brain-to-brain communication over the Internet, and otherwise greatly expand

human intelligence. But keep in mind that nonbiological intelligence is doubling in

capability each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially fixed in capacity.

As we get to the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

 

The closest life extension technology, however, is biotechnology, isn’t that right?

 

There’s certainly overlap in the G, N and R revolutions, but that’s essentially correct.

 

[Read Ray's full Q & A here.]

 

[xibalba]

HI balder

what is your take on artificial intelligence?

[Balder]

I don't know. I think Kurzweil's predictions ride largely on a rather large assumption: human-like consciousness = adequate complexity of circuitry. That may be the case, but it's not clear that we really understand consciousness well enough to just "assume" that. It may be worthwhile just to proceed on that assumption and see what happens. But consciousness may also involve or depend on more than he has accounted for.

[xibalba]

yes that reminds me of the paper of KW´s "the terror of tomorrow" as a response to Bill Joy´s paper´s"Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".


see link http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/terror_tomorrow.cfm/

[Christophe]

A Singularity Cinematic Movie? Good idea. I'm looking forward to it.

IMO it's in no way for sure that the Singularity will happen in the predicted way. Even Mr. Kurzweil himself allows for some scepticism, he publicly admitted on his website that he might have been wrong. The same scepticism is appropriate to the whole 2012 mythos. But, as we all know, to be skeptic about an event doesn't mean that it's not gonna happen.

Wilbers "Terror of tomorrow" text is pretty much pre 9/11. It's Habermas mixed with Aurobindo, and some rather lame "general orientations" like Jack the Ripper and the Nazi Straw Dog.

Reading this passage by Edwin Firmage "How do you change the souls of human beings? You have to go where law can't get you...." I am reminded of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" about the clean slate, the Waterboarding interrogation technique, and other brainwashing methods. If the soul doesn't fit the law, you gotta cut it down until it fits. An american story...? Wilber's gotta do an update about this. Where' the "Terror" Trilogy? Just an empty promise?

[...]

cheers

[Grey Drane]

Balder said:

I think Kurzweil's predictions ride largely on a rather large assumption: human-like consciousness = adequate complexity of circuitry. That may be the case, but it's not clear that we really understand consciousness well enough to just "assume" that.

Yeah, Kurzweil maybe sees things in too much of an anthropocentric sense. I prefer Kevin Kelly's thinking in terms of his concept of the "Technium" (see http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/). Not sure I can do this idea justice in a quick summary right now, so I'll just let you all look into it for yourselves if you're not already familiar with it.

~G

[xibalba]

Hi Balder

I remember have read that great science-fiction novel of Isaac Asimov "Fantastic voyage", very prophetic a narrative in the nanotechnological sense . There are apparently undreamed treatment opportunities in medical context for exemple, once we have groundly mastered that technology, but it is probably going to happen much later in time than claimed by Ray. The law of Moore is not so adequate a representation of a meta-development of this magnitude I believe while some its non-linear charateristics are very valuable to use as a theoretical construction.

cheers

[Edward theurj Berge]

Also see Balder's related video Technopolypse. My comment to it was also relevant here:

It seems many visions of the transhuman are disembodied, like robotics or transferring our consciousness into a virtual reality. Or at the very least enhancing the human with machinery, like those mechanical suits worn in Avatar. Here's from a review of a book (see citation) that goes in the other direction, back to embodiment and away from the "subject" of modernism, in which the usual transhuman visions like the above are still embedded to create a super human subject. A few excerpts:

"The problem with much of what passes for posthumanism (or sometimes transhumanism) is that it is not sufficiently posthuman....[it] explicitly grounds the post/transhumanist project in notions of human perfectibility, rationality, and agency....[or] promotion of the new science as a tool of human mastery over the natural world.....[it] is not abandoning the autonomous liberal subject but is expanding its prerogatives into the realm of the posthuman."

Instead it might be more like the following:

"Articulating a more persistent posthumanism by combining the insights of second order systems theorists Humberto Maturana, Fransisco Varela and especially Niklas Luhmann with those of Jacques Derrida....[that] entails the effacement of any presumed ontological divide between the human and the animal.....[and] ensure that this effacement is not undertaken in ways that reinscribe the very assumptions that produced the animal/human divide in the first place."

Here we find notions more like Jake in Avatar, the human-alien (or animal) hybrid (centaur), who integrates so-called primitive body-based culture into his more "reasoned" humanity that reconnects (reconstructs) us to something larger than the modern subject.

Sacasas, M. Reviewing Cary Wolfe's What is Posthumanism? in rhizomes 20, 2010.

[valli]

folks,
Are we there yet, in a new world these days? and theres no need to be brave. I could dig this.

from two Post human views – one, humanism is dispensable, sees humanos as a failed species - leitkultur, as something other than human. Actually sees itself as something beyond human post self dismissal. . And the other – humanism evolves way up to the next level, singularity all over, that it is unrecognizable – this may chime transcend and include, the former likes elimination
(Two ends of the spectrum, arguably extremes are a minimal ground for a singularity. Given that singularity isn’t wishful thinking, and if there’s a crises of such an order. it is possible interim realities are not viable. Of course the dramatic need for a resolution is reductionist, but then extended realities of unqualifiable/unknowable stretches looks like pukka ground to dispense with singularities, say, by already being one. And maybe another, which is ok, since nothing is as it was. I’ll just take the two ends since the rest is in between anyway !)
Lets say there's one flick in which you have two uberkinds coming out of the same secreto project , one with view one and the other with the other view. Lets expand the frame for mr.kurzweil. a linear thriller of incomprehensible self fulfilling blue prints by neural networks and nobody gets laid. Happy endings get delivered by phytochemicals through cellscapes , and get closer to home when excitement is scheduled. But after the break , there's a turn, something like delinking outcomes from events become markers for potential. Haha. Guess who has the trick….
in real time, The irreconcilable story is out there – that technology advances exponentially and the humaneo is in a sweat, teary, distant and divisive. Gets the fancy of the post/transhuman , media, scientific junta and has a big audience now.
And so the main story gets over written. Of passion that spans every shade of cultural time and space. laid to rest. The divide is all well, undercover. Comes to mind Chomsky on the spectacular success of propaganda. Drama isn’t really dreary? I can cite the mother gap! how the state has progressed and evolved at the expense of the individual. On systemic ground it easily translates to the military industrial show. You might raise a brow at how, beyond the home stretch anticapitalist china is a super corporate player. reminiscent of zizeks ‘the real tragedy’ – where the tea party and the noble left are often indistinguishable, and the post modern left and the digital liberal are to blame, by withdrawing and abandoning public and political space entirely to the far right. and so we are all set to lose the plot.

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today

First, there's the assumption that intelligence is biological. And as we become non biological our intelligence becomes more powerful? At the most elementary level, there is no recognition of what is in the realm of measure and what is not.

We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.

unenhanced human intelligence is unable to follow past a remarkably negligible level of what is going on in ouselves now. what fun from now on we may never know what our versatile laundry box is thinking. About the universe it is unlikely that mapping the information is going to impress it much. There is obviously a feeling component that cannot be transembodied,via transhumanism, or an alternative matrix, with discernible parameters.

The problem with much of what passes for posthumanism (or sometimes transhumanism) is that it is not sufficiently posthuman....[it] explicitly grounds the post/transhumanist project in notions of human perfectibility, rationality, and agency....[or] promotion of the new science as a tool of human mastery over the natural world.....[it] is not abandoning the autonomous liberal subject but is expanding its prerogatives into the realm of the posthuman."


sure,Doesn’t make sufficiently post human, but how is abandoning the autonomous liberal subject post human ? what happened to the notion of de-reconstruction/translocation of physical specificity to move at speeds faster than light for example, for which technology is probably accessible. Robot or human it would need an interdimentional/consciousness range to engage at all :) there's the speedier event of creativity itself which is comprehensive, and not merely within a context that is a given, or any context for that matter. How problematic is specialization, as in the linear bias of GNR. it is inevitably thinned down by isolation . ?

"Articulating a more persistent posthumanism by combining the insights of second order systems theorists Humberto Maturana, Fransisco Varela and especially Niklas Luhmann with those of Jacques Derrida....[that] entails the effacement of any presumed ontological divide between the human and the animal.....[and] ensure that this effacement is not undertaken in ways that reinscribe the very assumptions that produced the animal/human divide in the first place."

Here we find notions more like Jake in Avatar, the human-alien (or animal) hybrid (centaur), who integrates so-called primitive body-based culture into his more "reasoned" humanity that reconnects (reconstructs) us to something larger than the modern subject.

Reconnecting might be an essential premise to realize anything sustainably post human. to deliver essentially what occurs naturally in the ecosystem into the ecology of a body based culture, for instance, technology can be the hero once more depending on who has the finger on the button.
I cant go wrong with this…. I feel like I just helped an old lady across the street :)

cheers