April 1, 2008
Ray Kurzweil, a brief history of the singularity
What is The Singularity?
The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, “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.”
Ray Kurzweil, the leading proponent of the concept, wants to make sure he’s around for this shift.
Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.
The first bridge:
According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won’t die.
The short version:
Computers will soon be smarter than humans. Nobody has to die.
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4 Responses to “Ray Kurzweil, a brief history of the singularity”
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I read this last night in Wired and it would seem to me we don’t really have a good enough grasp about what consciousness is to download our brains in fifty years.
I agree, Gavan. I’m always surprised to see thinkers who are willing to carry the brain=computer model to such extremes. I’m pretty much a materialist when it comes to questions of how consciousnes might best be explained, but the idea of “downloading” yourself to just any old vessel leaves out lots of important considerations. Are the voices in the recordings in my flash drive in there singing to themselves? Isn’t there an inportant relation between the body and consciousness–or are the video tapes of your life somehow as good at being you as you are? I think physical sensation is an intricate part of what would have to be understood and mimiced before the information of your consciousness could ever be recognized–by you are anybody else–as you. And that task strikes me as more difficult than converting induced synaptic responces to 1s and 0s. A built in desire for identity seems to be the longest bridge to cross.
Imagine a direct connection between your brain and the internet. You zoom through electronic space and gobble up vast amounts of storage and processing power.
Soon you have an expanded mentality that is twice as powerful, three times, ten times, a thousand times. Then one day that organic brain that is less than one percent of your mentallity dies…
Would you even notice?
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!