Review: The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil

A wonderfully eye-opening read on the profound changes that are going to happen in society as a result of technology. Kurzweil makes a compelling argument that technology has been growing and improving at an exponential rate and a slightly less convincing one that it will continue to do so. But even if Kurzweil is off slightly in his math, the difference will be a matter of a few decades, and not centuries, which means life is going to change more than anyone expects very, very soon.

To some extent, this is clearly already happening. We are in an age with all human knowledge available instantly via the Internet, supercomputers in our pockets, self-driving cars, and other technologies that would seem inconceivable even two decades ago. And since tech growth is non-linear, it’s almost inconceivable what will be available two decades from now.

One issue I take with Kurzweil’s assumption though is that virtually all systems have a form of “friction” built in and once you hit a certain threshold point, it takes exponentially more and more effort to get past that point. Some examples:

• We are seeing bottlenecks with CPU speeds, as Moore’s law, which he cites often in the book, seems to be at its limits (instead of making CPUs faster, we’re just adding more of them now, which isn’t the same)
• We can build software systems with millions of lines of code, but they become incredibly hard to manage, update, and understand
• We can make our devices smaller and smaller, but our batteries actually have to get larger and larger, and we’ve seen relatively little advancement in that field
• We can learn an incredible amount of information, but that means each new person has to spend longer in school to learn all that is known before they can start contributing

Kurzweil claims that we’ll just keep coming up with new paradigms of technology to get past these bottlenecks–e.g. we’ll invent AI to solve many of these problems for us–but I’m not sure that follows from the data and just seems like wishful thinking to me. I also find Kurzweil’s explanation of how to prevent these immensely powerful technologies (e.g. self-replicating nanobots, evil AI) from destroying us to be underwhelming. He talks about building defenses up front, which is a good idea, but as an example, he talks about building self-replicating nanobots to defend against out-of-control self-replicating nanobots, which, especially given the state of modern programming, can only make you think that the former will almost inevitably be the cause of the latter…

There are other claims in the book I find problematic, such as the very optimistic view of AI. Kurzweil seems to believe that AI will have all of our strengths, but none of our weaknesses. But what if emotions, including irrational and destructive ones, are an inherent part of intelligence? What if making mistakes is an inherent part of creativity? What if those weaknesses are precisely what make the strengths possible?

It’s fun stuff to contemplate. In fact, much of the book is. For example, there is a wonderful discussion of what it means to be human or conscious. It clearly has little to do with biology, as every single cell in your body (perhaps every atom) is replaced every few weeks, and yet “you” remain. What makes you, you, as it turns out, is merely a pattern. You are no more and no less than a set of data. Death is a tragedy because that unique pattern of data is lost. Isn’t it fun to consider the fact that some day, we may be able to capture all of that data and create a backup somewhere, just like you might backup your computer hard drive?

Throughout the book, Kurzweil tends to discuss many cutting edge technologies that were in development around 2005. Reading the book more than 10 years later, it’s interesting to see that a small handful have become mature, but the rest feel just as out-there now as they did a decade ago. At times, Kurzweil gets a little to deep into the details of a particular technology, or a scientific debate, or just arguing with his critics, and you have to skim quickly, but for the most part, the book is well worth reading for anyone into tech, SciFi, or just curious about how our future is likely to evolve.

As I always do in my reviews, here is a collection of my favorite quotes from the book:

“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.”

“There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.”

“The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all. As a result, observers’ expectation of an unchanged future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.”

“The most popular data-compression techniques use similar methods of finding redundancy within information. But after you’ve compressed a data file in this way, can you be absolutely certain that there are no other rules or methods that might be discovered that would enable you to express the file in even more compact terms? For example, suppose my file was simply “pi” (3.1415…) expressed to one million bits of precision. Most data-compression programs would fail to recognize this sequence and would not compress the million bits at all, since the bits in a binary expression of pi are effectively random and thus have no repeated pattern according to all tests of randomness. But if we can determine that the file (or a portion of the file) in fact represents pi, we can easily express it (or that portion of it) very compactly as “pi to one million bits of accuracy.””

“Wolfram makes the following point repeatedly: “Whenever a phenomenon is encountered that seems complex it is taken almost for granted that the phenomenon must be the result of some underlying mechanism that is itself complex. But my discovery that simple programs can produce great complexity makes it clear that this is not in fact correct.”

“The reason memories can remain intact even if three quarters of the connections have disappeared is that the coding method used appears to have properties similar to those of a hologram. In a hologram, information is stored in a diffuse pattern throughout an extensive region. If you destroy three quarters of the hologram, the entire image remains intact, although with only one quarter of the resolution. Research by Pentti Kanerva, a neuroscientist at Redwood Neuroscience Institute, supports the idea that memories are dynamically distributed throughout a region of neurons. This explains why older memories persist but nonetheless appear to “fade,” because their resolution has diminished.”

“Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels.”

“Work by physiology professor Benjamin Libet at the University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to initiate an action actually occurs about a third of a second before the brain has made the decision to take the action. The implication, according to Libet, is that the decision is really an illusion, that “consciousness is out of the loop.” The cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the phenomenon as follows: “The action is originally precipitated in some part of the brain, and off fly the signals to muscles, pausing en route to tell you, the conscious agent, what is going on (but like all good officials letting you, the bumbling president, maintain the illusion that you started it all).”

”
SIGMUND: But a virtual body is not a real body.
RAY: The word “virtual” is somewhat unfortunate. It implies “not real,” but the reality will be that a virtual body is just as real as a physical body in all the ways that matter. Consider that the telephone is auditory virtual reality. No one feels that his voice in this virtual-reality environment is not a “real” voice.
“

“Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.—MARVIN MINSKY, 1995”

“Computer scientist Elaine Rich defines AI as “the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.”

“The problem here has a lot to do with the word “machine.” Your conception of a machine is of something that is much less valued—less complex, less creative, less intelligent, less knowledgeable, less subtle and supple—than a human. That’s reasonable for today’s machines because all the machines we’ve ever met—like cars—are like this. The whole point of my thesis, of the coming Singularity revolution, is that this notion of a machine—of nonbiological intelligence—will fundamentally change.”

“Later in this century it will seem remarkable to people that humans in an earlier era lived their lives without a backup of their most precious information: that contained in their brains and bodies. Is this form of immortality the same concept as a physical human, as we know it today, living forever? In one sense it is, because today one’s self is not a constant collection of matter, either. Recent research shows that even our neurons, thought to be relatively long lasting, change all of their constituent subsystems, such as the tubules, in a matter of weeks. Only our pattern of matter and energy persists, and even that gradually changes. Similarly, it will be the pattern of a software human that persists and develops and slowly alters.”

“Technology typically starts out with unaffordable products that don’t work very well, followed by expensive versions that work a bit better, and then by inexpensive products that work reasonably well. Finally the technology becomes highly effective, ubiquitous, and almost free”

“The portion of a manufactured product’s cost attributable to the information processes used in its creation varies from one category of product to another but is increasing across the board, rapidly approaching 100 percent. By the late 2020s the value of virtually all products—clothes, food, energy, and of course electronics—will be almost entirely in their information. As is the case today, proprietary and open-source versions of every type of product and service will coexist.”

“Death is a tragedy. It is not demeaning to regard a person as a profound pattern (a form of knowledge), which is lost when he or she dies. That, at least, is the case today, since we do not yet have the means to access and back up this knowledge. When people speak of losing part of themselves “when a loved one dies, they are speaking quite literally, since we lose the ability to effectively use the neural patterns in our brain that had self-organized to interact with that person.”

“Some observers refer to the post-Singularity period as “posthuman” and refer to the anticipation of this period as posthumanism. However, to me being human means being part of a civilization that seeks to extend its boundaries. We are already reaching beyond our biology by rapidly gaining the tools to reprogram and augment it. If we regard a human modified with technology as no longer human, where would we draw the defining line? Is a human with a bionic heart still human? How about someone with a neurological implant? What about two neurological implants? How about someone with ten nanobots in his brain? How about 500 million nanobots? Should we establish a boundary at 650 million nanobots: under that, you’re still human and over that, you’re posthuman?”

“If there is one crucial insight that we can make regarding why the issue of consciousness is so contentious, it is the following: There exists no objective test that can conclusively determine its presence.”

Rating: 4 stars