The Singularity Is Near

"Kurzweil's exploration of radical future change and human evolution aligns with Mark Manson's work on challenging conventional thinking and embracing uncomfortable truths. It's an expected read for someone exploring how we perceive and adapt to world-altering concepts."

"He does. He’s fantastically optimistic. He thinks that in 2029 we will have AGI. And he’s thought that for a long time, he’s been saying it for years. He then thinks we’ll have an intelligence explosion and achieve uploading by 2045. I’ve never been entirely clear what he thinks will happen in the 16 years in between. He probably does have quite detailed ideas, but I don’t think he’s put them to paper. Kurzweil is important because he, more than anybody else, has made people think about these things. He has amazing ideas in his books—like many of the ideas in everybody’s books they’re not completely original to him—but he has been clearly and loudly propounding the idea that we will have AGI soon and that it will create something like utopia. I came across him in 1999 when I read his book, Are We Spiritual Machines? The book I’m suggesting here is The Singularity is Near, published in 2005. The reason why I point people to it is that it’s very rigorous. A lot of people think Kurzweil is a snake-oil salesman or somebody selling a religious dream. I don’t agree. I don’t agree with everything he says and he is very controversial. But his book is very rigorous in setting out a lot of the objections to his ideas and then tackling them. He’s brave, in a way, in tackling everything head-on, he has answers for everything. The singularity is borrowed from the world of physics and math where it means an event at which the normal rules break down. The classic example is a black hole. There’s a bit of radiation leakage but basically, if you cross it, you can’t get back out and the laws of physics break down. Applied to human affairs, the singularity is the idea that we will achieve some technological breakthrough. The usual one is AGI. The machine becomes as smart as humans and continues to improve and quickly becomes hundreds, thousands, millions of times smarter than the smartest human. That’s the intelligence explosion. When you have an entity of that level of genius around, things that were previously impossible become possible. We get to an event horizon beyond which the normal rules no longer apply. “If you have a superintelligence that is many, many times smarter than the smartest human, it could solve many of our problems.” I’ve also started using it to refer to a prior event, which is the ‘economic singularity.’ There’s been a lot of talk in the last few months about the possibility of technological unemployment. Again, it’s something we don’t know for sure will happen, and we certainly don’t know when. But it may be that AIs—and to some extent their peripherals, robots—will become better at doing any job than a human. Better, and cheaper. When that happens, many or perhaps most of us can no longer work, through no fault of our own. We will need a new type of economy. It’s really very early days in terms of working out what that means and how to get there. That’s another event that’s like a singularity — in that it’s really hard to see how things will operate at the other side. There are a whole load of criticisms he replies to. The best example might be, ‘Exponential trends don’t last forever.’ There are lots of people who’ve said Moore’s Law, which is the fact that computers get twice as powerful every 18 months—$1000 of computer will buy you twice as much processing power in 18 months’ time as it will today—is an exponential growth trend, and that these never go on forever, they always turn into ‘S’ curves. They say we’re quite quickly going to get to the point where you can’t get any more transistors on a chip, because if you pack them any closer together they’ll set each other on fire. He says that that’s true, but that Moore’s Law, when it comes to integrated circuits, is actually the fifth paradigm of this exponential improvement in computing power, which goes back to vacuum tubes and other things before. Another one will replace integrated circuits. It might be optical or 3D or quantum computing. So, he says, the exponential growth will continue. That’s the kind of thing he does — and he goes into a lot of detail on that one: How long he thinks Moore’s Law has gone on and what will replace it. Within the timescale he imagines, yes. It’s always worth illustrating the power of exponential growth, because we’re not wired to understand it intuitively. If you take 30 strides you’ll go roughly 30 meters. If you could walk 30 exponential strides, so the first stride is one meter, the second is two meters, your third is four and your fourth is 8 meters and so on — you’d get to the moon. To be more precise, you’d get to the moon on the 29th stride, and the 30th would bring you all the way back. That is the power of exponential growth. That is why the smartphone in your pocket has more processing power than NASA had when they sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. I think Kurzweil is too optimistic. He is lately starting to acknowledge the downside possibilities more, but he does tend to gloss over them. But yes, I do think we are on an exponential curve. I don’t know—neither does anybody else—how long it will go on for. I certainly think it’s possible we’ll get AGI in the next few decades i.e. somewhere between 4 and 8 decades. My main view is that the impact of this, if it happens, is so massive that we have to take it seriously. Yes. He always seems to be devoid of doubt. I think that’s one of the things that makes him quite controversial. But he is something of a genius. Not only does he write fascinating books, but he’s also had a very successful career as a software entrepreneur. Yes. He was appointed a Director of Engineering there three years ago. I don’t know what that means in terms of the hierarchy. I went to California on holiday with my family two years ago and managed to wangle a tour of Google. I said to the person who was giving the tour, “So where does Ray Kurzweil work?” She pointed to a building and said he worked there. It was number 42. I thought, this has to be a Google joke. Because 42, obviously, is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ."

"I never got to speak to Kurzweil for the book — I reached out to him and it didn’t happen — but he’s maybe the most prominent proponent of these ideas. I guess he’s the high priest of this notion of the singularity which is kind of the logical endpoint that most transhumanists point towards when they talk about their aspirations for the future. Part of the reason why Kurzweil is so prominent is because he actually puts a date on it. He says that this is going to happen in the year 2045. And he has a relatively impressive record of predicting technological change in the past. He’s really staked everything on this notion that 2045 comes along and it’s going to be this point— often dismissively referred to as ‘the Rapture of the nerds’ — when we’re all subsumed into this giant all-consuming general superintelligence, where human existence as we know it ceases to be and, in turn, we reach this heavenly situation. I wouldn’t be the first to look at him this way but I read Kurzweil’s work as essentially a work of religious mysticism. I think there’s no other way to read it, really."