The end is near?

Originally published 9 October 2005

Ray Kurzweil is back. The in-your-face futurist/inventor from Mass­a­chu­setts has a new book—The Sin­gu­lar­i­ty is Near: When Humans Tran­scend Biol­o­gy—that touts the tip­ping point when sil­i­con, not car­bon, becomes the basis for intel­li­gent life on Earth. He fore­sees a time in the not so dis­tant future when a sin­gle zero-ener­gy-con­sum­ing com­put­er will be more pow­er­ful — and smarter! —than all the human brains on Earth act­ing togeth­er. Aging and nat­ur­al death will be elim­i­nat­ed by tech­nol­o­gy, says Kurzweil. Invis­i­ble nano-machines will oper­ate with­in and out­side of the human body, tidy­ing and repair­ing inter­nal and exter­nal worlds. And that’s just for starters.

If it hap­pens on Kurzweil’s sched­ule, my chil­dren may live to see it. My grand­chil­dren, certainly.

Fif­teen years ago [in 1990], Kurzweil caused a stir with his book The Age of Intel­li­gent Machines, in which he made star­tling pre­dic­tions about future devel­op­ments in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy. For exam­ple, he pre­dict­ed that a machine would soon out­per­form a chess grand mas­ter. His pre­dic­tion came true in 1997 when IBM’s chess-play­ing com­put­er Big Blue trounced grand mas­ter Gary Kasparov.

Then came The Age of Spir­i­tu­al Machines, in which Kurzweil made even more provoca­tive pre­dic­tions. By 2019, he said, a $1,000 com­put­er will match the pro­cess­ing pow­er of the human brain. We seem well on sched­ule for that. Com­put­ers will be large­ly invis­i­ble and embed­ded every­where, pre­dict­ed Kurzweil, in walls, desks, cloth­ing, jew­el­ry, and house­hold appli­ances, allow­ing inan­i­mate objects to respond to our every whim — a fore­cast that now seems blind­ing­ly obvi­ous. In recent weeks we have seen ads for com­put­er con­trolled toothbrushes.

By 2029, most of our com­mu­ni­ca­tion will be with machines, wrote Kurzweil. Peo­ple will have rela­tion­ships with elec­tron­ic per­son­al­i­ties, and use them as com­pan­ions, teach­ers, care­tak­ers, and lovers. Vir­tu­al sex will be bet­ter than the real thing. Machines will claim to be con­scious and many of us will believe them. Well, it’s not 2029 yet, but as I walked through the cam­pus this morn­ing, almost every­one I passed was com­mu­ni­cat­ing with one sort of machine or anoth­er, an iPod or cell phone, obliv­i­ous to the nat­ur­al world and oth­er human beings.

And now, in his new book, Kurzweil is telling us that by mid-cen­tu­ry humans will have relin­quished their place as lords of cre­ation to bio­me­chan­i­cal beings.

What are we to make of these pre­dic­tions of the immi­nent demise of every­thing we deem human?

A few folks, such as Kurzweil, embrace the post-human future with enthu­si­asm. They look back upon the long sweep of cos­mic evo­lu­tion and rec­og­nize that humans are a momen­tary efflo­res­cence, des­tined to be sup­plant­ed by new forms of com­plex­i­ty as sure­ly as peo­ple took prece­dence over insects and mice.

In Kurzweil’s view, the future will be char­ac­ter­ized by “greater com­plex­i­ty, greater ele­gance, greater knowl­edge, greater intel­li­gence, greater beau­ty, greater cre­ativ­i­ty, greater love.” His opti­mism is sim­i­lar to that of the Jesuit mys­tic Teil­hard de Chardin, who saw the ful­fill­ment of cre­ation at the end of time, rather than at the beginning.

The major­i­ty of peo­ple, how­ev­er, are dis­tressed and fright­ened by the prospect of a post-human future. The late great chemist Erwin Char­gaff and entre­pre­neur Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsys­tems, have gone so far as to call for con­straints on cer­tain kinds of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion as the only way of pre­serv­ing our essen­tial humanity.

Many peo­ple take refuge from fears about the future in reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism, New Age mys­ti­cism, anti-tech­no­log­i­cal Lud­dism, or hip­pie back-to-nature minimalism.

Kurzweil’s pre­dic­tions might be wrong, but I would­n’t bet on it. By the end of this cen­tu­ry, humans will pos­sess pow­ers for self-trans­for­ma­tion unlike any­thing even the futur­ists dream.

We must ask our­selves before it’s too late: What is a human self? What, if any­thing, is the essen­tial dif­fer­ence between an organ­ism and a machine? Are con­straints on human curios­i­ty desir­able or pos­si­ble? Is the human species as we know it today the final des­tiny of cos­mic evo­lu­tion? Will the arrival of a post-human future trig­ger a mas­sive retreat by a large part of the plan­et’s pop­u­la­tion into anti-sci­ence fun­da­men­tal­ism? Is it already happening?

If phi­los­o­phy depart­ments in our uni­ver­si­ties want a use­ful mis­sion, they should intro­duce young peo­ple to the grow­ing tech­no­log­i­cal poten­tial for plan­e­tary and self-trans­for­ma­tion, and pre­pare them to make the col­lec­tive polit­i­cal deci­sions that will ensure that what­ev­er the future brings, it will indeed be char­ac­ter­ized by greater knowl­edge, intel­li­gence, beau­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty, and love.

As it is, we have two sorts of peo­ple out there on the street announc­ing the future. There’s Ray Kurzweil, with his sign­board pro­claim­ing “The Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Is Near,” and on the next cor­ner is the Bible-thumper pre­dict­ing that “Jesus Is Com­ing Soon.” Sure­ly, some­where between those two poles is a place for a lib­er­al­ly edu­cat­ed band of cau­tious opti­mists, respect­ful of sci­ence, knowl­edge­able about his­to­ry, nour­ished by poet­ry and art, attuned to nature. That sen­si­ble mid­dle space seems ever more nar­row­ly squeezed by the forces of expo­nen­tial tech­nol­o­gy and head-in-the-sand reaction.