Ray kurzweil what is the singularity

A thousand-dollar computer can remember billions of things accurately — we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. Once they learn something, machines can also share their knowledge with other machines. We don't have quick downloading ports at the level of our intra-neuronal connection patterns and our concentrations of neurotransmitters, so we can't just download knowledge.

I can't just take my knowledge of French and download it to you, but machines can. So we can educate machines through a process that can be hundreds or thousands of times faster than the comparable process in humans.

It can provide a year education to a human-level machine in maybe a few weeks or a few days and then these machines can share their knowledge. The primary implication of all this will be to enhance our own human intelligence.

We're going to be putting these machines inside our own brains. We're starting to do that now with people who have severe medical problems and disabilities, but ultimately we'll all be doing this. Without surgery, we'll be able to introduce calculating machines into the blood stream that will be able to pass through the capillaries of the brain.

These intelligent, blood-cell-sized nanobots will actually be able to go to the brain and interact with biological neurons. The basic feasibility of this has already been demonstrated in animals.

One application of sending billions of nanobots into the brain is full-immersion virtual reality. People will beam their own flow of sensory experiences and the neurological correlates of their emotions out into the Web, the way people now beam images from web cams in their living rooms and bedrooms.

In virtual reality you don't have to be the same person. You can be someone else, and can project yourself as a different person. Most importantly, we'll be able to enhance our biological intelligence with non-biological intelligence through intimate connections. This won't mean just having one thin pipe between the brain and a non-biological system, but actually having non-biological intelligence in billions of different places in the brain.

I don't know about you, but there are lots of books I'd like to read and Web sites I'd like to go to, and I find my bandwidth limiting. So instead of having a mere hundred trillion connections, we'll have a hundred trillion times a million.

We'll be able to enhance our cognitive pattern recognition capabilities greatly, think faster, and download knowledge. If you follow these trends further, you get to a point where change is happening so rapidly that there appears to be a rupture in the fabric of human history. Some people have referred to this as the "Singularity.

Here, that concept is applied by analogy to human history, where we see a point where this rate of technological progress will be so rapid that it appears to be a rupture in the fabric of human history.

It's impossible in physics to see beyond a Singularity, which creates an event boundary, and some people have hypothesized that it will be impossible to characterize human life after the Singularity. My question is what human life will be like after the Singularity, which I predict will occur somewhere right before the middle of the 21st century.

A lot of the concepts we have of the nature of human life — such as longevity — suggest a limited capability as biological, thinking entities.

All of these concepts are going to undergo significant change as we basically merge with our technology. It's taken me a while to get my own mental arms around these issues. In the book I wrote in the s,The Age of Intelligent Machines, I ended with the spectre of machines matching human intelligence somewhere between and , and I basically have not changed my view on that time frame, although I left behind my view that this is a final spectre. In the book I wrote ten years later, The Age of Spiritual Machines, I began to consider what life would be like past the point where machines could compete with us.

Now I'm trying to consider what that will mean for human society. One thing that we should keep in mind is that innate biological intelligence is fixed. Fifty years from now, the biological intelligence of humanity will still be at that same order of magnitude.

On the other hand, machine intelligence is growing exponentially, and today it's a million times less than that biological figure. So although it still seems that human intelligence is dominating, which it is, the crossover point is around and non-biological intelligence will continue its exponential rise. This leads some people to ask how can we know if another species or entity is more intelligent that we are?

Isn't knowledge tautological? One response is not to want to be enhanced, not to have nanobots. The answer is that they really won't notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants. It will appear that these machines are very friendly are taking care of all of our needs, and are really our transcendent servants.

But providing that service of meeting all of the material and emotional needs of biological humanity will comprise a very tiny fraction of the mental output of the non-biological component of our civilization.

So there's a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won't actually notice. There are two levels of consideration here. On the economic level, mental output will be the primary criterion. We're already getting close to the point that the only thing that has value is information. Information has value to the extent that it really reflects knowledge, not just raw data.

There are a few products on this table — a clock, a camera, tape recorder — that are physical objects, but really the value of them is in the information that went into their design: the design of their chips and the software that's used to invent and manufacture them. The actual raw materials — a bunch of sand and some metals and so on — is worth a few pennies, but these products have value because of all the knowledge that went into creating them. And the knowledge component of products and services is asymptoting towards percent.

By the time we get to it will be basically percent. With a combination of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, we'll be able to create virtually any physical product and meet all of our material needs. When everything is software and information, it'll be a matter of just downloading the right software, and we're already getting pretty close to that.

On a spiritual level, the issue of what is consciousness is another important aspect of this, because we will have entities by that seem to be conscious, and that will claim to have feelings. We have entities today, like characters in your kids' video games, that can make that claim, but they are not very convincing. If you run into a character in a video game and it talks about its feelings, you know it's just a machine simulation; you're not convinced that it's a real person there.

This is because that entity, which is a software entity, is still a million times simpler than the human brain. In , that won't be the case. Say you encounter another person in virtual reality that looks just like a human but there's actually no biological human behind it — it's completely an AI projecting a human-like figure in virtual reality, or even a human-like image in real reality using an android robotic technology.

These entities will seem human. They won't be a million times simpler than humans. They'll be as complex as humans. They'll have all the subtle cues of being humans. They'll be able to sit here and be interviewed and be just as convincing as a human, just as complex, just as interesting. And when they claim to have been angry or happy it'll be just as convincing as when another human makes those claims.

At this point, it becomes a really deeply philosophical issue. Is that just a very clever simulation that's good enough to trick you, or is it really conscious in the way that we assume other people are?

In my view there's no real way to test that scientifically. There's no machine you can slide the entity into where a green light goes on and says okay, this entity's conscious, but no, this one's not.

You could make a machine, but it will have philosophical assumptions built into it. Some philosophers will say that unless it's squirting impulses through biological neurotransmitters, it's not conscious, or that unless it's a biological human with a biological mother and father it's not conscious.

But it becomes a matter of philosophical debate. It's not scientifically resolvable. The next big revolution that's going to affect us right away is biological technology, because we've merged biological knowledge with information processing. We are in the early stages of understanding life processes and disease processes by understanding the genome and how the genome expresses itself in protein.

And we're going to find — and this has been apparent all along — that there's a slippery slope and no clear definition of where life begins. Both sides of the abortion debate have been afraid to get off the edges of that debate: that life starts at conception on the one hand or it starts literally at birth on the other.

They don't want to get off those edges, because they realize it's just a completely slippery slope from one end to the other. But we're going to make it even more slippery. We'll be able to create stem cells without ever actually going through the fertilized egg. What's the difference between a skin cell, which has all the genes, and a fertilized egg? The only differences are some proteins in the eggs and some signalling factors that we don't fully understand, yet that are basically proteins.

We will get to the point where we'll be able to take some protein mix, which is just a bunch of chemicals and clearly not a human being, and add it to a skin cell to create a fertilized egg that we can then immediately differentiate into any cell of the body. When I go like this and brush off thousands of skin cells, I will be destroying thousands of potential people. There's not going to be any clear boundary. This is another way of saying also that science and technology are going to find a way around the controversy.

In the future, we'll be able to do therapeutic cloning, which is a very important technology that completely avoids the concept of the fetus. We'll be able to take skin cells and create, pretty directly without ever going through a fetus, all the cells we need.

We're not that far away from being able to create new cells. For example, I'm 53 but with my DNA, I'll be able to create the heart cells of a year-old man, and I can replace my heart with those cells without surgery just by sending them through my blood stream.

They'll take up residence in the heart, so at first I'll have a heart that's one percent young cells and 99 percent older ones. But if I keep doing this every day, a year later, my heart is 99 percent young cells. With that kind of therapy we can ultimately replenish all the cell tissues and the organs in the body.

This is not something that will happen tomorrow, but these are the kinds of revolutionary processes we're on the verge of. If you look at human longevity — which is another one of these exponential trends — you'll notice that we added a few days every year to the human life expectancy in the 18th century. In the 19th century we added a few weeks every year, and now we're now adding over a hundred days a year, through all of these developments, which are going to continue to accelerate.

Many knowledgeable observers, including myself, feel that within ten years we'll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy. As we get older, human life expectancy will actually move out at a faster rate than we're actually progressing in age, so if we can hang in there, our generation is right on the edge. We have to watch our health the old-fashioned way for a while longer so we're not the last generation to die prematurely. Philips is in good shape at the moment, but he is aware that time marches on.

I can't feel it, but I know its happening, little by little, cell by cell," he wrote on his intake questionnaire. Philips has read Kurzweil's books. He is a smart, skeptical person and accepts that the future is not entirely predictable, but he also knows the meaning of upside. At worst, his money buys him new information about his health. At best, it makes him immortal. But Philips wasn't born until , so he starts with an advantage.

According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 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.

Kurzweil himself started across the first bridge in That year, he confronted the risk that had been haunting him and began to treat his body as a machine. He read up on the latest nutritional research, adopted the Pritikin diet, cut his fat intake to 10 percent of his calories, lost 40 pounds, and cured both his high cholesterol and his incipient diabetes. But this was only the beginning. Kurzweil met Grossman at a Foresight Nanotech Institute meeting in , and they became research partners.

Their object of investigation was Kurzweil's body. Having cured himself of his most pressing health problems, Kurzweil was interested in adopting the most advanced medical and nutritional technologies, but it wasn't easy to find a doctor willing to tolerate his persistent questions.

Grossman was building a new type of practice, focused not on illness but on the pursuit of optimal health and extreme longevity. The two men exchanged thousands of emails, sharing speculations about which cutting-edge discoveries could be safely tried. Though both Grossman and Kurzweil respect science, their approach is necessarily improvisational. If a therapy has some scientific promise and little risk, they'll try it.

Kurzweil gets phosphatidylcholine intravenously, on the theory that this will rejuvenate all his body's tissues. He takes DHEA and testosterone. Both men use special filters to produce alkaline water, which they drink between meals in the hope that negatively charged ions in the water will scavenge free radicals and produce a variety of health benefits. This kind of thing may seem like quackery, especially when promoted by various New Age outfits touting the "pH miracle of living.

We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves. Obviously, Kurzweil has no plan for retirement. He intends to sustain himself indefinitely through his intelligence, which he hopes will only grow. A few years ago he deployed an automated system for making money on the stock market, called FatKat, which he uses to direct his own hedge fund.

Meanwhile, he tries to safeguard his well-being. As a driver he is cautious. He frequently bicycles through the Boston suburbs, which is good for physical conditioning but also puts his immortality on the line.

For most people, such risks blend into the background of life, concealed by a cheerful fatalism that under ordinary conditions we take as a sign of mental health. But of course Kurzweil objects to this fatalism.

He wants us to try harder to survive. His plea is often ignored. Kurzweil has written about the loneliness of being a singularitarian. This may seem an odd complaint, given his large following, but there is something to it. A dozen of his fans may show up in Denver every month to initiate longevity treatments, but many of them, like Matt Philips, are simply hedging their bets.

Most health fanatics remain agnostic, at best, on the question of immortality. Kurzweil predicts that by the early s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We'll have "eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel.

What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain. In outlining these developments, Kurzweil's tone is so calm and confident that he seems to be describing the world as it is today, rather than some distant, barely imaginable future. This is because his prediction falls out cleanly from the equations he's proposed. Knowledge doubles every year, Kurzweil says. He has estimated the number of computations necessary to simulate a human brain.

The rest is simple math. But wait. There may be something wrong. Kurzweil's theory of accelerating change is meant to be a universal law, applicable wherever intelligence is found. It's fine to say that knowledge doubles every year. But then again, what is a year? A year is an astronomical artifact. It is the length of time required by Earth to make one orbit around our unexceptional star.

A year is important to our nature, to our biology, to our fantasies and dreams. But it is a strange unit to discover in a general law. He's not thrown off. A year, he replies, is just shorthand. The real equation for accelerating world knowledge is much more complicated than that. In his book, he gives it as:. He has examined the evidence, and welcomes debate on the minor details. What science fiction depicts as the singularity — at which point a single brilliant AI enslaves humanity — is just that: fiction.

Today we have billions. For Kurzweil, the singularity is an opportunity for humankind to improve. He envisions the same technology that will make AIs more intelligent giving humans a boost as well. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud. Kurzweil expounded on how this technology could improve human lives.

A previous version of this article stated that Kurzweil predicted the singularity by , rather than the date an AI will pass a valid Turing test. Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money and planet!