The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (4 page)

Some observers question whether we are capable of applying our own thinking to understand our own thinking. AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter muses that “it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding—yet it is remarkably similar to our brain.”
⁶
However, we have already succeeded in modeling portions of our brain—neurons and substantial neural regions—and the complexity of such models is growing rapidly. Our progress in reverse engineering the human brain, a key issue that I will describe in detail in this book, demonstrates that we do indeed have the ability to understand, to model, and to extend our own intelligence. This is one aspect of the uniqueness of our species: our intelligence is just sufficiently above the critical threshold necessary for us to scale our own ability to unrestricted heights of creative power—and we have the opposable appendage (our thumbs) necessary to manipulate the universe to our will.

A word on magic: when I was reading the Tom Swift Jr. books, I was also an avid magician. I enjoyed the delight of my audiences in experiencing apparently impossible transformations of reality. In my teen years, I replaced my parlor magic with technology projects. I discovered that unlike mere tricks, technology does not lose its transcendent power when its secrets are revealed. I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Consider J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories from this perspective. These tales may be imaginary, but they are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now. Essentially all of the Potter “magic” will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book. Playing quidditch and transforming people and objects into other forms will be feasible in full-immersion virtual-reality environments, as well as in real reality, using nanoscale devices. More dubious is the time reversal (as described in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
), although serious proposals have even been
put forward for accomplishing something along these lines (without giving rise to causality paradoxes), at least for bits of information, which essentially is what we comprise. (See the discussion in
chapter 3
on the ultimate limits of computation.)

Consider that Harry unleashes his magic by uttering the right incantation. Of course, discovering and applying these incantations are no simple matters. Harry and his colleagues need to get the sequence, procedures, and emphasis exactly correct. That process is precisely our experience with technology. Our incantations are the formulas and algorithms underlying our modern-day magic. With just the right sequence, we can get a computer to read a book out loud, understand human speech, anticipate (and prevent) a heart attack, or predict the movement of a stock-market holding. If an incantation is just slightly off mark, the magic is greatly weakened or does not work at all.

One might object to this metaphor by pointing out that Hogwartian incantations are brief and therefore do not contain much information compared to, say, the code for a modern software program. But the essential methods of modern technology generally share the same brevity. The principles of operation of software advances such as speech recognition can be written in just a few pages of formulas. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula.

The same observation holds for the “inventions” of biological evolution: consider that the genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans, for example, is only a few hundred thousand bytes of information. Although chimps are capable of some intellectual feats, that tiny difference in our genes was sufficient for our species to create the magic of technology.

Muriel Rukeyser says that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” In
chapter 7
, I describe myself as a “patternist,” someone who views patterns of information as the fundamental reality. For example, the particles composing my brain and body change within weeks, but there is a continuity to the patterns that these particles make. A story can be regarded as a meaningful pattern of information, so we can interpret Muriel Rukeyser’s aphorism from this perspective. This book, then, is the story of the destiny of the human-machine civilization, a destiny we have come to refer to as the Singularity.

CHAPTER ONE

The Six Epochs

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

                   —A
RTHUR
S
CHOPENHAUER

I
am not sure when I first became aware of the Singularity. I’d have to say it was a progressive awakening. In the almost half century that I’ve immersed myself in computer and related technologies, I’ve sought to understand the meaning and purpose of the continual upheaval that I have witnessed at many levels. Gradually, I’ve become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the twenty-first century. Just as a black hole in space dramatically alters the patterns of matter and energy accelerating toward its event horizon, this impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality.

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. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one’s view of life in general and one’s own particular life. I regard someone who understands the Singularity and who has reflected on its implications for his or her own life as a “singularitarian.”
¹

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution). After all, it took me forty years to be able to see what was right in front of me, and I still cannot say that I am entirely comfortable with all of its consequences.

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are
expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. (See the “Linear vs. Exponential Growth” graph on
p. 10
.)

Consider this parable: a lake owner wants to stay at home to tend to the lake’s fish and make certain that the lake itself will not become covered with lily pads, which are said to double their number every few days. Month after month, he patiently waits, yet only tiny patches of lily pads can be discerned, and they don’t seem to be expanding in any noticeable way. With the lily pads covering less than 1 percent of the lake, the owner figures that it’s safe to take a vacation and leaves with his family. When he returns a few weeks later, he’s shocked to discover that the entire lake has become covered with the pads, and his fish have perished. By doubling their number every few days, the last seven doublings were sufficient to extend the pads’ coverage to the entire lake. (Seven doublings extended their reach 128-fold.) This is the nature of exponential growth.

Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later.
²
The list of ways computers can now exceed human capabilities is rapidly growing. Moreover, the once narrow applications of computer intelligence are gradually broadening in one type of activity after another. For example, computers are diagnosing electrocardiograms and medical images, flying and landing airplanes, controlling the tactical decisions of automated weapons, making credit and financial decisions, and being given responsibility for many other tasks that used to require human intelligence. The performance of these systems is increasingly based on integrating multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI). But as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations.

This book will argue, however, that within several decades information based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.

Although impressive in many respects, the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiological
bandwidth for processing new information extremely limited compared to the exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base.

Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed.

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of paradigm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the “knee of the curve,” which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trend quickly becomes explosive. Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology—which will be indistinguishable from ourselves—will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity.

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

Many commentators on these changes focus on what they perceive as a loss of some vital aspect of our humanity that will result from this transition. This perspective stems, however, from a misunderstanding of what our technology will become. All the machines we have met to date lack the essential subtlety of human biological qualities. Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.

The Intuitive Linear View Versus
the Historical Exponential View

When the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself into recursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur, the likes of which I can’t even begin to predict.

                   —M
ICHAEL
A
NISSIMOV

In the 1950s John von Neumann, the legendary information theorist, was quoted as saying that “the ever-accelerating progress of technology … 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.”
³
Von Neumann makes two important observations here:
acceleration
and
singularity
. The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly
multiplying
by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly
adding
a constant).