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Article Excerpt
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So what's a Singularity, you may ask. In astronomy, a Singularity occurs when a star dies and becomes a black hole. At that point, the laws of physics no longer apply. Anything that falls in is destroyed, but that destruction may be the beginning of a new universe. Verner Vinge, science-fiction author and retired San Diego State University math professor, popularized the idea of a technological Singularity in a 1993 Whole Earth Review essay, originally presented at a NASA symposium. Vinge admirably lays it all out in the first sentences of the abstract, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended" [1]. He also predicted that "as time passes, we should see more symptoms." Consider as one symptom the 2008 economic meltdown, which was influenced by computers developing new financial instruments, trolling the international digital markets for money-making opportunities, and enacting their own trades, supervised only by algorithms.
Depending on how machines feel about money, the Singularity may or may not become the end of the financial system, but it is definitely forecast as the end of biological humans, brought about by our own digital inventions. The primary cheerleader for the ultimate rise of the machines is inventor Ray Kurzweil, who sees the Singularity as a thrilling event. At age 61, he follows an austere health regimen so he can live long enough to merge with a machine and attain immortality.
Kurzweil predicts symptoms of the Singularity, using his Law of Accelerating Returns, based on Moore's Law, which forecast the doubling of semiconductor capacity approximately every 2 years. Kurzweil amplifies this to include the exponential growth of most technological advances, with slow doublings until suddenly each double becomes a massive breakthrough.
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To promote his vision of exponential growth, Kurzweil has written three books about the Singularity: The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which was on The New York Times best-seller list. To help everyone stay alive for the few years remaining until the mind-machine merger, he has also written three health books, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life and, with Dr. Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and this year's TRANSCEND:Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.
Kurzweil's intellectual credentials could explain his success in promoting the Singularity. He is an honored inventor, included in the Patent Office's National Inventor's Hall of Fame. According to his website biography, Kurzweil "was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition" [2]. Stevie Wonder was Kurzweil's first customer for the print-to-speech reading machine. Then they collaborated on the electric piano. Kurzweil has had a big influence on the information industry. The Lexis-Nexis databases were originally developed using his character-recognition methodology.
Kurzweil believes that "order is even more profound than information. It is information that fits a purpose. It is a step toward information that is more profound, more beautiful, more inspiring.... It moves towards indescribable beauty, intelligence, and creativity--all the things that God has been called" [3]. Ray Kurzweil has been compared to Thomas Edison, but he has a lot in common with English scientist and dissenting minister, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and photosynthesis in 1774.
The politically active Priestley promoted the American and French revolutions and civil rights for dissenters (non-Anglicans). After his home, lab, and library were burned in a riot, he found it prudent to move to Kentucky. There he continued his friendships with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whom he had met in England. Twenty years after Priestley's death, Adams wrote to Jefferson describing a breakfast conversation with the scientist. Priestley had told Adams about his millenarian vision based on evidence from Revelations and revolutions. He believed the signs of the time revealed the coming Rapture (i.e., the return of Christ posited in the Bible as the world ends). Like most Rapture enthusiasts, he anticipated it would occur within a couple of decades. Unlike Kurzweil, he wasn't expecting immortality, but he did plan to be resurrected when the great event happened.
Priestley based his version of the Rapture on the major upheavals of his era--political revolutions. Kurzweil's Singularity is based on the major upheaval of our time--technology. They both expect(ed) the great event within a few decades and they both expect(ed) to experience it even after death. Should he miss the Singularity by a few years, Kurzweil will be cryogenically frozen and resurrected when the fireworks start. Priestley didn't have that option.
I don't want to worry you, but Kurzweil does have a track record of accurate futurist predictions.
Wall Street on Machines
A few months after the 1987 stock-market crash, Lester Thurow, then dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, wrote an article absolving computers of responsibility for the crash. Program trading, the automated trading of a portfolio of stocks, had kicked in when the market started dropping. Computers, following instructions, automatically started selling at predetermined price drops. This was widely assumed to have caused the crash. Thurow hastened to set his readers at ease. He explained that humans had programmed the computers. The...
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