The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil review the coming AI revolution – The Times

In 2005 Ray Kurzweil futurologist, computer scientist and transhumanist cheerleader published The Singularity Is Near, the burden of which was: the Singularity is coming and it will be great. The Singularity is the moment when the upward curve on the graph of progress goes vertical, when technological advance actualises a step change in human existence.

Kurzweils new book revisits his earlier volume, repeating and reinforcing its message. Everything he previously predicted is, he says, coming true. The Singularity will launch us into bright, sunlit uplands: superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI) will interface with human consciousness, expanding our mental capacities a millionfold; nanotechnology will cure all illness; a second industrial revolution will generate global prosperity from which all benefit. To support its claims the book is supplied with great hose-blasts of data a hundred pages of tiny-font notes and appendices and the tone is remorselessly upbeat throughout.

A less optimistic individual might see downsides in all this, and Kurzweil does include one chapter, called Peril, on the possible dangers of these technologies. Theres the fear that nanotech might go rogue and process all the carbon in the world into grey goo, killing all life. A worrying thought, but one that Kurzweil thinks can be averted by the creation of a prophylactic blue goo nanotech that will guard against it. I worry that the two goos might decide that they have more in common with each other than they do with humanity and join forces. That would be, as John Lennon never sang, goo goo gdbye.

Or again: if AI really does achieve consciousness, given its vastly superior processing capacity, it might be a kind of god. Whos to say it would be a kindly one? Kurzweil believes it should be possible to programme emergent AI to avoid this, to make it compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedom and cultural diversity. He concedes that AI may develop beyond our power to control it, but thinks overall we should be cautiously optimistic.

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IAN ALLEN FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE

Other concerns are not addressed, although climate change might do the grey goos job for it. The mammoth power and cooling requirements of the computers in the cloud on which these (hugely expensive) experiments with AI depend will contribute to rising oceans, storms and heatwaves, mass methane release from warmed-over tundra, and societal collapse.

Thats not the future of The Singularity Is Nearer. Kurzweil believes that the Singularity is so imminent it will overtake, and solve, all todays pressing problems. The world of employment will change self-driving cars will make all lorry and taxi drivers redundant, for instance but that wont matter since so much wealth will be generated by AI and automation that governments can pay us all a generous salary simply to be ourselves.

Nanobots in our blood will cure all diseases, extending human lifespans on a sliding scale by 2030 living to 120 will be normal, which will take us to 2050 by which time newer tech will make living to 200 normal, by which time even more splendiferous tech will make living to 300 normal, and so on. This is what Kurzweil calls longevity escape velocity, and hes convinced that it will launch us into functional immortality; he repeats Aubrey de Greys sensational claim that the first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born.

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By the 2050s we will rebuild our bodies to go vastly beyond what our biology is capable of. As nanotechnology takes off well be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them. We will think a million times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of our bodies for our selves to survive. Sounds pretty exhausting to me, but chacun son got.

That last point, thinking a million times faster and avoiding death by uploading our consciousness to the cloud to evade death, is the boldest part of Kurzweils Singularity, and the biggest hole in his argument. He takes it as axiomatic that being a million times cleverer would be a good thing. Would it?

Kurzweil understands that intelligence has been selected evolutionarily (sophisticated brains provided a marked evolutionary advantage), one among many strategies animals have developed to pass on their genes: the speed of the cheetah; the camouflage of the stick insect; the long neck of the giraffe. Each of these adaptations improves the creatures fit to their environments. Brain-smarts are our one weird trick to improve our chances of passing on our DNA and weve been pretty successful as a species on the strength of it. For Kurzweil, though, its more. Regardless of consciousnesss origin, he says, it is somehow sacred. The logic seems to be: if something is sacred, then having a whole lot more of it must be a good thing.

Is that right? Intelligence feels special to us because intelligence is our thing if they could articulate it, cheetahs would surely tell us that their speed was sacred, fruit flies that their wings were sacred. A truer way of thinking about human intelligence would be to see it as just a strategy DNA developed to make more DNA.

This is important, because if we see intelligence in its evolutionary context its not obvious that we would want to expand it a millionfold. Perhaps the present levels of human intelligence, within todays parameters of IQ variance, are the right levels. A giraffes neck enables it to feast on the tastiest topmost leaves, but it doesnt follow that a giraffe with a neck a hundred times as long would be a hundred times the better giraffe. On the contrary, such a sudden cervical expansion would kill it. Maybe a sudden huge magnification of human intelligence would collapse rather than augment our humanity, drive us mad or catatonic. Maybe, as in Kurt Vonneguts 1985 novel Galpagos, intelligence is something we would actually be better off with less of.

If the Singularitys arrival is as inevitable as Kurzweil suggests, such concerns may be irrelevant. As the Titanic sank the band played Nearer, My God, to Thee. Kurzweils ever nearer Singularity approaches, like a huge, glimmering iceberg. Dive in, he says, the waters lovely. I have my doubts.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil (Bodley Head 25 pp432). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over 25. Special discount available for Times+ members

The granddaddy of futurist prediction is this bestseller, which marked a shift from HG Wells predicting the to-come via science fiction like The Time Machine (1895) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) to predicting it as fact, a practice that came to increasingly dominate his writing. Anticipations correctly predicts individual mass transit with everyone owning cars and the practice of commuting stretching home from walking-distance to hundreds of miles. It also anticipates the growth of cities, the rise of a managerial class, aerial warfare (two years before the Wright Brothers) and sexual liberalisation. It incorrectly predicted the coming of a world state and eugenics. A mixed bag.

A runaway bestseller in the 1970s, this book popularised the idea not just that times were changing, but that the pace of change was accelerating exponentially, such that the future would be radically, disorientatingly different to the now. The shock of the title is too much change in too short a period of time. The Tofflers predicted built-in obsolescence of commodities, postindustrial economies, the death of permanence and what they called information overload. This was perceptive, although the book also predicts underwater cities, mass ownership of spaceships and disposable paper clothing becoming commonplace. So not entirely a bullseye, prediction-wise.

Theres no shortage of doom and gloom when it comes to predicting the climate future, and Kim Stanley Robinsons powerful novel does not evade the direction of global heating and environmental-collapse upon which humanity seems fixed. But this, his most recent, and it seems last, novel also predicts a raft of future strategies for reversing the damage and saving the planet. Some are practical (interventions to stop glaciers slide and melt and avoid raising ocean levels), some matters of political policy (carbon strategies for industry, transport, land use, buildings and transportation) and some financial, for example, turning all the banks into co-ops with profits divided three ways between employee-owners, environmental capital improvements and a third given to charities chosen by the employees.

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The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil review the coming AI revolution - The Times