A central theme underlying all of the analysis we do here at Trends is the realization that the rate of change is constantly increasing ? and it’s been doing so in a measurable way for at least the past 500 years.
The cumulative effect of this accelerating change is unlike the gradual, steady change that mankind is used to seeing. Instead, it unfolds with such powerful momentum that it is unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. Today, we can expect the world to change more in one lifetime than it once did in a millennium.
To comprehend what this means, consider the familiar metaphor of waves lapping against a sea shore. When each wave is the same size and strength as the one before it, as in gradual change, the landscape evolves slowly over time. Soil is eroded and rocks wear down gradually over thousands, or even millions, of years.
But accelerated change is anything but gradual. It is the equivalent of a wave hitting the shore, followed by another wave twice as strong, then another wave four times stronger, until one tsunami after another is pounding the landscape, each more powerful than the one that preceded it. Under accelerated change, the environment is transformed not in millennia, but in minutes.
Similarly, as the intelligence of our computers continues to increase, and the rate of the increase continues to increase, we can expect to see machines that are millions of times faster and more powerful than today’s machines arriving in just a few decades.
Consider that the rate of technological innovation has been speeding up throughout history, and currently it is doubling every 10 years. That rate is eclipsed by the dizzying pace of improvements in IT. By every measure ? including speed, capacity, bandwidth, and price-performance ? the power of IT is now doubling every 12 months.
What’s more, the advances we will discuss appear ready to unleash a perfect storm of technological progress. The implications of this trend were first recognized in the 1940s by Princeton mathematician John Von Neumann, one of the pioneers of the computer architecture we still use today.
Von Neumann coined the term “singularity” to describe the point beyond which progress is so rapid that for all practical purposes, it is infinite.
In the past 15 years or so, a small but growing group within the world’s technological elite has emerged with an all-encompassing vision of the Singularity and the world that lies beyond. This vision, variously termed Singularitarian or “transhumanist,” is being most articulately popularized by inventor Raymond Kurzweil.
The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful than it is today, according to Kurzweil. He asserts that in this new world, there will be no distinction between human and machine, or between physical reality and virtual reality.
For those who aren’t familiar with Kurzweil’s latest book, The Singularity Is Near, we’ll review the nine fundamental elements of this vision:
- Technological progress will continue to increase at an increasing rate. Already the accomplishments of the entire 20th century are equivalent to just 20 years of progress at today’s rate of change. We’ll make another stride equal to the progress of the whole 20th century in the next 14 years ? and then we’ll do it again in just seven years. Kurzweil argues that because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of change.
- By the end of this decade, we will have developed supercomputers with the ability to emulate human intelligence; by 2020, that ability will spread to PCs.
- By 2030, Kurzweil claims computer intelligence will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. Computers will be able to combine the strengths of human intelligence ? such as the ability to recognize patterns and make decisions based on experience ? with the strengths of machine intelligence, including the ability to retrieve billions of pieces of information instantly.
- Within 40 years (give or take a decade) artificial intelligence will so dwarf human intelligence as to make our abilities nearly irrelevant.
- At the same time, nanotech and biotech will converge to largely eliminate disease, extend human life spans, and improve our human capabilities by integrating technology into our bodies and minds.
- Computers will be designed and built by other computers in an endless upward process that Kurzweil analogizes to Darwinean evolution.
- Everything worthwhile will be invented by ever-more-capable machines that are capable of thinking at a far higher level than humans or the previous generations of machines.
- At some point, around 2045 to 2050, Kurzweil believes the human consciousness will actually be uploaded to machines running our personalities, just as today’s computers run software.
- In the longer term, Kurzweil foresees this blend of human software and artificial intelligence spreading across the galaxy and the universe.
This is not the raving lunacy of some madman in a padded room. Kurzweil is the celebrated inventor of such technologies as speech recognition software, scanners, and music synthesizers. He is a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and has received 12 honorary doctorates, as well as awards from three U.S. presidents.
Kurzweil’s latest book was endorsed by Bill Joy, the co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems; Dean Kamen, the physicist and inventor of the Segway; and Bill Gates of Microsoft, who calls Kurzweil “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Hundreds of like-minded people attend the Conference on Accelerating Change that he co-chairs each year at Stanford University.
Those who want to get a more comprehensive understanding of this trend should visit the Accelerating Change website at www.accelerating.org.
One of the strengths of Kurzweil’s vision is that it weaves together many of the technologies we’ve been briefing you on in Trends and our sister publication, Business Briefings, over the past several years. For example, advances in molecular computing, carbon nanotubes, nanobots, the brain-machine interface, and virtual reality all figure prominently in this scenario.
Today’s computers rely on electronic circuits, which are more than 1 million times faster than the neurological switches that transmit information in human brains. Researchers are developing molecular circuits for use in future computers that will be based on nanotubes, which are 500 times smaller than today’s silicon chips and much faster. Instead of performing billions of operations per second like the current transistors, molecular circuits will operate at trillions of operations per second.
Nanotechnology is also yielding breakthroughs in the development of nanobots, which are robots so tiny they are measured in millionths of a meter. Kurzweil anticipates that nanobots will roam through the human body to fight diseases and delay aging. He expects to see billions of nanobots injected into the human brain to expand its natural limits and enhance its intelligence.
As he explained in an interview with Forbes magazine, “We will ultimately enhance our intelligence very directly by merging with non-biological intelligence, sending intelligent nanobots into our brains, which will communicate with our biological neurons ? they’ll all be on a local area network, they’ll be on the Internet.
”We’ll have direct brain-to-brain communication; we’ll be on-line all the time inside our brains. We’ll be able to harness any amount of computational power we might need because groups of brains will organize into a much larger machine when needed.”
At the same time, these nanobots in the brain will interact with neurons to create virtual reality within the body’s nervous system, according to Kurzweil’s book. Eventually, much of human experience will take place in virtual reality rather than physical reality. For example, you will be able to choose the virtual body that all of your senses experience as your “real” body. Meanwhile, you will be able to select a body for your spouse that your senses perceive as real, and your spouse will select one for you.
As Kurzweil explained in an interview with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, one of the implications of virtual reality is that the value of land will plummet.4 Because people will be able to have any experience they want to have wherever they are, it will not be necessary to have an ocean-front home in the physical world. It will not be necessary to have 10 acres of property in the suburbs when you can program yourself to experience a forest when you gaze down from the balcony of your condo in a large city. The travel industry will also suffer. It won’t be necessary to jet to the Riviera, to climb Everest, or to cruise to the Caribbean when you can enjoy the experience without leaving home.
Advances in nanotechnology will also clean up the environment and enable us to avoid an energy shortage. Kurzweil said in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily that “We can meet all energy needs with nano-engineered solar panels and fuel cells. If we capture just 1 percent of the 1 percent of sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs. We don’t do that today because solar panels use old-fashioned technology that is heavy, hard to install, and inefficient. When we get to the 2020s, we’ll have inexpensive, lightweight solar panels built into standard construction materials. They will be widely distributed with fuel cells that can store the energy. Like the Internet, it will be decentralized and secure.”
While it seems probable that Kurzweil’s predictions about nanotechnology will come true, the Trends editors are skeptical about the controversial scenario in which artificial intelligence replaces or merges with human intelligence. Kurzweil presented this scenario in his interview with Investor’s Business Daily as follows: “My conclusion is that by the late 2020s we will have fully reverse-engineered the human brain and will understand the principles of operations of several hundred regions of the brain. We’ll be able to create human-level intelligence in machines. . . . We are going to merge with the machines.”
Over time, Kurzweil believes the biological parts will be fully replaced by the machine parts, and the person will never realize when that change happens.
There are plenty of people who are uncomfortable with Kurzweil’s conclusions. For instance, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems who outlined Kurzweil’s vision in a Wired magazine essay, warned that if it became reality, self-replicating robots and nanotech advances would pose grave threats to human existence. He advocated “relinquishing” these supposedly dangerous technologies, which seems to be an overreaction.
Other technology pundits, including George Gilder, have challenged the feasibility of this scenario rather than its dangers. In doing so, they’ve questioned some of Kurzweil’s basic assumptions. For example, Kurzweil assumes that when our technology achieves a sufficient level of computational architecture and complexity, it will become conscious, like we are.
In his earlier book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that within the next few decades we would be able to scan our brains, upload them onto a computer, and go on with our lives.
William Dembski dismisses this possibility. Dembski has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. He is a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas.
In an essay titled, “Kurzweil’s Impoverished Spirituality,” Dembski makes the case that the assumption that machines can emulate human intelligence is flawed, because human intelligence consists of more than mere computation. Specifically, a computer can’t make a decision based on incomplete information or one that requires choosing the right frame of reference to solve a problem. He cites the following example:
A man goes into a bar and says, “I’d like a glass of water.” The bartender pulls out a gun and shouts, “Get out of here!” The man says “thank you” and leaves. What is the right frame of reference to understand what happened? The man has the hiccups, and that’s why he asked for a glass of water. The bartender understood the problem and chose to frighten the man with a gun, which made the hiccups stop instantly. Because the cure worked, the man said “thank you” and left. Humans can grasp the frame of reference for this type of problem, but computers can’t make sense of it.
Dembski points out that, “The artificial intelligence community has offered no compelling reason for thinking that it will ever solve the so-called ‘frame prob￢lem.’ Indeed, computers that employ common sense to determine ap￢propriate frames of reference continue utterly to elude computer sci￢entists.”
Despite fundamental problems that we believe will keep Kurzweil’s vision from being fully realized, the Trends editors expect the Singularitarian trend to be one of the fundamental drivers behind IT advances in the next 20 to 30 years.
So, with this understanding of the trend, we offer the following six forecasts for your consideration:
First, for the next two decades or so, Kurzweil’s vision of the singularity will continue to gather momentum, influencing both business and culture. Once again, “demography is destiny.” As humans inexorably move from birth, to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, to maturity, and ultimately to death, their priorities change. And those priorities determine how they spend their time and their money. Today, the Baby Boomers are beginning to catch their first real glimpse of the inevitability of death ? and they are responding. As we’ve discussed previously, religious faith has seen a substantial resurgence. The Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Hindu worldviews offer specific solutions to the problem of death. But, throughout history, secular humanists have had no such solution; death is the finite end of functionality. But, in Kurzweil’s vision, the Singularity and the future beyond it represent a “secular paradise.” Ever-expanding computer intelligence solves ever more difficult problems, ever faster. At some point, biological humans merge with the computer intelligence and eventually lose all their biological characteristics. Forever into the future this man-machine intelligence expands to control the universe. While shrouded in the rationale of science, this concept becomes the missing piece of a comprehensive “humanistic religion.”
Second, in pursuit of this salvation through science, the Singularitarians will use public and private resources to advance technologies and policies that will enable their vision. The power of the singularitarians will not come from large numbers, but from who they are: scientists, venture capitalists, and other members of the technological elite. This reprioratization will be a boon for the nanotech, biotech, and artificial intelligence industries. Areas such as molecular computing and neural mapping will be particularly hot as scientists attempt to replicate the actual functions of the brain in hardware and software. For the most part, this will simply add fuel to specific trends outlined in prior issues of Trends, having to do with extending human longevity and expanding the capabilities of computers and robots.
Third, by 2025, computers and robots will have improved exponentially, but will begin to see the futility of the more controversial aspects of the singularitarian vision. In many cases, computers will realistically mimic humans. However, for the reasons highlighted by Dembski and others, the quest to unravel the mechanics of human thought will hit a brick wall. Kurzweil’s models rests upon the naturalistic presumption that the mind and the personality are simply the product of patterns of chemical interactions within the brain, and if we simply dig deep enough, we’ll be able to completely understand it. That’s a view held almost universally by secularists, because it eliminates the need for supernatural solutions. However, this assumption isn’t supported by a body of empirical data. Between 2025 and 2030, it will become apparent to most that the quest for the “spiritual machine” is in vain. For example, while computers using genetic algorithms are likely to come up with innovations involving unexpected combinations of existing components, the “main line of progress” will continue to be constrained by human capabilities. From that point forward, instead of continuing to progress at an ever-faster rate, the rate of advance will plateau at the level at which man is able to manage technology. Change will then continue to advance at a roughly constant rate, as fast or faster than we see today.
Fourth, the quest for “secular salvation” will create momentum for turning many of the technologies Kurzweil expects to see into reality. Kurzweil’s vision of the man-machine merger is simply the latest variant on the timeless story of Prometheus in Greek mythology: man’s quest to take total command of his destiny through technology. The Trends editors argue that the ultimate objective of immortality will remain as elusive for the Singularitarians as it was for the builders of the pyramids 4500 years ago. Nevertheless, the business implications of the associated multi-pronged technological drive in the hands of those with the necessary money and technological knowledge are enormous. Therefore, expect to see unprecendented business opportunities in:
We will continue to highlight the specifics in future issues of Trends.
Fifth, the mere possibility of super-intelligent machines, which would make humans obsolete, is expected to create a backlash from many quarters. This backlash will begin among the anti-technology adherents within the anti-globalization movement. But it will also attract a certain subset of Christians, Muslems and others who fear the kind of Singularity envisioned by Kurzweil, for many reasons. As a result, this trend could arouse a new wave of anti-technology terrorism in the spirit of the “Unabomber.”
Sixth, regardless of whether Kurzweil’s vision unfolds as he predicts, the fact that change is accelerating and will continue to accelerate over the next few decades has profound implications for today’s businesses. It means that each of us must reconsider our business models, strategic plans, retirement plans, and investment portfolios to keep them viable under constantly evolving scenarios.
References List : 1. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil is published by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA). ⓒ Copyright 2005 by Ray Kurzweil. All rights reserved. 2. For information about the Conference on Accelerating Change held annually at Stanford University, visit the Acceleration Studies Foundation website at: www.accelerating.org 3. To access Ray Kurzweils interview with Forbes magazine, visit their website at:www.forbes.com/2005/10/19/kurzweil-ray-artificial-intelligence-comm05-cx_de_1024kurzweil.html 4. To access Ray Kurzweils interview with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, visit his website at:www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0563.html?printable=1 5. Investors Business Daily, October 21, 2005, “Nanobots Will Help Battle Ills in Future,” by Brian Deagon. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by Investors Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved. 6. Wired, April 2000, “Why the Future Doesnt Need Us,” by Bill Joy. ⓒ Copyright 2000 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. 7. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil is published by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA). ⓒ Copyright 1999 by Ray Kurzweil. All rights reserved.
