The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology [Paperback]

Ray Kurzweil (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 26, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0143037889 | ISBN-13: 978-0143037880

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist—a large-minded one at that—and gives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Kurzweil is one of the world’s most respected thinkers and entrepreneurs. Yet the thesis he posits in Singularity is so singular that many readers will be astounded—and perhaps skeptical. Think Blade Runner or Being John Malkovich magnified trillion-fold. Even if one were to embrace his techno-optimism, which he backs up with fascinating details, Kurzweil leaves some important questions relating to politics, economics, and morality unanswered. If machines in our bodies can rebuild cells, for example, why couldn’t they be reengineered as weapons? Or think of singularity, notes the New York Times Book Review, as the "Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints." Kurzweil’s vision requires technology, which we continue to build. But it also requires mass acceptance and faith.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (September 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143037889
• ISBN-13: 978-0143037880
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (226 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Biotechnology
  • #8 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Bioengineering
  • #33 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Evolution

More About the Author

Ray Kurzweil is a prize-winning author and scientist. He was named Inventor of the Year by MIT in 1988 and was awarded the Dickson Prize, Carnegie Mellon's top science prize, in 1994. He is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and honors from two American presidents. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

181 of 200 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Brave New World October 13, 2005

By John St John

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

To say that Mr. Kurzweil is a bit of an optimist is like saying Shaq is a bit on the tall side. Mr K is positively bubbling with enthusiasim. Had it not been taken by Joe Namath a suitable title might have been "The Future's So Bright I Just Gotta Wear Shades". But therein lies the problem. Mr K comes across more like a passionate evangelical than a reasoned scientist. Whenever someone is absolutley convinced about the rightness of his assumptions I become skeptical.

If you're reading this you know the premise of the book. Mr. K maintains that the pace of technological change (and by technology he means the really cool technologies, like infotech, biotech, and nanotech) is not simply increasing, but increasing exponentially, so fast that we will soon reach a point where man and machine have become one, and are brains are a million (or maybe a billion) times more powerful. When this happens everything we know will have changed forever.

Moreover, this is not someting that will happen at some vague time in the far future. It's just around the corner. Mr. K even gives us a date: 2045.

While reading the book I kept thinking, What if Mr. K had written this in the mid 1950's? Certainly he'd have backup for his basic premise--the changes that occured in the first half of the 20th century were indeed tremendous. Take aviation, a hot technology in those days. Mr. K would no doubt have observed that we went from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 707 in just 50 years. Projecting ahead, Mr. K would have concluded that the second half of the century would see an even greater rate of advancement, so that by now we'd all have our own personal flying devices, zipping off to Europe in just minutes.

But that hasn't happened.... Certainly there has been signigicant progress in aviation in the last 50 years, but not like the 50 years before that. In some says it's worse. I suspect that since 9/11 the time it takes to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco (from the time you get to one airport to the time you leave the other) may be longer now than it was in the 1950's.

Why has this happened? A lot of this has to do with social conditions, not technological ones. Supersonic trasport never got off the ground (so to speak) in part because people didn't want the sonic booms near populated areas. These same social factors may well put the brakes on a lot of what Mr. K predicts.

It's not that Mr. K's book isn't based on hard science. It's positively larded with science, so much so that my eyes tended to glaze over many times. It's just that he doesn't seem very critical. While he does acknowledge the existence of contrary opinion, he quickly (albeit politely) dismisses any cautionary thoughts. Those who disagree with his beliefs are clearly stuck-in-the-mud, nay-saying Luddites.

Mr K is obviously a brilliant, well-informed scientist. I don't have enough knowledge to judge the accuracy of his facts, except in a few situations. When that does occur, though, I become unimpressed. For example, he spends a few pages talking about the increases that have occured in life expectancy, and uses this to project further increases to 150 years and then to 500 years. But he fails to distinguish between life exoectancy and life span. The former has indeed increased, but the latter has not. I am certain Mr. K knows the difference. His failure to make the distinction is misleading and disingenuous. It makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the book.

As to the book itself, it's far too long. He repeats his points so much it seems as though he thinks that by mere repetition the reader will become more convinced that he's right. And some parts of the book are simply annoying, like the smug pseudo-conversations among past, present, and future personages that appear throughout the work.

To his credit, though, his optimisim about the future is refreshing, and certainly an antidote to the dystopian views typical in literature and Hollywood (Brave New World, 1984, Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Terminator, Waterworld, etc.).

The bottom line here is that Mr. K. doesn't seem to remember that virtually all predictions about the future are wrong, since the predictions are simply extrapolations of current trends. The future is never what we think it will be, and Mr. K is no exception.

Then again, he could be right. If so, I just hope I can live long enough to enjoy the sigularity, so I can have my body filled with nanobots and my brain uploaded to (as he would say) a suitable substrate. Maybe being a cyborg won't be so bad. Read more ›

345 of 388 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Important extrapolations, but not as careful or concise as I wanted September 22, 2005

By Peter McCluskey

Format:Hardcover

Kurzweil does a good job of arguing that extrapolating trends such as Moore's Law is better than most alternative forecasting methods, and he does a good job of describing the implications of those trends. But he is a bit long-winded, and tries to hedge his methodology by pointing to specific research results which he seems to think buttress his conclusions. He neither convinces me that he is good at distinguishing hype from value when analyzing current projects, nor that doing so would help with the longer-term forecasting that constitutes the important aspect of the book.

Given the title, I was slightly surprised that he predicts that AIs will become powerful slightly more gradually than I recall him suggesting previously (which is a good deal more gradual than most Singulitarians). He offsets this by predicting more dramatic changes in the 22nd century than I imagined could be extrapolated from existing trends.

His discussion of the practical importance of reversible computing is clearer than anything else I've read on this subject.

When he gets specific, large parts of what he says seem almost right, but there are quite a few details that are misleading enough that I want to quibble with them.

For instance (talking about the world circa 2030): "The bulk of the additional energy needed is likely to come from new nanoscale solar, wind, and geothermal technologies." Yet he says little to justify this, and most of what I know suggests that wind and geothermal have little hope of satisfying more than 1 or 2 percent of new energy demand.

His reference to "the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry" seems to say something undesirable about his perspective....

His comments on economists thoughts about deflation are confused and irrelevant.

On page 92 he says "Is the problem that we are not running the evolutionary algorithms long enough? ... This won't work, however, because conventional genetic algorithms reach an asymptote in their level of performance, so running them for a longer period of time won't help." If "conventional" excludes genetic programming, then maybe his claim is plausible. But genetic programming originator John Koza claims his results keep improving when he uses more computing power.

His description of nanotech progress seems naive. (page 228) "Drexler's dissertation ... laid out the foundation and provided the road map still being followed today." (page 234): "each aspect of Drexler's conceptual designs has been validated". I've been following this area pretty carefully, and I'm aware of some computer simulations which do a tiny fraction of what is needed, but if any lab research is being done that could be considered to follow Drexler's road map, it's a well kept secret. Kurzweil then offsets his lack of documentation for those claims by going overboard about documenting his accurate claim that "no serious flaw in Drexler's nanoassembler concept has been described".

Kurzweil argues that self-replicating nanobots will sometimes be desirable. I find this poorly thought out. His reasons for wanting them could be satisfied by nanobots that replicate under the control of a responsible AI.

I'm bothered by his complacent attitude toward the risks of AI. He sometimes hints that he is concerned, but his suggestions for dealing with the risks don't indicate that he has given much thought to the subject. He has a footnote that mentions Yudkowsky's Guidelines on Friendly AI. The context could lead readers to think they are comparable to the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. Alas, Yudkowsky's guidelines depend on concepts which are hard enough to understand that few researchers are likely to comprehend them, and the few who have tried disagree about their importance. Read more ›

140 of 156 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Technophilic ecstacy September 22, 2005

By Dr. Lee D. Carlson HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The author is definitely one of the most inspiring of all researchers in the field of applied artificial intelligence. For those, such as this reviewer, who are working "in the trenches" of applied AI, his website is better than morning coffee. One does not have to agree with all the conclusions reached by the author in order to enjoy this book, but he does make a good case, albeit somewhat qualitative, for the occurrence, in this century, of what he and other futurists have called a `technological singularity.' He defines this as a period in the future where the rate of technological change will be so high that human life will be `irreversibly transformed.' There is much debate about this notion in the popular literature on AI, but in scientific and academic circles it has been greeted with mixed reviews. Such skepticism in the latter is expected and justified, for scientists and academic researchers need more quantitative justification than is usually provided by the enthusiasts of the singularity, which in this book the author calls "singularitarians." Even more interesting though is that the notion of rapid technological change seems to be ignored by the business community, who actually stand to gain (or lose) the most by it.

Since this book is aimed primarily at a wide audience, and not professional researchers, the author does not include detailed arguments or definitions for the notion of machine intelligence or a list of the hundreds of examples of intelligent machines that are now working in the field. Indeed, if one were to include a discussion of each of these examples, this book would swell to thousands of pages.... There are machines right now used in business and industry that can manage, troubleshoot, and analyze networks, diagnose illnesses, compose music definitely worth listening to, choreograph dances, simulate human behavior in computer games, recommend and engage in financial transactions and bargaining, and many, many other tasks, a detailed list of which would, again, entail many thousands of pages.

There are various psychological issues that arise when discussing machine intelligence, which if believed might prohibit the acceptance of any kind of notion of a technological singularity. For example, it is one of the historical peculiarities of research in AI that advances in the field are later trivialized, i.e. when a problem in AI becomes solved it no longer holds any mystery and is then considered to be just another part of information processing. It is then no longer regarded as `intelligent' in any sense of the term. This phenomenon in AI research might be called the "Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect", named after the three individuals, Donald Michie, Barbara McCorduck, and Douglas Hofstader, who discussed it some detail in their writings. If one examines the history of AI, one finds many examples of this effect, such as in knowledge discovery from databases, the use of business rules in database technologies, and the use of ontologies for information systems development. One of the best examples of this effect though is the backgammon player TD-Gammon, a highly sophisticated example of machine intelligence but which is now considered to be merely part of the "programmer's toolbox." The Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect is important in discussing the notion of a technological singularity since if one does occur this effect would diminish one's ability to recognize it as being real. The author does not name this phenomenon as such in the book, but a reading of it definitely reveals that he is aware of the skepticism expressed by many towards any "advances" in machine intelligence.

Another one of these psychological issues regards the attitude of many philosophers on the notion of machine intelligence. In most cases they are extremely skeptical, and many AI researchers seem to feel the need to "refute" their opinions on the "impossibility" of intelligent machines. Unfortunately the author is one of these, and devotes space in the book to counter various philosophical arguments against AI. His arguments, although valid, are really a waste of time though. Such time would be better spent, both for the author and for AI researchers, in the actual development of intelligent machines. A moratorium should be declared among AI researchers on all philosophical speculation. Such musings are best left to professional philosophers, who have the time and the inclination to indulge themselves in them.

There are other issues that should have been given more attention in the book, such as more details on the energy requirements needed to bring about such a singularity. In addition, the author needs to sharpen just what he means by intelligence and move away from the Turing test/human brain benchmark that he uses in the book. There are many examples of intelligence in the natural world, and these can and have been emulated in many different types of machines. Interestingly, the fixation on human intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain (that is exemplified in this book) has inspired a few research teams to attempt to build a machine of "general intelligence", i.e. one that can think in many different domains, as clearly humans can. But it is still an open question whether this intelligence is "entangled" over these domains, i.e. whether or not a decrease in ability in one domain will affect the ability in another. From an evolutionary or efficiency standpoint it would seem that that domain specific intelligence is more optimal.

The notion of a technological singularity can be met with both exhilaration and a sense of foreboding, since (radical) change can be embraced with enthusiasm and with some feelings of anxiety. Even the author expresses this when he writes in the book that he is not "entirely comfortable" with all the consequences of a technological singularity. He has though made a fairly strong case for rapidly accelerating change. If the book concentrated more on the actual examples of intelligent machines and included the enormous amount of data from activities in applied AI that are now going on, an even stronger case could be made. Read more ›