The Singularity Is Coming Soon. Here’s What It May Mean.

 

In 2005, the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, machines would become smarter than humans. He called this inflection point the “singularity,” and it struck a chord. Kurzweil, who’s been tracking artificial intelligence since 1963, gained a fanatical following, especially in Silicon Valley.

Now comes The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with A.I. where Kurzweil steps up the Singularity’s arrival timeline to 2029. “Algorithmic innovations and the emergence of big data have allowed AI to achieve startling breakthroughs sooner than expected,” reports Kurzweil. From winning at games like Jeopardy! and Go to driving automobiles, writing essays, passing bar exams, and diagnosing cancer, chunks of the Singularity are arriving daily, and there’s more good news just ahead.

Very soon, predicts Kurzweil, artificial general intelligence will be able to do anything a human can do, only better. Expect 3D printed clothing and houses by the end of this decade. Look for medical cures that will “add decades to human life spans” just ahead. “These are the most exciting and momentous years in all of history,” Kurzweil noted in an interview with Boston Globe science writer Brian Bergstein.

As a futurist myself, I applaud Kurzweil’s focus on a bright tomorrow. Kurzweil’s bestseller status is bringing attention to our craft. His well-documented and thought-provoking book urges us to set aside the media-infused doom and gloom of today’s headlines, and instead contemplate the abundance that advancing technology will bring about in the years ahead.

Futurists generally agree on the power of looking back in order to look ahead. Kurzweil overwhelms his reader with charts and graphs to argue that life has gotten better and better over time: longevity and literacy rates are improving. The number of people living on $2.15 per day is decreasing. People are working shorter hours. The internet delivers huge chunks of value for free. Tangible progress is occurring in areas as distinct as healthcare, education and democracy and with the Singularity arriving soon, life is just about to become exponentially better.

Yet Kurzweil largely omits discussion of ominous mega forces that are also on the horizon: the baked-in devastation of climate change, the scourge of economic inequality, political polarization, deep fakes and misinformation, the rise of “tech feudalism” and the very real possibility that the future will be controlled by a few monolithic companies such as Google, where Kurzweil resides as “chief researcher and A.I. Visionary.”

Kurzweil has little patience with such discussion. His eye is on the forward march of the human race over time. He wants to eradicate the limitations of todays brain. “My biological brain evolved for a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits that I would rather not have,” Kurzweil confesses. “I can’t reprogram it to free me of fears, traumas, and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving what I would like to achieve.”

If more intelligence is better, and Kurzweil believes that it is, we need simply to create machines that make us smarter. But this is where his argument becomes problematic, controversial even. Kurzweil believes we get to the future by ingesting “nanobots,” microscopic-sized robots that can transport drugs, genes, and other payloads to specific locations in the body, such as diseased cells or tumors. Kurzweil’s nanobots will “go through your bloodstream and develop something in your brain that would talk to the web automatically.”

But will we want to ingest nanobots?

“The Singularity is Nearer did not persuade me that his AI-maximalist vision is coming close to fruition or that it would be desirable,” noted science writer Bergstein. “I see how AI could give our civilization greater intelligence to solve big problems like finding new medical cures. But I’m less sure that a lot of individual people will want so much more intelligence in their daily lives that they’ll implant computers inside their bodies.”

Another reviewer, Becca Roth Feld, writing in the Washington Post, noted a broader limitation, not only to nanobots, but to the Singularity vision of utopia: “Kurzweil is a refreshingly lucid expositor of complex technical concepts, but he suffers from the shape rotators (”engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley”) characteristic deficiency: an incapacity to recognize the limits of his own understanding.”