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Are you ready to live forever?
BOOK REVIEW: 'Singularity' looks ahead to the day when science trumps biology
11:52 AM CST on Friday, November 25, 2005
The future is almost here. Forget flying cars or personal jetpacks.
Instead, imagine billions of tiny robots swimming through your body,
defeating diseases and cancers.
Get ready for computers millions of times smarter than the average
human, capable of creating virtual-reality environments
indistinguishable in every way from the real world.
And prepare for the day, much closer than you might think or want to
think, when your limited brain can be digitally copied and uploaded to a
vast intergalactic network that makes the World Wide Web look like those
dusty encyclopedias stored in your attic.
Oh, yeah, and you'll live forever.These seemingly impossible feats of
technology are not only inevitable, but they'll also arrive in a mere 40
years, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singularity
Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Mr. Kurzweil is no crackpot. He's one of the most famous inventors and
futurists in the world. Not many writers have blurbs from Bill Gates on
their book jackets.
The new book, a sequel of sorts to Mr. Kurzweil's The Age of
Spiritual Machines, painstakingly chronicles our progression toward
what the author calls the "singularity." That's the point at which we
will be nearly freed of the limitations of our physical bodies and be
able to merge our minds with the super-intelligent machine world we will
have created.
Until that time, which Mr. Kurzweil predicts will occur around 2045,
we'll see major leaps in three main fields: genetics, nanotechnology and
robotics.
Once genetics and nanotechnology have given us complete maps of the
human brain, we'll be able to reverse-engineer its capabilities and
create a virtual mind, Mr. Kurzweil argues. This won't just be a
chess-playing math wizard, but a computer capable of the full range of
human thought and emotion, even consciousness.
Mr. Kurzweil is keenly aware of both the scientific objections to his
predictions and the simple incredulity that both scientists and laymen
will display toward his world-changing projections.
So the bulk of the book is a detailed look at the progression of
everything from the price and power of computer processors to the
mapping of neurons, dendrites and spindle cells in the human brain.
It's not always an easy read. The book lacks the metaphorical style of
other popular science works such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and
Steel, or Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Part of the problem is that Mr. Kurzweil seems a very serious man. But
he's dealing with a serious topic. And when he confronts some of the
potential drawbacks of genetics, nanotech and robotics, he's dealing
with sobering stuff.
From engineered viruses unleashed by terrorists to nanobots run amok,
covering the world in "gray goo," to near-omnipotent artificial
intelligence that has decided to wage war on mankind, the perils are not
small.
While the remedies to the genetic and nanotech threats sound plausible,
Mr. Kurzweil acknowledges that an unfriendly AI would basically be
unstoppable.
He says we should continue to foster "liberty, tolerance, and respect
for knowledge and diversity," so that artificial intelligences created
by those societies will also be imbued with those values.
"If this sounds vague, it is," Mr. Kurzweil concedes. "But there is no
purely technical strategy that is workable in this area, because greater
intelligence will always find a way to circumvent measures that are the
product of a lesser intelligence."
In other words, we'd better hope that the smart computers of the future
are nice, because we'll be too dumb to stop them from doing anything
they want. That doesn't sound encouraging and represents the one solid
objection to the singularity that Mr. Kurzweil is unable to really
deflect. But Mr. Kurzweil is otherwise relentlessly optimistic and
thoroughly convincing.
While he may not have the timelines exactly right – and he does
acknowledge that these stages of technological evolution could be
delayed by various events or hurdles – it's hard to argue with his
long-term outlook on the possibilities of unbridled technology.
Things are about to get very interesting.
E-mail vgodinez@dallasnews.com
When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil (Viking, $29.95)
When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil (Viking, $29.95)
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