Ray Kurzweil, The Technological Singularity And The Future Of Humanity
Artificial Neural Networks, Adaptive Algorithms, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence...
these are all terms we often hear about without understanding their true meaning,
unless we are familiar with the rapid progress already achieved in the field of computing.
Today we have robots that can paint portraits, compose music and write articles for newspapers;
robots that buy and sell securities on the stock exchange. And that for a long time they
surpass human intelligence in the most complex mental game: chess. 40 years ago we had Pong,
do you remember it?: two rectangles and a point on the screen. Now we have photorealistic 3D
simulations with millions of people simultaneously playing video games of incredible complexity.
In another 40 years, what will we have? When people can’t tell the difference between
artificial and human intelligence, will humans become obsolete, like the floppy disk? Or will it
be a world where artificial and human intelligence merge to usher in the next step of our evolution?
That’s the “technological singularity”, the theoretical time in the future where
technological development will outpace our abilities to maintain control over it. For
better or worse, it’s undoubtedly something that will result in never seen changes to our world.
“Roll intro”
By 2029, computers will reach human-level intelligence.
It's not just any guy who says so, but the famous Ray Kurzweil,
chief engineer at Google and guru in the world of computing.
It is not the first time that the controversial scientist plays the role of the oracle.
The same Ray Kurzweil is so fond of his predictions to keep track of their accuracy:
at the moment, well 86% of its 147 prophecies have been proven correct, 12% only partially correct,
and 2% wrong. In about 8 years, however, we will know if the most ambitious of his hypotheses
have proved to be correct, and really artificial intelligence will be able to reason, think in
abstract terms, understand complex ideas, and all the other skills that characterize humans.
Also according to Kurzweil, however, there is another date to mark on the calendar: 2047,
the year in which according to him will become reality the so-called Technological Singularity,
or the time when "technological progress will reach a speed that will radically change the world
as we know it" and in which the intelligence of machines will exceed several measures that of man.
But exactly... what is a singularity, and more importantly: how does it manifest itself?
History is replete with instances where a revolutionary new technology,
or a collection of such technologies, completely changes people's lives.
The change is often so dramatic that people who lived before the technological leap
have difficulty understanding how subsequent generations think. For people before the change,
the new generation may even be alien in their way of thinking and seeing the world.
To make the point, predictive analysts often compare modern smartphone technology
to Apollo-era computers, and remind us that NASA computers had the equivalent of
73,728 bytes of memory... while smartphones have up to 32 GB of memory, about 430,000 times the
working memory of the Apollo guidance computer. Not to mention that the computers on Voyager 1
and 2 - the spacecraft that explored the outer planets and became the first man-made objects
to reach interstellar space - run on 69.63 kilobytes of memory each...
These dramatic and sudden changes - although the one of the passage from the Apollo era to today
represents a minor example - are called Singularity, a term borrowed from physics
and mathematics, where it is used to define a point of a function of which we are no longer
able to describe the exact properties. To explain with some more or less fitting
examples, we could imagine the singularity as that particular moment when a calculator
suddenly signals us "error, division by zero" when dividing a constant by a smaller and smaller
number, up to infinity. Or, more trivially, the singularity is that exact moment when a glass
shatters when subjected to a sound that increases in frequency faster and faster.
In physics, singularity is related to the phenomenology of black holes and the Big
Bang itself. Objects and events that it is possible to describe only passing from
classical physics to quantum physics, and that anyway are considered a door that opens on a
physical world totally unexplored. In the historical and social field,
which is what interests us most at this moment, Singularity is the technological change so rapid
and so deep to cause a discontinuity in the normal path of human history.
In 1983, writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge popularized the theory in an article in which
he argued that rapidly improving artificial intelligence would eventually reach a "kind
of singularity," beyond which reality would be difficult to predict. These are his words.
"Soon we will create an intelligence greater than our own. When that happens,
human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as
impenetrable as space-time nestled at the center of a black hole, and the world will
be transformed beyond our comprehension." Something very similar had already been done
by the English astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who in 1983 made public in the book "Mindsteps to
the Cosmos" his notion of "mindsteps": dramatic and sudden changes of reality.
Hawkins identified five main mindsteps in the history of mankind and the technology
that had led to these "new worldviews": the invention of images (30,000 BC),
writing (3,000 BC), mathematics (150 AD), the Copernican revolution (1543 AD),
the space age (1927)... And as Hawkins himself points out,
the waiting period between changes gets shorter and shorter, and even goes so far as to formulate
an empirical mathematical equation capable of linking past steps and predicting future
ones ... The date of the next mindstep according to the English astronomer is that of 2021,
to which will follow in rapid acceleration that of 2045, 2051, and lastly that of 2053.
It is a series of terms (and steps) that eventually stops because it reaches an
insurmountable barrier. There is a mathematical limit, and no matter how many mental steps you
keep adding, then you meet a time barrier that there is no way to cross. What happens from the
mathematical point of view is that there comes a time when the mental steps are accelerated.
The acceleration increases in such a way that after 2051, the successive mental steps occur
every month, then every day, every hour, and every second, until in the year 2053 they pass
by at infinite speed. At that time the human mind will have absorbed all the possible mental steps
that can occur and in a grand culmination humanity will make the final adaptation
to the greater cosmos. Destiny, from the perspective of the equation, will have arrived!
Note that for Hawkins the final mental step, the one that we could assimilate to
the concept of singularity... will happen in 2053! A date very close to 2047 of Kurzewei!
The nucleus of studies on the subject has been formed from the nineties onwards,
by people such as Ray Kurzweil, futurologist and author of books such as The Singularity is Near,
in which the phenomenon is defined as "that future point at which technological advances will begin
to occur with such rapidity, that normal human beings will not be able to keep pace,
and will be cut out of the cycle. Similarly to Hawkins, Kurzweil has proposed
that humanity's scientific and technological journey can be divided into six different epochs
The first epoch is determined by a simple and general mass of information:
energy and matter. We are talking about millions of years ago when there were atomic structures
that stored information of various kinds. After the Big Bang (millions of years later)
atoms started to form and then chemistry was born: from the meeting of atoms, molecules were born.
It is necessary to mention carbon, that thanks to its atomic and molecular characteristics,
is able to combine with other molecules creating complex three-dimensional structures.
"Hey, guys, just a moment before we continue... BE sure to join the Insane Curiosity Channel...
Click on the bell, you will help us to make products of ever-higher quality!"
The second epoch is instead characterized by the development of organisms from carbon:
DNA is the apex of the development of this epoch, allowing to transmit more and more information.
The third epoch, following the mechanism of the previous epochs, starts from DNA to arrive at the
development of complex organisms, equipped with sensory organs and ability to store information
collected by the senses themselves: we have the development of brains and nervous systems.
The fourth epoch differs from the others for the fact that biological progress has
ended and has reached its peak with man. From now on, the development will mainly
concern technology: from small and simple mechanical devices we have arrived today
to sophisticated electronic equipment capable of managing and storing an impressive amount of
data. Wanting to compare the biological development and the "technical" one,
it is clear how the second has happened quickly and fast: about two billion years have passed
from the origin of life to cells, only fourteen years from the first laptop to the World Wide Web.
The fifth epoch should be oriented indicatively from today to a near future and within it,
we would have the so-called "fusion" between human intellect and technology.
It will happen the definitive union man-machine, the technological singularity, as it has been
often told in many movies and novels. This will allow us to expand both intellectual
and technological horizons, thus overcoming the limits imposed by our biological system.
Finally, the last epoch of the six described by Kurzweil foresees a further evolution that will
allow on the basis of singularity technologies to overcome the limits of the universe as it
is known today. We will be able to transform the entire universe into a complex intelligent system.
Just like Vinge, Kurzweil believes that we will arrive at the Singularity by creating
a superhuman artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence of that level could conceive of ideas
that no human has thought of in the past and will invent technological tools
that will be more sophisticated and advanced than anything we have today.
Not all artificial intelligence scientists agree with the timeline Kurzweil provides.
On the contrary: most experts believe that the evolutionary leap of artificial intelligence
will happen later than 2029, around the mid-2040s; others think that we need to wait until 2070.
Although the predictions are different, they all agree on one fact: designing truly
intelligent computers is not only possible, but a matter of years or, at most, decades.
But is there anything to fear from such predictions? People such as Bill Gates,
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and other numerous scientists, have raised serious alarms about the
unknowns arising from a super intelligence, far superior to the human one. And they have voiced
their concerns that artificial intelligence could escape our control and move against us.
Musk and others, who follow the growth of new technologies closely and speak knowledgeably,
propose setting ethical standards today before it becomes too late. They call on governments to act.
In short, will the singularity be a wall we crash into or just a barrier we cross?
When asked whether or not this scenario will prove to be a threat to the world's population,
Kurzweil instead replied that the idea of artificial intelligence capable of enslaving
humans is pure invention. "What is already happening is that machines are empowering us.
They are making us smarter." In fact, according to the scholar, in the future we will be able
to join the neocortexes of the brain, connecting the functions of learning, language, and memory.
"We'll have a larger portion of the neocortex,
we'll be more fun, we'll be better at playing musical instruments,
we'll be sexier. We'll exemplify all the laudable things in being human but at a higher level."
What is clear, from the speech of the head of the engineering department of Google,
is that talking about singularity means talking about evolution. The human being of the future,
in fact, could no longer be simply human but hybrid. The biological brain - fatigued by the
immense amount of information that reaches us daily - would be enhanced through the support
of nanorobotic implants. These implants, in addition to making learning and elaboration
processes more efficient, would be able to connect our mind to the cloud of internet data,
so that we would have access to almost unlimited knowledge.
This is what Kurzweil thinks... but others, as we have already said,
believe instead that machines will end up doing everything by themselves, thus excluding the
human being from any hypothesis of hybridization. Machines able to read Shakespeare, make politics,
tell a joke, argue. Machines that will learn by themselves and will transmit their knowledge to
other machines, which in turn ... In a short time they will have reached and exceeded our
global intellectual capacity and a few months later their powers will be incalculable.
All this was anticipated in some way back in 1954 in a story by science fiction writer
Fredric Brown, in which he imagines the construction of a galactic supercomputer.
Having completed the work, the humans ask the computer, as a first thing, if there is God.
And the answer is fulminating: "Now, yes."