Ray Kurzweil has argued that we're on our way to a singularity, that is that if you
look at the change and the interaction of scientific fields over the course of the last
century or so and you project it forward, what you see is not a linear progression,
but an exponential progression, which means that as things change they're going to change
more rapidly so that the curve will mean that over a very short period of time we will make
giant leaps in scientific sophistication.
What he's argued about that is that that is going to reach kind of critical mass, which
will mean that at some point, and there are different dates that have been projected,
but it's not that far in the future; a couple of decades.
We are going to be able to so manipulate human form and function, so change the nature of
life that it's impossible on this side of that moment that he calls a singularity, to
predict what life will be like on the other side of that singularity.
I happen to think he's wrong.
I think that things will change.
I think things will change dramatically, but I don't think that moment's going to come
anything like in the way that he thinks it's going to come.
Society is too complex for that, our interactions with different scientific fields -- look.
One of the things that we have found out over and over and over again when we talk about
biology and biotechnology is that things are much more complex than we think they are.
First, we were going to decode the human genome and that was going to open up everything we
needed to know about the nature of life.
And then we said, oh no, we just finished the human genome, but we don't really understand
the proteins that these genes code for, so we have to map the proteome and then we have
to get all of these proteins together.
And then people said, oh no, that's not going to be enough because now we've kind of discovered
epigenetics and we realize that the genome is mediated by all kinds of cellular mechanisms
that decide what gets expressed and how it gets expressed.
And that's how things go.
The same things happen in the brain sciences where a lot of our assumptions about the way
the brain worked and synaptic relationships and midlevel brain organization turned out
to be much more simplistic than we thought it was.
And we still don't really understand how the brain works.
And I think what we're going to find over time is that rather than convergence leading
us to some sort of unified idea is that there will constantly be this kind of complexity
fallout.
As we learn about things more deeply and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there's
all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn't have even imagined looking forward.
And what that means is you're not going to have a convergence towards a singularity,
but you're going to have a very complex set of moments where things will change in a lot
of different ways.
And I think the singularity is actually a very simplistic idea and it misunderstands
the complex nature of biological life and physical life.
And physics also thought it was going to find its grand unified theory a long time ago.
And now we're just beginning to discover that maybe the universe isn't exactly organized
the way we thought it was with dark matter and String Theory and all of that, which we
still don't really understand the nature of it and we can't agree about it.
So, I'm not a big singularity fan.
I think that Ray Kurzweil's basic insight that science is increasing in a very rapid
rate, more rapidly than people recognize and that there is a convergence of fields.
The classic 19th century fields of biology and chemistry, they don't make any sense anymore.
Everything is interdisciplinary.
Universities have to change their structure now because we're still -- I spent my life
in universities and we're still functioning on a 19th century model of what a university
should be with these departments that have somehow gotten so petrified in their place
that we are petrified of changing them.
But I also think that part of the nature of understanding that move towards complexity
is recognizing that even as we get more and more sophisticated about it, part of that
sophistication will be discovering new complex phenomenon that right now we can't even imagine
exists.
And that suggesting that it's all going to be tied up in a moment where we're just going
to understand everything well enough to transform the world is, I think, a fairly naive and
simplistic view of how things are going to change.