The Singularity and Human Destiny

In 1949, several decades before the birth of the PC, computer scientist John von Neumann announced, “It would appear we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology.” He quickly and prudently added, “One should be careful with such statements; they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.” More than half a century later, it is Neumann’s caveat rather than his prediction that is borne out daily. Our computer intelligence is growing at an ever-quickening pace, surpassed only by our dependence on computer technology. For many of us, computers and computer-based devices have become not so much tools as appendages, third arms that are integral to our lives, cumbersome on occasion, and increasingly willful. This begs the obvious question: If computer power advances beyond our control, how will that change us? In his most recent book, The Singularity Is Near, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil provides us with a clue. Imagine that with the help of a small device you could create a perfect replica of any object—Gianlorenzo Bernini’s David, the hub cap from a ’78 Dodge Dart—seemingly from vapor. Imagine that through virtual-reality software you won’t be shackled to a particular position in time, and could exist in several locations at once—work, home, a seaside bungalow in Bora Bora—and each setting in which you chose to locate yourself looked, sounded, and felt perfectly real. Imagine that you could live indefinitely in a world in which all poverty, pollution, and scarcity has been vanquished. Imagine that there existed no limitation to what you could do or be, except for those limitations that you imposed yourself. This scenario may sound like a cross between Thomas Moore’s Utopia and Christopher Marlow’s Doctor Faustus, but according to Ray Kurzweil it is our real and fast-approaching future. It will come about as the result of an explosion in our technological abilities. We will incorporate more computer-based processes into our biological functioning until we transcend our crude, earthly bodies entirely and become machine-based, virtually immortal. This coming period of rapid technological progress and its miraculous effects will occur within the next 50 years and is what Kurzweil refers to as the Singularity. The concept is both startling and optimistic, but it immediately provokes certain philosophical concerns. If nanotechnology allows us to create any object, will any object ever again be valuable? What role will responsibility, temperance, and discipline play in a world where any urge can be gratified at almost the same moment it is felt? What will pass for morality when there is no mortal consequence to any action? These questions cannot and should not be answered all at once—either by Ray Kurzweil, his devotees, or his critics. Rather, what is important is that they be asked, repeatedly and earnestly, and by as many people as possible. To further the debate of these key issues, THE FUTURIST presents Kurzweil’s insights and ideas along with invited commentaries from nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall, acceleration studies scholar John Smart, and sociologists Damien Broderick and Richard Eckersely. Together, they examine this issue of the Singularity to determine how near it is exactly, and explore what it might mean for humanity.