Some months ago a friend asked for opinions about "The Singularity is Near" by futurist Ray Kurtzweil. He had been reading recent Science Fiction inspired by the book and had been led to believe that it offered a unique vision of the future, bordering on revolutionary. I looked into it, reading a few things that other people who had read it wrote about it, and I came to my typical snap judgment. It's bunk.
Then about a month ago Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine I read consistently and which I generally respect, ran an extremely positive review of the same book. In light of that I decided that I really needed to evaluate it directly. Having now read the book, I offer my modified conclusion.
It's mostly bunk.
Kurtzweil's premise can be stated succinctly: Moore's Law will advance unabated until humans have converted all the matter in the solar system, including ourselves, into computers. Based on projections from current (and accelerating) rates of exponential growth, this should take about a century. We could convert the whole universe to circuit boards in another century except for that annoying speed of light thing.
Unfortunately the book is not so succinct. The hardback edition I read was 650 pages long, and although 160 pages of that were notes and appendices the rest is more than tedious and repetitive enough to make it a very tough slog. The author endeavors to beat the reader into submission by approaching his thesis from as many possible angles as he can as long as they all come out the same. Ultimately he beats back skeptics with accusations that they simply lack the imagination to see what he can see.
Ironically this makes the stultifying prose simultaneously absurdly grandiose. The author practically hyperventilates in every sentence brow-beating us with the wonders he envisions for the future. I suppose if he were right, and he could give us good reasons to believe he was right, then these would be startling revelations. However since just using the word "paradigm" at every opportunity doesn't make for an unassailable argument, he really should have taken a slightly more humble stance.
And this leads to by far the most annoying aspect of this book. Kurtzweil is far too self-referential and self-aggrandizing. Hardly a page goes by where he fails to pat himself on the back for some prior accomplishment or prediction. He has founded a lot of companies and been in a number of think-tanks and symposia, and I think he mentions every one. Several times. In every chapter. Not all of them are things that everyone would necessarily be proud of. Here's a choice example:
I have been very aggressive about reprogramming my biochemistry. I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract). As a result, the metabolic reactions in my body are completely different than they would otherwise be. Approaching this as an engineer, I measure dozens of levels of nutrients (such as vitamins, minerals, and fats), hormones, and metabolic byproducts in my blood and other body samples (such as hair and saliva). Overall, my levels are where I want them to be, although I continually fine-tune my program based on the research I conduct with Grossman.
Why does he put himself though all this? It's simple. He believes that he - Ray Kurtzweil - will personally live forever. The path he outlines he calls GNR. Genetics revolutions over the next decade will allow his deliberately abnormal but aging body to live far longer that it normally would. Nanotechnology advances in the following decade will again enhance longevity while facilitating neural-computer interfaces. Robotics breakthroughs facilitated by vast numbers of non-invasive neural implants will complete the cycle, allowing the dying brain of Ray Kurtzweil to be uploaded into a new, electronic but fully capable brain in a robotic body.
So anyone who can muddle through for another 30 years, if you buy the timeline, will live forever, albeit in the form of an artificial intelligence. There are a lot of possible objections to this proposition, as one could imagine, some of which I will attempt to address. On the whole however I don't disagree with some of the key predictions, just the timing. It's vaguely possible that the first humans to sidestep natural death may have already been born. I very much doubt they were born in the fifties. When Ray Kurtzweil dies I'll write a suitably ironic obituary.
The subtitle for the book is "When Humans Transcend Biology." If he had really wanted to capture his more viceral premise (while also increasing sales) he should have given the subtitle some more thought. I think "How Baby Boomers can live forever, enjoy virtual sex whenever they want with whomever they want, and shape the destiny of the entire frigging universe" might have been more of a winner.
Yeah, he's crazy.
- jack*
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