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This weekend (October 15-16) we had the sixth Singularity summit, which went on for two days in New York City. The star speaker was the radical futurist and prophet of a union between man and the machine, Ray Kurzweil. Singularity is heady stuff. It is quite engrossing to watch Ray Kurzweil hold up a latest smartphone, and declare, This device is a billion times more valuable per constant dollar than the computer I used as a student at MIT in the late 60s. In 25 years, it will be the size of a blood cell. And it will be a billion times more powerful.
The Law of Accelerating Returns
It was in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, published in 1999, that Kurzweil proposed the "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially. So at some point of time 100 years of progress could be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at an earlier stage of civilisation.
Kurzweil and his many supporters believe that human civilisation has already reached a stage when there can be exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades machines could reach a stage where they are able to surpass human intelligence, leading to a situation where we have Singularity.
The technological change could turn out to be so rapid and profound that it might rupture in the fabric of human history. Singularity could entail a merger of biological and non-biological intelligence. A new race of super intelligent software-based humans, who are immortal, could be spawned. This new race of humans could make rapid advances into outer universe, and there could be developments that beyond our wildest imaginations at this point of time.
Kurzweils law of accelerating returns is loosely based on Moores Law, proposed by Gordon Moore, a past chairman of Intel and one of the inventors of integrated circuits.
Singularity by year 2045
In his books Kurzweil has written about his views on possible life extension. Right now only hope that human beings have of extending their life is through modern medication and healthier living habits. But for Kurzweil its not so much about staying healthy for as long as possible, it is about staying alive until there is Singularity. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans.
It is even possible that we will have a technology that allows us to transfer our minds to vessels that are much more infinitely durable as compared to human bodies. Perhaps the devotees of Singularity can be accused of taking the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal far too seriously.
After working on a set of models and historical data, Kurzweil famously calculates that the singularity will arrive around 2045. That is only 34 years away. If this prophecy of Singularity being only 34 years away is true, then many of us (if we can hold on for another three decades) could be able to have a tryst with immortality. The concept of life, or death, as we understand it today would vanish. If man becomes machine or software, it is possible for him to exist forever.
Right now we are not even discussing the ethical issues that would come to fore if Singularity became real. The debate is purely technological.
By implementing, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil has reached the conclusion that human beings will be able to successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. As that decade ends, there will be computers with intelligence equivalent to that of human beings. By 2045, we will have at our disposal artificial intelligence that is about a billion times more powerful than all the human intelligence that exists today.
Is Singularity Possible?
One of the most prominent disbelievers of Kurzweils Singularity theory is the Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. In a recent article, Paul Allen writes, An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort. But if the singularity is to arrive by 2045, it will take unforeseeable and fundamentally unpredictable breakthroughs, and not because the Law of Accelerating Returns made it the inevitable result of a specific exponential rate of progress.
Paul Allen points out that the Law of Accelerating Returns is not a physical law. It is statistical derivation. Just because a trend has continued for sometime, it is not necessary that it will continue in future as well. In fact, it is quite common for even the strongest trends to reverse themselves at some point of time. We have the example of the Airlines industry. The technological advancement in the airlines industry has ground to a standstill. Companies and governments are no longer interested in building faster than sound aircrafts. Something like that could happen in the field of computing too.
Paul Allen writes, The amazing intricacy of human cognition should serve as a caution to those who claim the singularity is close. Without having a scientifically deep understanding of cognition, we can't create the software that could spark the singularity. Rather than the ever-accelerating advancement predicted by Kurzweil, we believe that progress toward this understanding is fundamentally slowed by the complexity brake. Our ability to achieve this understanding, via either the AI or the neuroscience approaches, is itself a human cognitive act, arising from the unpredictable nature of human ingenuity and discovery. Progress here is deeply affected by the ways in which our brains absorb and process new information, and by the creativity of researchers in dreaming up new theories. It is also governed by the ways that we socially organize research work in these fields, and disseminate the knowledge that results.
All of us are amazed at the way technology developed new inroads into our lives during the past few years. And there is no doubt that we are going to be even more amazed at where technology will be a decade from today or in 2045. Even if Singularity is not achieved in near future, lot of other interesting developments will continue to happen in the field of technology.
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