The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

  Microsoft researcher Eric Brill, who has led research on Ask MSR, has also attempted an even more difficult task: building a system that provides answers of about fifty words to more complex questions, such as, “How are the recipients of the Nobel Prize selected?” One of the strategies used by this system is to find an appropriate FAQ section on the Web that answers the query.

  Natural-language systems combined with large-vocabulary, speaker-independent (that is, responsive to any speaker) speech recognition over the phone are entering the marketplace to conduct routine transactions. You can talk to British Airways’ virtual travel agent about anything you like as long as it has to do with booking flights on British Airways.207 You’re also likely to talk to a virtual person if you call Verizon for customer service or Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch to conduct financial transactions. These systems, while they can be annoying to some people, are reasonably adept at responding appropriately to the often ambiguous and fragmented way people speak. Microsoft and other companies are offering systems that allow a business to create virtual agents to book reservations for travel and hotels and conduct routine transactions of all kinds through two-way, reasonably natural voice dialogues.

  Not every caller is satisfied with the ability of these virtual agents to get the job done, but most systems provide a means to get a human on the line. Companies using these systems report that they reduce the need for human service agents up to 80 percent. Aside from the money saved, reducing the size of call centers has a management benefit. Call-center jobs have very high turnover rates because of low job satisfaction.

  It’s said that men are loath to ask others for directions, but car vendors are betting that both male and female drivers will be willing to ask their own car for help in getting to their destination. In 2005 the Acura RL and Honda Odyssey will be offering a system from IBM that allows users to converse with their cars.208 Driving directions will include street names (for example, “turn left on Main Street, then right on Second Avenue”). Users can ask such questions as “Where is the nearest Italian restaurant?” or they can enter specific locations by voice, ask for clarifications on directions, and give commands to the car itself (such as “Turn up the air conditioning”). The Acura RL will also track road conditions and highlight traffic congestion on its screen in real time. The speech recognition is claimed to be speaker-independent and to be unaffected by engine sound, wind, and other noises. The system will reportedly recognize 1.7 million street and city names, in addition to nearly one thousand commands.

  Computer language translation continues to improve gradually. Because this is a Turing-level task—that is, it requires full human-level understanding of language to perform at human levels—it will be one of the last application areas to compete with human performance. Franz Josef Och, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, has developed a technique that can generate a new language-translation system between any pair of languages in a matter of hours or days.209 All he needs is a “Rosetta stone”—that is, text in one language and the translation of that text in the other language—although he needs millions of words of such translated text. Using a self-organizing technique, the system is able to develop its own statistical models of how text is translated from one language to the other and develops these models in both directions.

  This contrasts with other translation systems, in which linguists painstakingly code grammar rules with long lists of exceptions to each rule. Och’s system recently received the highest score in a competition of translation systems conducted by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

  Entertainment and Sports. In an amusing and intriguing application of GAs, Oxford scientist Torsten Reil created animated creatures with simulated joints and muscles and a neural net for a brain. He then assigned them a task: to walk. He used a GA to evolve this capability, which involved seven hundred parameters. “If you look at that system with your human eyes, there’s no way you can do it on your own, because the system is just too complex,” Reil points out. “That’s where evolution comes in.”210

  While some of the evolved creatures walked in a smooth and convincing way, the research demonstrated a well-known attribute of GAs: you get what you ask for. Some creatures figured out novel new ways of passing for walking. According to Reil, “We got some creatures that didn’t walk at all, but had these very strange ways of moving forward: crawling or doing somersaults.”

  Software is being developed that can automatically extract excerpts from a video of a sports game that show the more important plays.211 A team at Trinity College in Dublin is working on table-based games like pool, in which software tracks the location of each ball and is programmed to identify when a significant shot has been made. A team at the University of Florence is working on soccer. This software tracks the location of each player and can determine the type of play being made (such as free kicking or attempting a goal), when a goal is achieved, when a penalty is earned, and other key events.

  The Digital Biology Interest Group at University College in London is designing Formula One race cars by breeding them using GAs.212

  The AI winter is long since over. We are well into the spring of narrow AI. Most of the examples above were research projects just ten to fifteen years ago. If all the AI systems in the world suddenly stopped functioning, our economic infrastructure would grind to a halt. Your bank would cease doing business. Most transportation would be crippled. Most communications would fail. This was not the case a decade ago. Of course, our AI systems are not smart enough—yet—to organize such a conspiracy.

  Strong AI

  If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns “by rote,” we say that they don’t really understand. However, if you have several different representations then, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!

  —MARVIN MINSKY213

  Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! For now, though, we must rely on our representatives in the lowlands to tell us what water is really like.

  Our representatives on the foothills of chess and theorem-proving report signs of intelligence. Why didn’t we get similar reports decades before, from the lowlands, as computers surpassed humans in arithmetic and rote memorization? Actually, we did, at the time. Computers that calculated like thousands of mathematicians were hailed as “giant brains,” and inspired the first generation of AI research. After all, the machines were doing something beyond any animal, that needed human intelligence, concentration and years of training. But it is hard to recapture that magic now. One reason is that computers’ demonstrated stupidity in other areas biases our judgment. Another relates to our own ineptitude. We do arithmetic or keep records so painstakingly and externally that the small mechanical steps in a long calculation are obvious, while the big picture often escapes us. Like Deep Blue’s builders, we see the process too much from the inside to appreciate the subtlety that it may have on the outside. But there is a non-obviousness in snowstorms or tornadoes that emerge from the repetitive arithmetic of weather simulations, or in rippling tyranno
saur skin from movie animation calculations. We rarely call it intelligence, but “artificial reality” may be an even more profound concept than artificial intelligence.

  The mental steps underlying good human chess playing and theorem proving are complex and hidden, putting a mechanical interpretation out of reach. Those who can follow the play naturally describe it instead in mentalistic language, using terms like strategy, understanding and creativity. When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp.

  As the rising flood reaches more populated heights, machines will begin to do well in areas a greater number can appreciate. The visceral sense of a thinking presence in machinery will become increasingly widespread. When the highest peaks are covered, there will be machines that can interact as intelligently as any human on any subject. The presence of minds in machines will then become self-evident.

  —HANS MORAVEC214

  Because of the exponential nature of progress in information-based technologies, performance often shifts quickly from pathetic to daunting. In many diverse realms, as the examples in the previous section make clear, the performance of narrow AI is already impressive. The range of intelligent tasks in which machines can now compete with human intelligence is continually expanding. In a cartoon I designed for The Age of Spiritual Machines, a defensive “human race” is seen writing out signs that state what only people (and not machines) can do.215 Littered on the floor are the signs the human race has already discarded because machines can now perform these functions: diagnose an electrocardiogram, compose in the style of Bach, recognize faces, guide a missile, play Ping-Pong, play master chess, pick stocks, improvise jazz, prove important theorems, and understand continuous speech. Back in 1999 these tasks were no longer solely the province of human intelligence; machines could do them all.

  On the wall behind the man symbolizing the human race are signs he has written out describing the tasks that were still the sole province of humans: have common sense, review a movie, hold press conferences, translate speech, clean a house, and drive cars. If we were to redesign this cartoon in a few years, some of these signs would also be likely to end up on the floor. When CYC reaches one hundred million items of commonsense knowledge, perhaps human superiority in the realm of commonsense reasoning won’t be so clear.

  The era of household robots, although still fairly primitive today, has already started. Ten years from now, it’s likely we will consider “clean a house” as within the capabilities of machines. As for driving cars, robots with no human intervention have already driven nearly across the United States on ordinary roads with other normal traffic. We are not yet ready to turn over all steering wheels to machines, but there are serious proposals to create electronic highways on which cars (with people in them) will drive by themselves.

  The three tasks that have to do with human-level understanding of natural language—reviewing a movie, holding a press conference, and translating speech—are the most difficult. Once we can take down these signs, we’ll have Turing-level machines, and the era of strong AI will have started.

  This era will creep up on us. As long as there are any discrepancies between human and machine performance—areas in which humans outperform machines—strong AI skeptics will seize on these differences. But our experience in each area of skill and knowledge is likely to follow that of Kasparov. Our perceptions of performance will shift quickly from pathetic to daunting as the knee of the exponential curve is reached for each human capability.

  How will strong AI be achieved? Most of the material in this book is intended to lay out the fundamental requirements for both hardware and software and explain why we can be confident that these requirements will be met in nonbiological systems. The continuation of the exponential growth of the price-performance of computation to achieve hardware capable of emulating human intelligence was still controversial in 1999. There has been so much progress in developing the technology for three-dimensional computing over the past five years that relatively few knowledgeable observers now doubt that this will happen. Even just taking the semiconductor industry’s published ITRS road map, which runs to 2018, we can project human-level hardware at reasonable cost by that year.216

  I’ve stated the case in chapter 4 of why we can have confidence that we will have detailed models and simulations of all regions of the human brain by the late 2020s. Until recently, our tools for peering into the brain did not have the spatial and temporal resolution, bandwidth, or price-performance to produce adequate data to create sufficiently detailed models. This is now changing. The emerging generation of scanning and sensing tools can analyze and detect neurons and neural components with exquisite accuracy, while operating in real time.

  Future tools will provide far greater resolution and capacity. By the 2020s, we will be able to send scanning and sensing nanobots into the capillaries of the brain to scan it from inside. We’ve shown the ability to translate the data from diverse sources of brain scanning and sensing into models and computer simulations that hold up well to experimental comparison with the performance of the biological versions of these regions. We already have compelling models and simulations for several important brain regions. As I argued in chapter 4, it’s a conservative projection to expect detailed and realistic models of all brain regions by the late 2020s.

  One simple statement of the strong AI scenario is that we will learn the principles of operation of human intelligence from reverse engineering all the brain’s regions, and we will apply these principles to the brain-capable computing platforms that will exist in the 2020s. We already have an effective toolkit for narrow AI. Through the ongoing refinement of these methods, the development of new algorithms, and the trend toward combining multiple methods into intricate architectures, narrow AI will continue to become less narrow. That is, AI applications will have broader domains, and their performance will become more flexible. AI systems will develop multiple ways of approaching each problem, just as humans do. Most important, the new insights and paradigms resulting from the acceleration of brain reverse engineering will greatly enrich this set of tools on an ongoing basis. This process is well under way.

  It’s often said that the brain works differently from a computer, so we cannot apply our insights about brain function into workable nonbiological systems. This view completely ignores the field of self-organizing systems, for which we have a set of increasingly sophisticated mathematical tools. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the brain differs in a number of important ways from conventional, contemporary computers. If you open up your Palm Pilot and cut a wire, there’s a good chance you will break the machine. Yet we routinely lose many neurons and interneuronal connections with no ill effect, because the brain is self-organizing and relies on distributed patterns in which many specific details are not important.

  When we get to the mid- to late 2020s, we will have access to a generation of extremely detailed brain-region models. Ultimately the toolkit will be greatly enriched with these new models and simulations and will encompass a full knowledge of how the brain works. As we apply the toolkit to intelligent tasks, we will draw upon the entire range of tools, some derived directly from brain reverse engineering, some merely inspired by what we know about the brain, and some not based on the brain at all but on decades of AI research.

  Part of the brain’s strategy is to learn information, rather than having knowledge hard-coded from the start. (“Instinct” is the term we use to refer to such innate knowledge.) Learning will be an important aspect of AI, as well. In my experience in developing pattern-recognition systems in character recognition, speech recognition, and financial analysis, providing for the AI’s education is the most challeng
ing and important part of the engineering. With the accumulated knowledge of human civilization increasingly accessible online, future AIs will have the opportunity to conduct their education by accessing this vast body of information.

  The education of AIs will be much faster than that of unenhanced humans. The twenty-year time span required to provide a basic education to biological humans could be compressed into a matter of weeks or less. Also, because non-biological intelligence can share its patterns of learning and knowledge, only one AI has to master each particular skill. As I pointed out, we trained one set of research computers to understand speech, but then the hundreds of thousands of people who acquired our speech-recognition software had to load only the already trained patterns into their computers.

  One of the many skills that nonbiological intelligence will achieve with the completion of the human brain reverse-engineering project is sufficient mastery of language and shared human knowledge to pass the Turing test. The Turing test is important not so much for its practical significance but rather because it will demarcate a crucial threshold. As I have pointed out, there is no simple means to pass a Turing test, other than to convincingly emulate the flexibility, subtlety, and suppleness of human intelligence. Having captured that capability in our technology, it will then be subject to engineering’s ability to concentrate, focus, and amplify it.