The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

  It is important to point out that well before the end of the first half of the twenty-first century, thinking via nonbiological substrates will predominate. As I reviewed in chapter 3, biological human thinking is limited to 1016 calculations per second (cps) per human brain (based on neuromorphic modeling of brain regions) and about 1026 cps for all human brains. These figures will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering adjustments to our genome. The processing capacity of nonbiological intelligence, in contrast, is growing at an exponential rate (with the rate itself increasing) and will vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s.

  By that time we will have moved beyond just the paradigm of nanobots in a biological brain. Nonbiological intelligence will be billions of times more powerful, so it will predominate. We will have version 3.0 human bodies, which we will be able to modify and reinstantiate into new forms at will. We will be able to quickly change our bodies in full-immersion visual-auditory virtual environments in the second decade of this century; in full-immersion virtualreality environments incorporating all of the senses during the 2020s; and in real reality in the 2040s.

  Nonbiological intelligence should still be considered human, since it is fully derived from human-machine civilization and will be based, at least in part, on reverse engineering human intelligence. I address this important philosophical issue in the next chapter. The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and nonbiological thinking mediums, but more important, one of method and organization of thinking, one that will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way.

  Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained. As the nonbiological portion of our thinking begins to predominate by the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions. Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern-recognition, and cognitive abilities. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another, they will be able to create any set of new neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing), create new hybrid biologicalnonbiological networks, and add completely nonbiological networks, as well as interface intimately with new nonbiological forms of intelligence.

  The use of nanobots as brain extenders will be a significant improvement over surgically installed neural implants, which are beginning to be used today. Nanobots will be introduced without surgery, through the bloodstream, and if necessary can all be directed to leave, so the process is easily reversible. They are programmable, in that they can provide virtual reality one minute and a variety of brain extensions the next. They can change their configuration and can alter their software. Perhaps most important, they are massively distributed and therefore can take up billions of positions throughout the brain, whereas a surgically introduced neural implant can be placed only in one or at most a few locations.

  MOLLY 2004: Full-immersion virtual reality doesn’t seem very inviting. I mean, all those nanobots running around in my head, like little bugs.

  RAY: Oh, you won’t feel them, any more than you feel the neurons in your head or the bacteria in your GI tract.

  MOLLY 2004: Actually, that I can feel. But I can have full immersion with my friends right now, just by, you know, getting together physically.

  SIGMUND FREUD: Hmmm, that’s what they used to say about the telephone when I was young. People would say, “Who needs to talk to someone hundreds of miles away when you can just get together?”

  RAY: Exactly, the telephone is auditory virtual reality. So full-immersion VR is, basically, a full-body telephone. You can get together with anyone anytime but do more than just talk.

  GEORGE 2048: It’s certainly been a boon for sex workers; they never have to leave their homes. It became so impossible to draw any meaningful lines that the authorities had no choice but to legalize virtual prostitution in 2033.

  MOLLY 2004: Very interesting but actually not very appealing.

  GEORGE 2048: Okay, but consider that you can be with your favorite entertainment star.

  MOLLY 2004: I can do that in my imagination any time I want.

  RAY: Imagination is nice, but the real thing—or, rather, the virtual thing—is so much more, well, real.

  MOLLY 2004: Yeah, but what if my “favorite” celebrity is busy?

  RAY: That’s another benefit of virtual reality circa 2029; you have your choice of millions of artificial people.

  MOLLY 2104: I understand that you’re back in 2004, but we kind of got rid of that terminology back when the Nonbiological Persons Act was passed in 2052. I mean, we’re a lot more real than . . . umm, let me rephrase that.

  MOLLY 2004: Yes, maybe you should.

  MOLLY 2104: Let’s just say that you don’t have to have explicit biological structures to be—

  GEORGE 2048: —passionate?

  MOLLY 2104: I guess you should know.

  TIMOTHY LEARY: What if you have a bad trip?

  RAY: You mean, something goes awry with a virtual-reality experience?

  TIMOTHY: Exactly.

  RAY: Well, you can leave. It’s like hanging up on a phone call.

  MOLLY 2004: Assuming you still have control over the software.

  RAY: Yes, we do need to be concerned with that.

  SIGMUND: I can see some real therapeutic potential here.

  RAY: Yes, you can be whomever you want to be in virtual reality.

  SIGMUND: Excellent, the opportunity to express suppressed longings . . .

  RAY: And not only to be with the person you want to be with, but to become that person.

  SIGMUND: Exactly. We create the objects of our libido in our subconscious anyway. Just think, a couple could both change their genders. They could each become the other.

  MOLLY 2004: Just as a therapeutic interlude, I presume?

  SIGMUND: Of course. I would only suggest this under my careful supervision.

  MOLLY 2004: Naturally.

  MOLLY 2104: Hey, George, remember when we each became all of the oppositegender characters in the Allen Kurzweil novels at the same time?37

  GEORGE 2048: Ha, I liked you best as that eighteenth-century French inventor, the one who made erotic pocket watches!

  MOLLY 2004: Okay, now run this virtual sex by me again. How does it work exactly?

  RAY: You’re using your virtual body, which is simulated. Nanobots in and around your nervous system generate the appropriate encoded signals for all of your senses: visual, auditory, tactile of course, even olfactory. From the perspective of your brain, it’s real because the signals are just as real as if your senses were producing them from real experiences. The simulation in virtual reality would generally follow the laws of physics, although that would depend on the environment you selected. If you go there with another person or persons, then these other intelligences, whether of people with biological bodies or otherwise, would also have bodies in this virtual environment. Your body in virtual reality does not need to match your body in real reality. In fact, the body you choose for yourself in the virtual environment may be different from the body that your partner chooses for you at the same time. The computers generating the virtual environment, virtual bodies, and associated nerve signals would cooperate so that your actions affect the virtual experience of the others and vice versa.

  MOLLY 2004: So I would experience sexual pleasure even though I’m not actually, you know, with someone?

  RAY: Well, you would be with someone, just not in real reality, and, of course, the someone may not even exist in real reality. Sexual pleasure is not a direct sensory experience, it’s akin to an emotion. It’s a sensation generated in your brain, which is reflecting on what you’re doing and thinking, just like the sensa
tion of humor or anger.

  MOLLY 2004: Like the girl you mentioned who found everything hilarious when the surgeons stimulated a particular spot in her brain?

  RAY: Exactly. There are neurological correlates of all of our experiences, sensations, and emotions. Some are localized whereas some reflect a pattern of activity. In either case we’ll be able to shape and enhance our emotional reactions as part of our virtual-reality experiences.

  MOLLY 2004: That could work out quite well. I think I’ll enhance my funniness reaction in my romantic interludes. That will fit just about right. Or maybe my absurdity response—I kind of like that one, too.

  NED LUDD: I can see this getting out of hand. People are going to start spending most of their time in virtual reality.

  MOLLY 2004: Oh, I think my ten-year-old nephew is already there, with his video games.

  RAY: They’re not full immersion yet.

  MOLLY 2004: That’s true. We can see him, but I’m not sure he notices us. But when we get to the point when his games are full immersion, we’ll never see him.

  GEORGE 2048: I can see your concern if you’re thinking in terms of the thin virtual worlds of 2004, but it’s not a problem with our 2048 virtual worlds. They’re so much more compelling than the real world.

  MOLLY 2004: Yeah, how would you know since you’ve never been in real reality?

  GEORGE 2048: I hear about it quite a bit. Anyway, we can simulate it.

  MOLLY 2104: Well, I can have a real body any time I want, really not a big deal. I have to say it’s rather liberating to not be dependent on a particular body, let alone a biological one. Can you imagine, being all tied up with its endless limitations and burdens?

  MOLLY 2004: Yes, I can see where you’re coming from.

  . . . on Human Longevity

  It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.

  —RICHARD FEYNMAN

  Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Immortality first! Everything else can wait.

  —CORWYN PRATER

  Involuntary death is a cornerstone of biological evolution, but that fact does not make it a good thing.

  —MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

  Suppose you’re a scientist 200 years ago who has figured out how to drastically lower infant mortality with better hygiene. You give a talk on this, and someone stands up in back and says, “hang on, if we do that we’re going to have a population explosion!” If you reply, “No, everything will be fine because we’ll all wear these absurd rubber things when we have sex,” nobody would have taken you seriously. Yet that’s just what happened—barrier contraception was widely adopted [around the time that infant mortality dropped].

  —AUBREY DE GREY, GERONTOLOGIST

  We have a duty to die.

  —DICK LAMM, FORMER GOVERNOR OF COLORADO

  Some of us think this is rather a pity.

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1955, COMMENTING ON THE STATISTIC THAT ABOUT ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE DIE OF AGE-RELATED CAUSES EVERY DAY38

  Evolution, the process that produced humanity, possesses only one goal: create gene machines maximally capable of producing copies of themselves. In retrospect, this is the only way complex structures such as life could possibly arise in an unintelligent universe. But this goal often comes into conflict with human interests, causing death, suffering, and short life spans. The past progress of humanity has been a history of shattering evolutionary constraints.

  —MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

  Most of the readers of this book are likely to be around to experience the Singularity. As we reviewed in the previous chapter, accelerating progress in biotechnology will enable us to reprogram our genes and metabolic processes to turn off disease and aging processes. This progress will include rapid advances in genomics (influencing genes), proteomics (understanding and influencing the role of proteins), gene therapy (suppressing gene expression with such technologies as RNA interference and inserting new genes into the nucleus), rational drug design (formulating drugs that target precise changes in disease and aging processes), and therapeutic cloning of rejuvenated (telomere-extended and DNA-corrected) versions of our own cells, tissues, and organs, and related developments.

  Biotechnology will extend biology and correct its obvious flaws. The overlapping revolution of nanotechnology will enable us to expand beyond the severe limitations of biology. As Terry Grossman and I articulated in Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, we are rapidly gaining the knowledge and the tools to indefinitely maintain and extend the “house” each of us calls his body and brain. Unfortunately the vast majority of our baby-boomer peers are unaware of the fact that they do not have to suffer and die in the “normal” course of life, as prior generations have done—if they take aggressive action, action that goes beyond the usual notion of a basically healthy lifestyle (see “Resources and Contact Information,” p. 489).

  Historically, the only means for humans to outlive a limited biological life span has been to pass on values, beliefs, and knowledge to future generations. We are now approaching a paradigm shift in the means we will have available to preserve the patterns underlying our existence. Human life expectancy is itself growing steadily and will accelerate rapidly, now that we are in the early stages of reverse engineering the information processes underlying life and disease. Robert Freitas estimates that eliminating a specific list comprising 50 percent of medically preventable conditions would extend human life expectancy to over 150 years.39 By preventing 90 percent of medical problems, life expectancy grows to over five hundred years. At 99 percent, we’d be over one thousand years. We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death. As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.

  Life Expectancy (Years) 40

  The Transformation to Nonbiological Experience

  A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow, . . . and when it becomes great enough, and looks back . . . what fellow feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more.

  —VERNOR VINGE

  The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  I reported on brain uploading in chapter 4. The straightforward brain-porting scenario involves scanning a human brain (most likely from within), capturing all of the salient details, and reinstantiating the brain’s state in a different—most likely much more powerful—computational substrate. This will be a feasible procedure and will happen most likely around the late 2030s. But this is not the primary way that I envision the transition to nonbiological experience taking place. It will happen, rather, in the same way that all other paradigm shifts happen: gradually (but at an accelerating pace).

  As I pointed out above, the shift to nonbiological thinking will be a slippery slope, but one on which we have already started. We will continue to have human bodies, but they will become morphable projections of our intelligence. In other words, once we have incorpo
rated MNT fabrication into ourselves, we will be able to create and re-create different bodies at will.

  However achieved, will such fundamental shifts enable us to live forever? The answer depends on what we mean by “living” and “dying.” Consider what we do today with our personal computer files. When we change from an older computer to a newer one, we don’t throw all our files away. Rather, we copy them and reinstall them on the new hardware. Although our software does not necessarily continue its existence forever, its longevity is in essence independent of and disconnected from the hardware that it runs on.

  Currently, when our human hardware crashes, the software of our lives—our personal “mind file”—dies with it. However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains (together with the rest of our nervous system, endocrine system, and other structures that our mind file comprises).

  At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.