The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

  At the center of the FCS is a self-organizing, highly distributed communications network capable of gathering information from each soldier and each piece of equipment and in turn providing the appropriate information displays and files back to each human and machine participant. There will be no centralized communications hubs that could be vulnerable to hostile attack. Information will rapidly route itself around damaged portions of the network. An obvious top priority is to develop technology capable of maintaining integrity of communication and preventing either eavesdropping or manipulation of information by hostile forces. The same information-security technology will be applied to infiltrate, disrupt, confuse, or destroy enemy communications through both electronic means and cyberwarfare using software pathogens.

  The FCS is not a one-shot program; it represents a pervasive focus of military systems toward remotely guided, autonomous, miniaturized, and robotic systems, combined with robust, self-organizing, distributed, and secure communications.

  The U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Project Alpha (responsible for accelerating transformative ideas throughout the armed services) envisions a 2025 fighting force that “is largely robotic,” incorporating tactical autonomous combatants (TACs) that “have some level of autonomy—adjustable autonomy or supervised autonomy or full autonomy within . . . mission bounds.”48 The TACs will be available in a wide range of sizes, ranging from nanobots and microbots up to large UAVs and other vehicles, as well as automated systems that can walk through complex terrains. One innovative design being developed by NASA with military applications envisioned is in the form of a snake.49

  One of the programs contributing to the 2020s concept of self-organizing swarms of small robots is the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS) program of the Office of Naval Research, which envisions a drone army of unmanned, autonomous robots in the water, on the ground, and in the air. The swarms will have human commanders with decentralized command and control and what project head Allen Moshfegh calls an “impregnable Internet in the sky.”50

  Extensive research is going into designing swarm intelligence.51 Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex behaviors can arise from large numbers of individual agents, each following relatively simple rules.52 Swarms of insects are often able to devise intelligent solutions to complex problems, such as designing the architecture of a colony, despite the fact that no single member of the swarm possesses the requisite skills.

  DARPA announced in 2003 that a battalion of 120 military robots (built by I-Robot, a company cofounded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks) was to be fitted with swarm-intelligence software to enable it to mimic the organized behavior of insects.53 As robotic systems become physically smaller and larger in number, the principles of self-organizing swarm intelligence will play an increasingly important role.

  There is also recognition in the military that development times need to be reduced. Historically, the typical time period for military projects to go from research to deployment has been longer than a decade. But with the technology paradigm-shift rate coming down by half every decade, these development times need to keep pace, as many weapons systems are already obsolete by the time they reach the field. One way to accomplish this is to develop and test new weapons using simulations, which enable weapons systems to be designed, implemented, and tested far more quickly than the traditional means of building prototypes and testing them (often by blowing them up) in actual use.

  Another key trend is to move personnel away from combat to improve soldiers’ rates of survival. This can be done by allowing humans to drive and pilot systems remotely. Taking the pilot out of a vehicle allows it to take part in riskier missions and to be designed to be far more maneuverable. It also allows the devices to become very small by dispensing with the extensive requirements for supporting human life. The generals are moving even farther away. Tommy Franks conducted the war in Afghanistan from his bunker in Qatar.

  Smart Dust. DARPA is developing devices even tinier than birds and bumblebees called “smart dust”—complex sensor systems not much bigger than a pinhead. Once fully developed, swarms of millions of these devices could be dropped into enemy territory to provide highly detailed surveillance and ultimately support offensive warfare missions (for example, releasing nano-weapons). Power for smart-dust systems will be provided by nanoengineered fuel cells, as well as by conversion of mechanical energy from their own movement, wind, and thermal currents.

  Want to find a key enemy? Need to locate hidden weapons? Massive numbers of essentially invisible spies could monitor every square inch of enemy territory, identify every person (through thermal and electromagnetic imaging, eventually DNA tests, and other means) and every weapon and even carry out missions to destroy enemy targets.

  Nanoweapons. The next step beyond smart dust will be nanotechnology-based weapons, which will make obsolete weapons of larger size. The only way for an enemy to counteract such a massively distributed force will be with its own nanotechnology. In addition, enhancing nanodevices with the ability to self-replicate will extend their capabilities but introduces grave dangers, a subject I address in chapter 8.

  Nanotechnology is already being applied to a wide range of military functions. These include nanotech coatings for improved armor; laboratories on a chip for rapid chemical and biological-agent detection and identification; nanoscale catalysts for decontaminating areas; smart materials that can restructure themselves for different situations; biocidal nanoparticles incorporated into uniforms to reduce infection from injuries; nanotubes combined with plastics to create extremely strong materials; and self-healing materials. For example, the University of Illinois has developed self-healing plastics that incorporate microspheres of liquid monomers and a catalyst into a plastic matrix; when a crack appears, the microspheres break, automatically sealing the crack.54

  Smart Weapons. We’ve already moved from dumb missiles launched with hopes they will find their targets to intelligent cruise missiles that use pattern recognition to make thousands of tactical decisions on their own. Bullets, however, have remained essentially small dumb missiles, and providing them with a measure of intelligence is another military objective.

  As military weapons become smaller in size and larger in number, it won’t be desirable or feasible to maintain human control over each device. So increasing the level of autonomous control is another important goal. Once machine intelligence catches up with biological human intelligence, many more systems will be fully autonomous.

  VR. Virtual-reality environments are already in use to control remotely guided systems such as the U.S. Air Force’s Armed Predator UAV.55 Even if a soldier is inside a weapons system (such as an Abrams tank), we don’t expect him or her to just look outside the window to see what is going on. Virtual-reality environments are needed to provide a view of the actual environment and allow for effective control. Human commanders in charge of swarm weapons will also need specialized virtual-reality environments to envision the complex information that these distributed systems are collecting.

  By the late 2030s and 2040s, as we approach human body version 3.0 and the predominance of nonbiological intelligence, the issue of cyberwarfare will move to center stage. When everything is information, the ability to control your own information and disrupt your enemy’s communication, command, and control will be a primary determinant of military success.

  . . . on Learning

  Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

  —IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804)

  Most education in the world today, including in the wealthier communities, is not much changed from the model offered by the monastic schools of fourteenth-century Europe. Schools remain highly centralized institutions built upon the scarce resources of buildings and teachers. The quality of education also varies enormously, depending on the wealth of the local community (the American tradition of funding education from property taxes clearly exacerbates this inequality), thus contributing to
the have/have not divide.

  As with all of our other institutions we will ultimately move toward a decentralized educational system in which every person will have ready access to the highest-quality knowledge and instruction. We are now in the early stages of this transformation, but already the advent of the availability of vast knowledge on the Web, useful search engines, high-quality open Web courseware, and increasingly effective computer-assisted instruction are providing widespread and inexpensive access to education.

  Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course offerings—for free on the Web.56 These have already had a major impact on education around the world. For example, Brigitte Bouissou writes, “As a math teacher in France, I want to thank MIT . . . for [these] very lucid lectures, which are a great help for preparing my own classes.” Sajid Latif, an educator in Pakistan, has integrated the MIT OCW courses into his own curriculum. His Pakistani students regularly attend—virtually—MIT classes as a substantial part of their education.57 MIT intends to have every one of its courses online and open source (that is, free of charge for noncommercial use) by 2007.

  The U.S. Army already conducts all of its nonphysical training using Web-based instruction. The accessible, inexpensive, and increasingly high-quality courseware available on the Web is also fueling a trend toward homeschooling.

  The cost of the infrastructure for high-quality audiovisual Internet-based communication is continuing to fall rapidly, at a rate of about 50 percent per year, as we discussed in chapter 2. By the end of the decade it will be feasible for underdeveloped regions of the world to provide very inexpensive access to high-quality instruction for all grade levels from preschool to doctoral studies. Access to education will no longer be restricted by the lack of availability of trained teachers in each town and village.

  As computer-assisted instruction (CAI) becomes more intelligent the ability to individualize the learning experience for each student will greatly improve. New generations of educational software are capable of modeling the strengths and weaknesses of each student and developing strategies to focus on the problem area of each learner. A company that I founded, Kurzweil Educational Systems, provides software that is used in tens of thousands of schools by students with reading disabilities to access ordinary printed materials and improve their reading skills.58

  Because of current bandwidth limitations and the lack of effective three-dimensional displays, the virtual environment provided today through routine Web access does not yet fully compete with “being there,” but that will change. In the early part of the second decade of this century visual-auditory virtual-reality environments will be full immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing. Most colleges will follow MIT’s lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually. Virtual environments will provide high-quality virtual laboratories where experiments can be conducted in chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other scientific field. Students will be able to interact with a virtual Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison or even to become a virtual Thomas Jefferson. Classes will be available for all grade levels in many languages. The devices needed to enter these high-quality, high-resolution virtual classrooms will be ubiquitous and affordable even in third world countries. Students at any age, from toddlers to adults, will be able to access the best education in the world at any time and from any place.

  The nature of education will change once again when we merge with non-biological intelligence. We will then have the ability to download knowledge and skills, at least into the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. Our machines do this routinely today. If you want to give your laptop state-of-theart skills in speech or character recognition, language translation, or Internet searching, your computer has only to quickly download the right patterns (the software). We don’t yet have comparable communication ports in our biological brains to quickly download the interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning. That is one of many profound limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity.

  . . . on Work

  If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, if the shuttle could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, nor masters slaves.

  —ARISTOTLE

  Before the invention of writing, almost every insight was happening for the first time (at least to the knowledge of the small groups of humans involved). When you are at the beginning, everything is new. In our era, almost everything we do in the arts is done with awareness of what has been done before and before. In the early post-human era, things will be new again because anything that requires greater than human ability has not already been done by Homer or da Vinci or Shakespeare.

  —VERNOR VINGE59

  Now part of [my consciousness] lives on the Internet and seems to stay there all the time. . . .A student may have a textbook open. The television is on with the sound off. . . . They’ve got music on headphones . . . there’s a homework window, along with e-mail and instant messaging. . . . One multi-tasking student prefers the online world to the face-to-face world. “Real life,” he said, “is just one more window.”

  —CHRISTINE BOESE, REPORTING ON FINDINGS BY MIT PROFESSOR SHERRY TURKLE60

  In 1651 Thomas Hobbes described “the life of man” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”61 This was a fair assessment of life at the time, but we have largely overcome this harsh characterization through technological advances, at least in the developed world. Even in underdeveloped nations life expectancy lags only slightly behind. Technology typically starts out with unaffordable products that don’t work very well, followed by expensive versions that work a bit better, and then by inexpensive products that work reasonably well. Finally the technology becomes highly effective, ubiquitous, and almost free. Radio and television followed this pattern, as did the cell phone. Contemporary Web access is at the inexpensive-and-working-reasonably-well stage.

  Today the delay between early and late adoption is about a decade, but in keeping with the doubling of the paradigm-shift rate every decade, this delay will be only about five years in the middle of the second decade and only a couple of years in the mid-2020s. Given the enormous wealth-creation potential of GNR technologies, we will see the underclass largely disappear over the next two to three decades (see the discussions of the 2004 World Bank report in chapters 2 and 9). These developments are likely to be met, however, with increasing fundamentalist and Luddite reaction to the accelerating pace of change.

  With the advent of MNT-based manufacturing, the cost of making any physical product will be reduced to pennies per pound, plus the cost of the information guiding the process, with the latter representing the true value. We are already not that far from this reality; software-based processes guide every step of manufacturing today, from design and materials procurement to assembly in automated factories. The portion of a manufactured product’s cost attributable to the information processes used in its creation varies from one category of product to another but is increasing across the board, rapidly approaching 100 percent. By the late 2020s the value of virtually all products—clothes, food, energy, and of course electronics—will be almost entirely in their information. As is the case today, proprietary and open-source versions of every type of product and service will coexist.

  Intellectual Property. If the primary value of products and services resides in their information, then the protection of information rights will be critical to supporting the business models that provide the capital to fund the creation of valuable information. The skirmishes today in the entertainment industry regarding illegal downloading of music and movies are a harbinger of what will be a profound struggle, once essentially everything o
f value is composed of information. Clearly, existing or new business models that allow for the creation of valuable intellectual property (IP) need to be protected, otherwise the supply of IP will itself be threatened. However, the pressure from the ease of copying information is a reality that is not going away, so industries will suffer if they do not keep their business models in line with public expectations.

  In music, for example, rather than provide leadership with new paradigms, the recording industry stuck rigidly (until just recently) with the idea of an expensive record album, a business model that has remained unchanged from the time my father was a young, struggling musician in the 1940s. The public will avoid wide-scale pirating of information services only if commercial prices are kept at what are perceived to be reasonable levels. The mobile-phone sector is a prime example of an industry that has not invited rampant piracy. The cost of cell-phone calls has fallen rapidly with improving technology. If the mobile-phone industry had kept calling rates at the level where they were when I was a child (a time when people dropped whatever they were doing at the rare times that someone called long distance), we would be seeing comparable pirating of cell-phone calls, which is technically no more difficult than pirating music. But cheating on cell-phone calls is widely regarded as criminal behavior, largely because of the general perception that cell-phone charges are appropriate.

  IP business models invariably exist on the edge of change. Movies have been difficult to download because of their large file size, but that is rapidly becoming less of an issue. The movie industry needs to lead the charge toward new standards, such as high-definition movies on demand. Musicians typically make most of their money with live performances, but that model will also come under attack early in the next decade, when we will have full-immersion virtual reality. Each industry will need to continually reinvent its business models, which will require as much creativity as the creation of the IP itself.