Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

by Joel Garreau

  When Kurzweil was in high school in 1965, he appeared on the hit television show I’ve Got a Secret, in which celebrity panelists attempted to puzzle out a guest’s mystery. Kurzweil sat down on an old upright piano and played a composition. Then he whispered to Steve Allen, the show’s host, “I built my own computer.” “Well, that’s impressive,” Allen replied, “but what does that have to do with the piece you just played?” Kurzweil then whispered the rest of his secret: “The computer composed the piece I just played.”

  This primitive machine, which analyzed the work of famous musicians and then created new melodies in the same style, was Kurzweil’s first foray into that core part of human thought so difficult for computers to match: pattern recognition.

  Soon after college, Kurzweil developed three technologies. He invented the first practical flatbed scanner, launching a multibillion-dollar industry. He invented the character recognition device that could read any typeface, not just those weird ones that were designed specifically for computers. And he invented the first full text-to-speech synthesizer. Together, these brought the Kurzweil Reading Machine to life. When he unveiled his device, revered news anchor Walter Cronkite, on the air, had the machine read his signature sign-off: “And that’s the way it was, January 13, 1976.”

  Kurzweil has created nine technology companies that continue to be leaders in their fields. One was built around the Kurzweil 250. Invited by Stevie Wonder to deliver an encore to his reading machine, Kurzweil invented the first music synthesizer that could match the response of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. It is so realistic that most musicians can’t tell the difference. Because it can create the sound of a universe of instruments, the 250 allows a teenager in her bedroom to imagine music for a rock band or an entire philharmonic, hear what her composition sounds like, and instantly revise it if she doesn’t like it. It is now marketed in more than 40 countries.

  Another company is Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, which was the first to commercially introduce large-vocabulary speech-recognition systems. By the early 21st century, doctors in 10 percent of American emergency rooms were already talking into them and seeing their notes transformed into print. Kurzweil’s latest venture is the whimsically named FAT KAT (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies). It applies pattern recognition to stock market decisions. Its goal is to create an artificially intelligent financial analyst—which certainly sounds like an improvement.

  In the course of all this Kurzweil has received a raft of decorations. He has been granted the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest such award. He’s been inducted into the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was named Inventor of the Year by MIT and the Boston Museum of Science. Three U.S. presidents have honored him. The music industry and the handicapped have showered him with prizes. He’s received eleven honorary degrees.

  But that’s not what made Kurzweil notorious.

  His books are what really curl people’s toes. In The Age of Intelligent Machines, Kurzweil in 1989 predicted the World Wide Web, the taking of the world chess championship by a computer, and the dominance of intelligent weapons in warfare. All of this seemed pretty far-fetched at the time. Yet in 1999, in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which has been translated into nine languages, Kurzweil went much farther than that, predicting that in a very few decades, because of The Curve discussed in the previous chapter, many intelligences will roam the earth that are not traditional humans. His forthcoming work, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, due out in 2005, tops that, however. It lays out the case for the imminent and cataclysmic upheaval in human affairs associated with The Singularity.

  But even that isn’t the audacious part.

  What makes Kurzweil an outrage to some and an inspiration to others is that he is relentlessly and fiercely optimistic about these futures. He uses charts and graphs to systematically portray a near future that to some seems indistinguishable from the Christian version of paradise. On top of everything else, he is convinced that medicine is moving sufficiently fast that any person who can stay healthy for the next 20 years may so benefit from the explosion in biological technology as to be immortal. He lays out an extensive scientific, nonreligious, non–New Age case for personally planning to live for a thousand years. When challenged, he doesn’t retreat from his logic at all. Once, to rattle his cage, I paraphrased the author Arthur C. Clarke’s renowned line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I asked him, So, Ray, what are you saying? That any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from angels? He did not back off an inch. “Depends on what you mean by angels,” he replied.

  I call his scenario Heaven.

  When we met in his office one bright, brisk New England April day, I delicately inquired, So, Ray, Do you have enough cash to last the next thousand years?

  “Probably not,” he replied unflappably, and without a trace of irony. “I can support my family and some businesses. I mean, capital to an entrepreneur is kind of like clay to a sculptor. So I can experiment with inventions and ideas, which is a nice freedom to have. But I think I’ll need a bit more for a thousand years, particularly with the way things are going to speed up.”

  Raymond C. (“for Clyde—please don’t put that in”) Kurzweil is a first-generation American, born in 1948. His parents were refined Viennese Jews. His mother’s father was a leading physician, a friend of the Freuds. He got the family out in 1938, one step ahead of Hitler. Kurzweil’s mother, Hannah, is a gifted artist. A remarkable painting of hers, of flowers, hangs on Kurzweil’s office wall, right next to a remarkable painting created by a computer, also of flowers. His late father, Fredric, a brilliant musician, had been Hannah’s music teacher in Vienna. Just before the Holocaust, a wealthy American society woman who was a patron of the arts brought him out of danger. He joined the U.S. Army and ended up as musical director at Fort Dix, where he and Hannah had a reunion, a quick courtship and a military wedding.

  Until Kurzweil was six, his family lived the life of struggling artists in one of America’s first “garden apartments,” a walk-up in Jackson Heights, in western Queens, New York. Jackson Heights was then a lower-middle-class Irish and Jewish quarter, different in flavor from today’s polyglot neighborhood of Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis as well as Colombians and Ecuadorans. Those immigrants are overlaid on the community of elderly Jews still living there. All are being joined by the urban hip moving into those same old newly trendy garden apartments.

  Fredric Kurzweil became conductor of the Bell Symphony, performing at Carnegie Hall, and was chairman of the music department at Queensborough College. (Kurzweil recalls that when his father wrote a symphony, he had to rent a hall, hire all the musicians and write out all the sheet music for each of them just to hear what he needed to change. The son wishes his father had had a Kurzweil 250.) The family eventually moved to a nice brick middle-class house. Ray Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School, a vast public school with 2,000 students per grade and a science program that produced more Westinghouse award winners than any other high school in the country at the time—even surpassing the Bronx High School of Science, no small boast. Kurzweil didn’t take school terribly seriously, but he fondly recalls several mentors who validated his notion that imagination was not incompatible with science.

  Several forces shaped his attitudes toward human frailty. One was the tragedy born of human nature that was the Holocaust, uprooting his family as well as destroying much of his wife’s. Another was his father’s medical history. The elder Kurzweil had a major heart attack when he was 51—four years younger than was Kurzweil at the time of our conversation. The elder Kurzweil died at 58. Kurzweil himself was diagnosed with Type II diabetes when he was in his 30s. He brought it under control, he says, by a very aggressive program he researched and designed himself, involving lifestyle, nutrition and supple
ments. He now takes 250 pills a day. When Kurzweil was younger, he grew accustomed to being told he resembled the musician Paul Simon, of Simon and Garfunkel fame. He has seriously reduced his body fat since then, so at the time of the interview, he had the sort of deeply lined, sad and wizened visage that you might expect of a man in his mid-50s whose face used to be much fuller. He looked like a cross between Paul Simon and a basset hound.

  What Kurzweil really worships is ideas. “Religion in my household was ideas and knowledge,” he says. “I remember my grandfather telling me that he was allowed into a special part of a library and was actually able to handle some of da Vinci’s original documents. He described it in reverential terms, like it was a religious experience, like he handled the Ten Commandments. And what is the significance of da Vinci’s documents? They were ideas. Ideas that were different, that defied the current common wisdom. He just gave free rein to his imagination. Things like the airplane.”

  Kurzweil’s formal religious upbringing was eclectic. He still belongs to a Reform temple. “I see Judaism as a cultural identification. It’s one I’m proud of, because Jews have been pioneers, from Bob Dylan to Einstein to Freud. Jews are very often in the forefront of democratic movements and the rights of women, and things like that.”

  His parents, however, “wanted to avoid the provincialism of the narrow religions,” as he says they saw it. So the family joined a Unitarian church. “In keeping with the power of ideas, my own religious education was in a Unitarian Sunday school. The theme of this educational program was ‘many paths to the truth.’ We would spend six months studying a particular religion—let’s say Buddhism. We would go to those services, we’d study those books and bring Buddhist religious leaders into our discussion group. Some of the kids took it more seriously than others. But I actually was one of the more involved.”

  What he learned was that “seemingly different stories are really speaking the same truth. The theme was tolerance of different ways of looking at things, and that was also very influential. The real truth of the matter is something that can transcend an apparent contradiction. We see that in physics. Is light a particle or a wave? Both are true, even though they seem to contradict each other.”

  Today his is a “Buddhist’s view of God—as the sort of life force, the force of creativity. As opposed to a specific cranky personality that makes deals with humanity and gets mad and exacts vengeance.”

  This worship of a life force fuels his optimism about the coming transcendence of human nature. “What we see in evolution is increasingly accelerating intelligence, beauty. We find evolving organisms, like humans, that are capable of higher emotions like love. I mean, if you go to the point where there were just reptiles, there was no love. They don’t have much emotional intelligence. They don’t have art, music. So part of the evolutionary process—and this has continued with our technological growth of human cultural and technological history—is an increase of those higher emotional, intelligent functions. We see exponentially greater love.

  “Even 200 years ago, 98 or 99 percent of human beings lived lives of utter desperation. Extreme poverty. Extreme labor. Spending all their time to prepare the evening meal. Extremely disaster-prone. No social safety nets. Now at least an increasing portion of human civilization is free of that level of desperation. So our ability to appreciate arts and music and to have stable relationships is increasing. That was relatively difficult to do even 200 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago.”

  The core element of Kurzweil’s thinking is that The Curve of exponentially increasing technology is rising smoothly, as if on rails. It is in command, in his view, and unstoppable. Everything flows from that. He sees The Curve as a force of nature. He sees it as an extension of evolution. He does not particularly see The Curve as something humans chose to create. Like evolution, it is simply a pattern of life to be recognized, the outcome of billions of small actions. He calls it “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” In his view, nothing any one country or collection of countries can do will deflect it or even slow it down. The only possible limit he sees is a complete and catastrophic collapse of civilization or the extinction of the human species, worldwide, and he only inserts that as something of a rhetorical footnote.

  “Exponential progress, in recent times, has marched right through” disasters such as the Depression and World War II, he observes. “It really is an evolutionary process. Biological evolution is full of unpredictable events like visitors from outer space in the form of meteors and asteroids. But nonetheless, out of that chaos comes a very smooth curve. Now the progress is so rapid that The Curves are on a very fast track. But they still emerge from an evolutionary process that is full of disruption. I mean, a lot of people ask me, ‘Well, now with 9/11 things must be different? Or with the high-tech recession and the meltdown of communications and Internet stocks, surely that has disrupted these curves?’”

  Well, no they haven’t, Kurzweil says.

  “These meltdowns were only meltdowns in the capital markets—they don’t affect the fundamental issues that are driving this progress. We get more powerful tools. We use the more powerful tools to create the next generation. That is built into our economic expectations. A company, even to survive or tread water, has to move ahead. The perception that Wall Street had, that telecommunications and the Internet were revolutionary, was correct. But that does not mean there is not a pace to these things. Investment got ahead of itself. They overinvested in one aspect of the technology, like fiber, and underestimated other aspects. So the capital market suffered. But the actual technologies have proceeded. You can see very smooth exponential growth with the boom or the bust, even though every point on those curves is a human drama of competition and marketing programs and bankruptcies and initial public offerings. So you’d think it would be very erratic. But it’s not. It is very smooth. Now, those curves are moving very quickly, so the underlying chaos is happening very quickly.”

  I ask Kurzweil what he thinks of scenarios that are very different from his, such as the ones in the ensuing chapters of this book: Hell, in which the technology is used for extreme evil, threatening humanity with extinction, and Prevail, in which humans shape and adapt it in entirely new directions.

  He can’t see these scenarios. “I mean, you go to these academic conferences and they talk as if we could get some consensus and stop these processes. ‘Let’s keep those good technologies, but those dangerous ones, you know, like nanotechnology—let’s just not do those.’ How unrealistic that is. Nanotechnology is not just one thing or three things. It is really the end result of miniaturization, which is pervading all of technology. Most technology will be nanotechnology in the 2020s. You would have to relinquish all of technology.”

  Kurzweil shrugs at the controversy over the use of stem cells from human embryos, for example. “All the political energy that has gone into this issue—it is not even slowing down the most narrow approach.” It is simply being pursued by others outside the United States in places such as China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Scandinavia and Great Britain, where scientists will probably get there first, he notes. He compares political obstacles to boulders thrown into a stream—the water just flows around them, although he does acknowledge that such political boulders can divert the flow. In the case of stem cells, the ethical problems involved in destroying human embryos, he believes, may hasten research that will allow any cell—such as your own skin cell—to be redirected to form any other kind of cell, maybe a nerve cell. “I’d rather have my own DNA anyway,” he says.

  Kurzweil has heard all the arguments. What about the notion that people will simply recoil from a technoid future? He’s impatient with that. “Your quintessential grandmother uses her cell phone and she calls up British Airways and makes reservations with a virtual reservation agent”—a computer that understands your speech and talks back intelligently. “We don’t have to be experts.”

  Perhaps most important to his notion that The Curve is unstop
pable is that he sees it as a voyage of tiny advances. “Each application is a relatively small, noncontroversial, benign step. If you have a better way of diagnosing something, or more effective treatment, it’s not controversial. It is just readily accepted. We get from here to these more revolutionary scenarios through a hundred steps like that.”

  Kurzweil is incensed that more scientists and technologists are not taking seriously their moral responsibility to raise their hands if they think they are looking at developments that will add up to profound transformation.

  “Scientists are absolutely trained not to think about this. It is just part of the scientific style, or ethic, to be very conservative about what you are trying to do. A typical scientific speech is, ‘We know very little about XYZ, we have just begun to scratch the surface, our ignorance is far more than our knowledge, we don’t know this and we don’t know that, and maybe, with luck, we’ll be able to shed some light on what I am now working on, and anything beyond that is sheer speculation.’

  “Well, that was all very well and good when a generation of that kind of technology was 20 years. But now when a generation is more like 2 years, society does have an interest in knowing what is going to happen 3, 4, 5, even 10 generations away. Yet scientists typically are trained not to speculate beyond maybe one or two generations of technology and science. So, hence, they very often take a ridiculing attitude towards the future and bring up wrong predictions from the past—that were made without any methodology. They just dismiss the whole idea of looking ahead. But that is not of service to society. I mean, even though we can’t be absolutely sure what is going to happen and how these scenarios will play out, these basic trends are so strong—we need to appreciate their existence. They really do reflect a future that is going to be very different. I have tried to bring some disciplined approach to studying these trends, and it is something where I have actually some track record.”