The Merry Prophet, a book review on "The Singularity is Near", by Ray Kurtzweil

Ray Kurzweil should probably have chosen a different, more dramatic first sentence for his book. Somehow "At the age of five, I had the idea I would become an inventor" doesn’t do justice to the scope and power of his basic premise. Nor does it prepare the reader for the almost religious fervor that will permeate great lengths of his work.

Maybe something in the lines of “A spectre is haunting the world, the spectre of Artificial Intelligence” would have been more appropriate. It’s the kind of ominous drumbeat a book like The Singularity is Near, begs for. Its doubtful, however, if mr Kurzweil would be comfortable using the terms of the Communist Manifesto.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. In a book that argues that in a not too distant future, technology will transform us in what we would call by present standards…well…gods, the tone in which it is set, is largely irrelevant. The astute reader will be left with a deep sense of foreboding (plus a healthy dose of suspicion).

Accelerating technological change

To fully grasp mr Kurzweil’s point, it pays to take a quick glance at the history of Human kind. For the sake of the argument, let’s imagine that this entire history, from the emergence of Homo Sapiens, through the Pyramids of Cheops up until the iPhone, took place in one single day.

For the longest stretch of this day, nothing much happened. Each generation lived its life essentially as the one before it, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, relying mostly on stone tools. In fact, when we finally stumbled on the relationship between seed and plant it was already 10pm. Needless to say, this insight profoundly changed our relationship with the material world.

Our next great accomplishment, however, took us no more than an hour. Around 4000 years ago, a couple of minutes past eleven by our reckoning, we came up with the written word, and essentially invented information technology.

After that, human kind became caught in an ever faster spinning whirlwind. Every other human invention, from the telescope to the combustion engine, is packed in the last hour of this marvelous day, the intervals between one innovation and the next getting progressively shorter as we approach midnight.

The point being?

“Well,” mr Kurzweil would answer, “technological change is accelerating, exponentially”. And he would do so with great force. Some critics claim that his choice of technological key events are arbitrary, but that criticism doesn't hold in front of the truckload of supporting data provided in Kurzweil’s book.

Rupturing the fabric of Human History

The implications of this notion, which Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns, are truly transformational. Exponential change sneaks up on you. In the beginning it might even be confused with linear change, but then it explodes towards an asymptote, rising faster by every time interval.

Eventually, Kurzweil writes, “the growth rates will (…) be so extreme, that the changes they bring will appear to rupture the fabric of human history”. This is the singularity of the title, scheduled by mr Kurzweil for the first half of this century.

We can already see glimpses of what will be possible. Today we are moving objects with the power of our thoughts, interfacing animal brains with robotic devices and growing organs from our own stem cells, to name but a few examples.

Tomorrow, Kurzweil tells us, we will reverse engineer the human brain and body, build machines that outsmart us, radically extend our lifespan and make anything we like from the simplest raw materials. And these are the least far-fetched of his predictions.

In fact, halfway through his book, he gets so caught up in the ultimate consequences of the singularity that he almost forgets about the more immediate and mundane impacts. Kurzweil writes extensively about the total computational potential of a galaxy and looses himself in fantasies about intelligence permeating the whole universe. The further he wades into this marshland of conjecture, the less forceful his arguments become.

Ignoring the dark side

It’s a minor flaw, however, compared to the other big shortcoming of The Singularity: mr Kurzweil’s starry-eyed optimism. The discussion about the dangers surrounding the technological revolution is consistently put of, as to not distract from the wonderful visions of the future the author wants to paint for us.

Whenever a less palatable aspect of the singularity pops up, like the hair-raising issue of runaway nanotechnology,(the scenario where out of control, self replicating nanorobots out compete all biological life for earths resources), mr Kurzweil will shrub of the fears with phrases like: “I do have strategies for dealing with these issues, which I discuss at the end of chapter 8”.

When you finally come around to chapter 8, however, you find out that mr Kurzweil seems to know a lot about technology, and precious little about people. He suggest we can avoid most of the dangers by a combination of regulation, international cooperation and some ethical guidelines.

It's no small understatement to say he overlooks a couple of details. Government abuse, for example. What would the Chinese government do today, with the neurocontrol technology of tomorrow? And what about greed? What corners would the less scrupulous companies cut, to increase their margins? In short, Kurzweil completely ignores the darker side of Human Nature.

Even worse, his world view tends to be Manichean, dividing the world into good and bad people. A childish notion that has gotten us into trouble before, and is sure to get us into trouble again.

Don’t leave it to the engineers

Nevertheless, The Singularity is Near unveils a powerful reality that we ignore at our peril. We are being swept up by an ever-accelerating technological revolution. Mr Kurzweil holds that this revolution will be mostly benign and that we will eventually merge with our technology. But unlike the opening accords for his book, which sustain the basic premise, the part that is meant to reassure us, does not convince.

As with most engineers, his vision of human nature is fundamentally flawed. His religious optimism only aggravates a sense of unease in face of the speed in which we are harnessing the immense power around us.

In any case, its important that all of us start thinking about the consequences of the technological revolution. To paraphrase Clemenceau: “technology is too important to be left to the engineers”. Like the generals in the original quote, they tend to make a mess of things.

One thing is for sure though: The roller coaster has left the station, so we'd better fasten our seatbelts