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

It's alive!

If there is anyone who fits the stereotype of the crazy scientist, it is probably Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading. He will, for example, tell anyone within hearing range that he wants to become a Cyborg.

And he will put his money (or put more succinctly, his life) where his mouth is: By 2002 he had already implanted computer chips in his nervous system. Not only could he now move a robotic arm with his implant, but also feel artificial sensations from a similar electrode inserted into his wife. Somehow sexual intercourse just wasn’t enough.

His no holds barred, pyrotechnic approach to scientific research has earned him a lot of appearances on the discovery channel and the disdain of some of his fellow scientists.

But think of mr Warwick what you may, you cannot help but be intrigued by his experiments.

Apparently bored by something as mundane as implanting electrodes into his body, mr Warwick is now growing neurons in Petri dishes and attaching them to robotic devices. His rat-neuron-petri-dish-brain successfully controls a simple wheeled robot.

And guess what animal will provide the brain cells for his next artificial brain?

I’ll give you a hint, it’s a biped.

The Cyborg

The Hype Cycle

Remember the bursting of the internet bubble at the turn of the century? It was the perfect moment for technophobes. All the promise held by technology seemed to go up in smoke:

Suddenly, the talking heads had always known it: E-commerce was a farce, the only way to make money online was with porn, and e-mail was the only real application the net had to offer.

Sounds ludicrous now, but in fact it seems that these moments of disillusionment are normal. A lot like the last spasm of the luddites.

When a new technology emerges, we tend to get so intoxicated by the far horizons it opens up, that we overlook important technical details and overstate its possibilities in the short term. When our expectations are not met, we inevitably get disillusioned with our new toy.

But then the real applications of the new technology start getting hold and becoming economically viable. Before you know it, we can’t imagine how we survived without it.

This is a description of the Hype Cycle, a concept launched by the consultancy Gartner, inc., to describe the adoption by society of technological innovations. An important concept to remember, both when the enthusiasts predict the coming technological rapture and when the pessimists condemn humanity to life as usual.

The Cyborg

P.S. From Gartners' updated chart for 2009 its seems that twitters bubble is about to burst.

Touching Consciousness

The more religious inclined will surely disagree, but let’s postulate a scientific axiom: If it cannot be observed, it cannot be.

For centuries this was the trouble with one of the most puzzling of phenomena: consciousness. We could not define it, we could not determine its manifestations, and yet, if we were to deny its existence our sense of self would come crashing down.

To put it another way: without consciousness we couldn’t consciously deny consciousness.

Notice the past tense in the second paragraph? It’s there because neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has done something remarkable: he has advanced a working theory of consciousness. Falsifiable and observable.

Tononi calls it the Integrated Information Theory (ITT) and it basically states that consciousness in any system is a function of two properties:

- The amount of differentiated information in that system.
- The level of integration of this information through causal connections.

If his theory holds (far from sure at this point) it means that consciousness can emerge in any system complex and interconnected enough. So be careful how you treat your robot vaccuum cleaner!

You can read a more in depth article here.

The Cyborg

One step closer to the Holodeck

For those of you who aren’t trekkies, the Holodeck is a full immersion, virtual reality platform that allowed the crew of the starship Enterprise to live out every little fantasy that popped into their g-rated, fictional minds.

Think this is the mental delirium of some nerdy screenwriters? Think again.

Check out this mind-bending video demonstration of a touchable hologram:



Take a bow for sensei Hiroyuki Shinoda and his team of researchers at the University of Tokyo.

The Cyborg

The Singularity is Near - Book Review

The very first cyborg book review is out. In The Singularity is Near Ray Kurzweil envisions a radically different future for mankind. The man who predicted the rise of the internet, now claims machines will surpass us intelectually in the coming generation. Let's hope they don't have Austrian accents and keep asking for Sarah Connor. Read the full book review.

Comments on the book review can be left here.

Gadget Suggestions

Post your suggestions here as comments. One rule, the gadgets must promise to change our lives is some way or another. I’ll let you be the judge of what that means. The best suggestions will earn a spot on the main site. One hint, the newest Rolex will not get you anywhere (unless it allows you to teletransport)

Renaissance 2.0

Where did Galileo go for advice? Where did he find inspiration when he wanted to make sense of those odd orbital trajectories? In the 16th century there were precious little giants on which shoulders he could stand and most of them were dead and buried. Also, I’m pretty sure the library of the University of Padua didn’t have an internet connection.

Yet by meticulous observation and cold reasoning the Italian astronomer and mathematician forever changed the worldview of all humanity and infuriated a bunch of fundamentalists as an added bonus. This is what one dedicated man can do through careful application of the scientific method.

Now imagine hundreds, thousands, no millions of Galileis living at the same time, exchanging and debating ideas, attacking different problems through similar methods and vice versa, cross-pollinating, inspiring, competing, cooperating. The power of reason multiplied is an awesome power indeed.

This is the world we live in, right now!

Just consider the field of neuroscience. Today, tens of thousands of researches all over the world are following hundreds of different paths to that ultimate goal, understanding the workings of the human brain. They are scanning the contents of our skulls with ever more sophisticated instruments, they are growing neurons in petri dishes, they are interfacing animal brains with robots, they are building computer models of specific brain regions, etc, etc. When one road leads to a dead end, another forces a breakthrough. The gathered momentum is overwhelming, unstoppable.

Galileo, Da Vinci and a couple of odd scientists and artists spread throughout medieval Europe, delivered us from the dark ages. Our own Renaissance promises to be much more profound.

The Cyborg

"Maybe you can drive my car"

Ever wished you had a personal chauffeur?

Here’s an idea: take a moth, cut of its head and wire it to your car’s steering mechanics.

In sum this is exactly what Japanese scientist Ryohei Kanzaki has accomplished, demonstrating the enormous leaps we’re taking in applied neuroscience these days.

Just make sure your designated driver doesn’t head obsessively towards the pretty white light.

The Cyborg

Invasion of the bodyhackers

As we discover new ways to plug into our brains and bodies, we’re going to have to come to terms with a new kind of criminal. In an article in Wired, computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno, claims that if we don’t start thinking about the dangers, our increasingly complex neural devices will be vulnerable for attack by mindjackers, bodyhackers and all kinds of neuropirates (the neologisms are my doing). You wouldn’t want to lose control over that prosthetic arm, would you?

Think this is far fetched, some organisms already pull off this villainous trick in nature. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii tricks its host, an infected rodent, to be strongly attracted to cat urine. Why? So the parasite can complete its lifecycle in the feline's stomach.

Hey, maybe those voices in your head are real after all.

The Cyborg

A Brainy Matter

The last bastion of human superiority, the biological brain, is quickly being encircled by technology and science. Its workings no longer baffle us and as Steven Pinker put it in his must-read book ‘How the Mind Works’, what was once a mystery is now a research problem.

Here are two articles that announce the end of an era:

The first offers a profound insight into the intricate workings of our synapses.

The second paves the way for subtle and precise communications between machines and the human brain.

For millions of years, the contents of our skulls represented the most sophisticated intellectual device around. Time to prepare a farewell party.

The Cyborg

Give us a hand

The ways in which we can interface with machines and computers is rapidly expanding. Case in hand (no pun intended): AnthroTronix just released its first commercial version of the AcceleGlove, an affordable, programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. The outgoing data can be manipulated (open source) for any imaginable use: gaming, rehabilitation, training, 3d virtual environments, you name it.

Our most defining body part just went virtual.

The Cyborg

Robot See, Robot Do

European scientists have developed a robot that mimics the way humans process visual information. Two cameras mounted on its head, feed images that are processed by algorithms inspired on models of the human brain. The result is that the robot moves as a human.

What is so interesting about this research is its interdisciplinary approach, mixing computer science and artificial intelligence with neuroscience. The crosspollination of these scientific fields will expand our horizons to almost unimaginable distances.

What will we see with our robot eyes?

The Cyborg

Defining body

What is the body? Let me rehearse an answer: the body is the instrument through which the mind interacts with the environment. If the brain controls it, it is part of the body.

Off course, if this definition holds any truth, any tool you wielded would be (albeit temporarily) a body part. The pen you’re holding, the iPhone you’re using, the surfboard you’re riding, yes, even the toilet you’re flushing.

And before you object, read this article in the newscientist.com

The Cyborg

The Power of Thought

This week’s tech news was off course Honda’s demonstration of its mind controlled robot. A man with a helmet imagining crude movements and the robot ASIMO executing them, not yet flawlessly so it seems, but close enough for this to represent a veritable technological breakthrough.

It has been a couple of years since the scientist Miguel Nicolelis astonished this blogger with his experiments in brain-machine-interfaces. Mr Nicolelis implanted electrodes in to an owl monkey’s brain, interpreted and digitalized the outgoing signals and lo and behold, the monkey learned to move a mechanic arm with his thoughts alone.

No longer was the monkey bound to his biological body. The implications of such a discovery are truly transformational.

What the Japanese have accomplished is so astounding, because it promises the same power Nicolelis gave his owl monkeys without the inconvenience of having a bunch of wires protruding from your skull.

What times we live in.

The Cyborg

Power Plastic

Check the article about a new product that will change the way we use solar energy. Just go to my gadget watch page.

The Cyborg.

P.S. Do you want to tell about a technological innovation that is going to change our lives? Leave a comment.

The Aha-moment

We live in the most exiting of times. The current and mind boggling developments in science and technology will transform us and the world around us so profoundly, that we cannot yet hope to imagine the end result.

This realization, the realization of profound and inevitable change, first came to me in 2002 when I was discussing technological innovations with a friend. I remember telling him that we were not far away from creating cyborgs by integrating engineered machines and computers to our own bodies. Incredously, he asked me to put a timeframe to my prediction.

So we googled “cyborg” right then and there and to our astonishment we realised that we were discussing something that had already happened. My mind raced as we read about professor Kevin Warwick of the university of Reading, who by 2002 had already integrated a computer chip to his nervous system. The cyborgs were already among us.

That was my aha-moment. The instant I saw we were in a whirlwind of change. Off course I had always perceived the power of technology to change us, but only now did I realize the scope and the pace of these developments in our lifetime.

Since you are on such a niched website, chances are you also had your aha-moment. if not, you will have it very soon. Take my word for it.

In the 21st century Human kind has entered its pupa stage. There is no stopping the metamorphosis. The only question is: Will we emerge a peaceful butterfly or a voracious dragonfly?

The Cyborg

P.S. Tell me about your Aha-moment, leave a comment

Starting Up

The last couple of days were spent setting up the website. I’m happy with the look, now we can start filling the pages with technological dreams of the future.

The Cyborg

Ps. Send your comments or suggestions to cyborgbooks [at] gmail.com

First post

This Blog is inspired by the accelerating technological revolution that is drastically changing us and the world around us. In the coming decade, a score of scientific fields are poised to make a quantum leap. Just think of Robotics, Genetics, Nanotechnology, Cybernetics and Neuroscience. The convergence of these multiple technological breakthroughs will have such profound consequences that we can scarcely look beyond them. Its what Raymond Kurzweil calls the technological singularity.

How will we emerge on the other side? This site will help you find an answer. Periodically we will review a book that can shed light on a field o science or provoke us to think about our future. Also we will provide links to videos, articles, blogs or any other site of interest. We welcome contributions or suggestions, just leave a comment.