The Singularity is Nearer
Ray Kurzweil, Vintage, £12.99

BACK in 2005, Ray Kurzweil told the world that we humans were hurtling toward the technological Singularity and had best prepare for the two generations left in the current paradigm for the merger with smart machines. He wrote a book, The Singularity is Near, which describes a brazen new future and the best practices necessary to get there safely and expeditiously. Folks shrugged.

Kurzweil has a new book out now, The Singularity is Nearer, that seems to gloat about how right he was in his earlier proclamations. To give a sense of the urgency involved, he writes in his update: “For perspective, the moment you’re reading this is probably closer to the creation of the first superhuman AI than to the release of my last book, 2012’s How to Create a Mind … babies born today will be just graduating college when the Singularity happens.” Not much time left until the Big Event, according to Kurzweil.

Who is this guy that he should tell us such things? Another nutter? A latter day Cassandra? Kurzweil is a former engineer for Google, the “Don’t Do Evil” people. Just after his 2012 book drew critical acclaim and had global tech wonks wowed, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, hired him “to bring natural language understanding to Google,” as Kurzweil put it. He is a pioneer in the ChatGPT revolution.

As Kurzweil sees it, we are racing toward a new horizon in human meaning. He writes in Nearer: “There are several key areas of change that are continuing to accelerate simultaneously: computing power is becoming cheaper, human biology is becoming better understood, and engineering is becoming possible at far smaller scales.” Suddenly, some technologists sense the grand breakthrough of new consciousness, like astronaut Bowman experienced through the StarGate in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 
Then Kurweil hits the reader with an astonishing claim, now packed with the uncanny feeling he may be right and there’s nothing we can do about it. He writes: “As artificial intelligence (AI) grows in ability and information becomes more accessible, we are integrating these. Capabilities will merge ever more closely with our natural biological intelligence. Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us.”

It’s clear from this that Kurzweil, for all his unquestioned genius, is no socialist. Don’t worry, his ilk seems to say, while we elites are cloning around and merging with machines on the weekends, the Have-Nots will abide. The raises the ago-old question of who’s the singularity for and who’s in charge of the production. 

Kurzweil does suggest that AI will not end the social safety net, but even perhaps enhance its value: “The level of these programmes is barely adequate today, but as AI-driven advances make it possible for medicine, food, and housing to be much cheaper during the 2030s, the same level of financial support will provide a very comfortable standard of living without needing to further increase the percentage of GDP devoted to social safety net spending."

Kurzweil reminds us that in his previous book he laid out Six Epochs. Epoch One saw the birth of the laws of physics and the chemistry they make possible. Two brought life and DNA that introduced self-replication. Three saw brains develop. Four witnessed humans develop “their higher-level cognitive ability, along with their thumbs, to translate thoughts into complex actions.” 

In this, the Fifth Epoch, he writes, that we have reached the point where we can directly merge biological human cognition with the speed and power of our digital technology by means of brain–computer interfaces (BCI). Indeed, BCI is here. Elon Musk hopes soon to frame a system of interconnected minds he calls Telepathy.

This is breathtaking in itself. But Kurzweil stresses the urgency of the Coming Ubermensh. He predicts more confidently than ever that merged humans will know the Singularity and superintelligence by 2045. He blithely proclaims: “If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better.”

But then, perhaps understanding how little humans have done to stop climate change, the threat of nuclear war or the decline of democracy, he seems to add, on the other hand, “Revolutionary new systems in biotechnology, nanotechnology, or artificial intelligence could possibly lead to an existential catastrophe like a devastating pandemic or a chain reaction of self-replicating machines.” Oh, God.  

What a read.