Immortality and the Singularity

 

If I asked you how long you thought it would take before human beings achieved clinical immortality, the ability for humans to choose when they wish to die rather than have it be an involuntary process, what would you say?  200 years?  300?

How about twenty?

Rubbish, right?  I used to think so.  I used to hang my head in sadness at how far this civilization had to go before it achieved something truly masterful, and that I would not be alive to see the wondrous achievements of the distant future.  But now there is a glimmer of hope (and a glimmer of dark terror) in the promise of future technology that suddenly makes all of it much closer than ever before.  I am suddenly a huge futurist.

I mean, I’ve always been at least a little bit of a futurist, but ever since I read an article about inventor Ray Kurzweil, I have been intrigued about how close we truly are to this monumental achievement of immortality.  Kurzweil is no quack - he is a guy who has been a technology insider for decades, winning many awards and honorary doctorates from top technology institutions.  He helped create text-to-speech and electronic keyboards, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called Kurzweil “the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”.  And the 57-year-old is rigorously fine-tuning the aspects of his health through supplements to keep himself alive long enough for the biotechnology (genetics) and nanotechnology (microscopic machines) revolutions to make immortality possible in the very near future.

The centerpiece of Kurzweil’s argument is that our progress is not linear, it is exponential, and has been carried upward through a series of paradigm shifts that build upon the mastery of previous ones.  Most people assume intuitively that human progress will be linear, and that we will achieve breakthroughs at the same growth rate that exists today.  But what is missed is that the growth rate itself is rising.  History shows an exponential trend of paradigm shifts with shorter timespans in between.  We see evidence of this in new inventions and how much more quickly they are adopted each time.  Technological breakthroughs such as Digital Video Recorders and Flat Panel TVs catch on more quickly than previous inventions and become sharply cheaper in the blink of an eye as computing power also becomes cheaper and more powerful.

The exponential trend is also evidenced by our primitive past.  Primitive life formed on earth between 10⁹ and 10¹⁰ years ago.  Homo Sapiens arrived around 10⁵ to 10⁶, agriculture at around 10⁴, printing a little before 10³, the industrial revolution and the telephone just before 10², the computer about 70 years, and the personal computer at 30 years.  Kurzweil points out that we now have computers as smart as lizards, where 20 years ago, they were only about as smart as worms, and 50 years ago, only as smart as bacteria.  If this trend continues, by 2020 we will have computers with the awesome brainpower of humans, and with millions to billions of times faster calculative power.

As this telescopic shortening of technological advancements continues, we will advance by thousands to tens of thousands of years within this century, as measured by today’s growth rate.  As we are already on the cusp of making major breakthroughs in the fields of biotech and nanotech, with practical applications no more than ten years away, this makes our pending immortality quite attainable.  Once we have machines that are able to enter living cells from the inside, we will be able to cure virtually all disease simply by rearranging molecular structures, and conquer aging itself.

Another application of nanotech could be overwhelmingly positive, that enables us to create universal abundance – our ability to manufacture just about any object needed out of a few raw materials.  Since the principal reason for war in our time must be control of resources and wealth, the abundance of these resources will essentially eradicate the need for war and perhaps the concept of wealth itself.

Kurzweil’s optimism has his critics, such as Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who helped create many of the foundations for modern networking, the Berkeley UNIX operating system, and Java.  He foresees a bleak future indeed, where terrorism becomes exponentially easier, through engineered nanobots that target specific people, be it those with certain DNA signatures, or ethnic groups.  Joy himself may have been a target of the unapprehended Unabomber, who railed against people who were making just this type of future tech possible.

If we survive the peril of this technology in the hands of madmen, there is a much foggier aspect to all of this that extends just slightly beyond the age of nanotech and immortal humans.  Once computers achieve sentience through hardware and software that mimics the human brain in functionality, which should happen by the year 2030, will they need us any longer? Will we merge with technology to transcend humanity?  Intelligent computers will continue the exponential trend by creating further, smarter generations of themselves, until they achieve the time of what Kurzweil calls the “singularity”, when the growth rate is so fast that it “represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”.  This should happen by the year 2045, and it could be heaven or hell on earth, and so great care obviously must be taken in the creation of our intelligent machines, and we must direct them to have a deep reverence and respect for their creators, or we will be eradicated just as superior species have done to lesser ones since the dawn of natural selection.

The age of biological intelligence, as it exists today, is at its maturity, and doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.  We’re almost out of too many kinds of resources, and if we don’t transcend in tandem with the intelligent machines, or at least create new ways of getting more from less, we will be left squabbling over what resources remain.  Humanity of today is a wash, and we are starving for a new way and a new wisdom. 

This isn’t science fiction any longer, and we would do well to look at the messages of well-established science fiction on these subjects to begin a dialogue about immortality and the ethical implications of intelligent machines in our lives.  It turns everything we’ve been assuming about the future on its ear, and will redefine everything we know about ourselves, and what it means to be human.  It’s all very tentative and subject to setbacks, but it is coming in this century, sure as rain, and we can choose to come through it and become one of the great civilizations among the stars, or we can perish in nightmarish agony.  May we choose the former.

 

Further reading:

Immortality Institute, www.imminst.org

Kurzweil Technologies, Inc., www.kurzweiltech.com

“Why the Future Doesn’t Needs Us”, Bill Joy, Wired, Apr 2000, www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html