The Future Will Be Different

Among the books I've had to read to understand where my employer, Zero Point Frontiers, wants to go is Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, which I've read previously. Darlene Cavalier even managed to arrange for us to interview Kurzweil on this site. Briefly, the Singularity is a technological takeoff point, where our computer, nanontechnological, biotechnological, and robotic technologies fundamentally change the way we live.

It's one thing to think about when you're casting about for science fiction ideas or treating the Singularity as a purely intellectual exercise. But what if you were tasked with thinking about how to plan for it--purposely engage with the Singularity-related tech fields (plus energy and space)--and figure out how to adjust your corporate strategy to account for it? Mind you, Kurzweil and others are charging $25,000 a person to help CEOs do exactly that at The Singularity University. However, lacking $25K in pocket change, I've taken to learning on my own.

So what could this sort of high-technology future look like? Without going all John Lennon on y'all, imagine some of these possibilities...

• Material Plenty: Obtaining the basic necessities of life from a "replicator" machine in your home. This would be an advanced version of the 3D printers now being built by hobbyists and some companies (Zero Point Frontiers has one). Instead of building only computer-modeled solid objects, future replicators could provide basic necessities like food, clothing, and medicine. Why go to the store? Why build stores in the first place? And suppose these things were available to everyone. Yes, everyone. No more hunger. No more unnecessary illnesses.
• A Cleaner World: You can't get something from nothing. Where would the replicators get the materials to make all this useful stuff? Garbage dumps, for one. No, you wouldn't be eating trash; the replicators would be transforming the physical materials currently cluttering the landscape at the molecular level and changing those molecules into something useful or healthy. Nanotechnology also could build artificial trees to extract carbon dioxide more quickly from the atmosphere. Think this is ridiculous? Consider trees themselves, which grow to massive size from tiny acorns.
• Healthier Bodies: Medical technologists are already developing molecule-sized materials and machines that could target specific diseases like cancer. Other machines could patrol our bloodstreams to help our white blood cells fight disease while helping red blood cells more efficiently carry oxygen to our bodies. Still other machines could help us access the internet directly with our minds. I've been joking about "getting that chip in my head" for years, but semiconductor chips might soon be overtaken by atomic-scale quantum computers. We could live for centuries with such enhancements. Or, if you believe Kurzweil, forever.

It's difficult to imagine such a world, yet our machines keep getting faster and more advanced every year. Let's say you don't believe computers will become conscious or that we'll all be assimilated to become the Borg. Fine. But our machinery is getting faster, more advanced, and more capable every year. The paces of progress and change are increasing. A world without poverty? Hunger? Ignorance? That's crazy talk, yes?

Okay, so (as they said in Firefly), let's talk crazy.

Prompted by my recent reading, I posted the following item on Facebook to see what people would come up with:

Thought-provoking question of the night: if you could do one big thing to make the world better, what would you do? Ground rules: no "offing" individuals or groups that bother you. Entries of that nature will be deleted. Think positively, have fun!

One of my coworkers, Maria, posited this idea:  

 Have all occupations pay equal salaries

I won't lie: my inner free-marketeer, immediately thought aloud, "Communist!" But then I considered some of this Singularity stuff I've been reading. They've got a ways to go yet, but once the 3D printers/replicators can produce anything on a mass scale, they will fundamentally change manufacturing and Life As We Know it. If all of life's necessities become essentially free, what need is there for money? Here are the advantages of a society with mass-produced plenty:

1. If money has only limited utility, the traditional incentives of capitalism go right out the window and they can be replaced with things like autonomy, mastery, and purpose. 
2. If money is no longer the primary motivator for a career, you just might get (no guarantees, just playing with ideas here) people who want to be in the field because they love the work rather than because they just want to make a lot of money.

There could be disadvantages, of course, or at least hard questions for which I don't have ready answers:

1. Money is a medium of exchange for obtaining equitable trades for scarce resources. In a world where all the basics are covered or readily available, why would you want or need money? Why would you need to work, for that matter? What luxuries would be incentive enough for people to work? 
2. Would you need that world of uniform resources (replicators) first, before you could make career salaries equal?
3. What do you do with human ne'er-do-wells in an everything-is-free society? They have any number of problems, even if you provide them with their basics: violence, drug use, general hostility to or unwillingness to help others, etc. 
4. If, in this high-tech utopia, so much is provided for you and a lot of basic trades or services are automated, what are people supposed to do?
5. Human beings are competitive and always seeking for what they don't have. If we all have what we need, what will we find to compete over?
6. Would there be any limits on individual replicators--amount of energy or mass used per day? Number of calories produced (in the case of food)? Safety measures to prevent abuse of alcohol or drugs? Prohibitions on harmful chemicals or weapons?

Which leads me to another talk I heard this week by consumer consultant Mike Walsh. He asked, "If you could re-imagine cities as video games, what sorts of behaviors would you incentivize?" And, more to the point, what incentives would you use to encourage those behaviors if money is no longer a motivator?

The best place to test this theory might be in space, either on a space station or on a lunar or Mars colony. For example, the Deep Space Industries folks--the second commercial space mining venture--plan to mine the asteroids of our solar system, starting with the mere 2-3 million of them that pass near to Earth. After collecting this material, they plan to put it into 3D printers or the equivalent and use it to build useful items for people living in space. In addition to metals and other ores, asteroids are supposed to have carbon, water, and rare earth elements--all of which could be applied toward more advanced 3D printers (replicators) in the future. So if you're in space, and all of the basics of life are coming from these orbital foundries in mass quantities for free, are you really going to need to get paid? In any case, this sort of resource-abundant, money-free environment would be an excellent place to test the notions described above.

Yes indeed, the future can and will be different. Sometimes we overlook just how different it might be, and how quickly the changes might occur. Cash money is on the decline. 3D printers are increasing and improving regularly, and do-it-yourself kits can be found free on the internet. Ray Kurzweil is predicting that we might reach the Singularity by 2045. Not saying you should mark your calendars, but just reminding you that the future might come sooner than you think.

Potpourri CXXXVII

Here's the latest batch of foolishness...

Boeing flew a formation flight with its newest and oldest aircraft.




Israeli nanotechnology researchers claim to have developed an anti-icing surface.


Some good news for a change: Russia wants to work with the U.S. on space projects past 2020. I don’t think that means they’ll lower the price of Soyuz launches anytime soon, but the sentiment is nice.


The problem with Voyager 2 has been addressed: a bit was “flipped” through random radiation.


The FAA chief doesn’t like his agency being a “piñata” for airlines’ schedule delays. Okay, fine. But if the FAA has been slow to upgrade our out-of-date air traffic control system and ATC delays are the primary cause of planes being stuck on the tarmac, shouldn’t FAA be a legitimate target for the stick?


A citizens group from Texas is visiting Capitol Hill to make a plea for the Constellation Program. Visits matter. So do well-written letters. If you want the U.S. to continue having a human space exploration program (as opposed to just sending humans to low-Earth orbit, which is not exploration), then your voice matters!


Steven Colbert visited Johnson Space Center recently. Nice to have at least one influential media personality digging space.

The inner workings of a 1950s ballistic computer. Cool!


A 1939 Popular Mechanics article describing a transcontinental airplane flight—all 15 hours of it. Yikes!


A Saudi woman beat up a member of the nation’s morality police. I admire her spirit, but don’t like to think about the ultimate outcome.


The Long Now Foundation is sponsoring a talk on fusion.


Food for thought: Science Warriors vs. Philosophers of Science.

From Walt Disney World: How to move a 120-ton Winnie the Pooh tree.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s something of a revolution going on in Thailand.

From Hu, for D2: two articles on training marine mammals for homeland security purposes: here and here. Cindy, Sandy, Seymour, and Clyde have been busy.


The White House blocked a Chicago chef’s tweets as he was being brought in to serve the President. Predictable. Organizations want to use social media when it’s to their advantage and suppress it when it doesn’t. Can’t have it both ways, guys. And really: what's the security risk on a chef?

From Jerry Pournelle: why don't more medical discoveries become cures? Would you believe government regulations have something to do with it? Would you be more likely to believe it if the story was from Newsweek?

Sabine has some interesting thoughts regarding the No Child Left Behind Act (a regular volleyball Doc and I bat back and forth during some of our daily bull sessions). I will have to reread the entry when I get some more time. I'm not sure if I'm qualified or knowledgable enough to argue for or against any of her points, but she posits a very important question. Paraphrased, she wants to know how failing school systems are supposed to clean themselves up when they're given no money or other resources to do so?

Late Addition from Kate Down Under: a Civil War hero of Gettysburg receives a posthumous Medal of Honor 147 years late. I've actually stood at the position where Alonzo Cushing's artillery battery was emplaced, and it was not exactly excellent ground, nor could it have been easy fighting with no long-range guns. Cushing's unit held Cemetary Ridge in the face of Pickett's Charge at close range. I don't know what would've been crazier: being one of the 13,000 men Pickett led in a dash across an open field or being one of the artillerymen forced to hold the line against 13,000 charging Confederates. The Civil War (called "The War Between the States" by some historians or "The War of Northern Aggression" by historians in my neighborhood) is the reason why American military doctrine has since emphasized minimizing casualties. Over 600,000 American lives were lost in that conflict.

That'll do for now. Off to attempt 8 hours of sleep. I know: craziness!

Movie Review: G. I. Joe

There was a time when I was a connoisseur of big, dumb action films. I saw pretty much every Stallone, Willis, or Schwarzenegger film during the 1990s. Then--I don't know. My tastes changed. Ahhhnuhld became The Governator. Stallone retired. Bruce Willis started getting fewer gigs. The Batman movies turned silly and homoerotic. And I just couldn't gin up much enthusiasm for the latter-day James Bond franchise. So aside from a couple Star Trek films or the newest Batman movies, I don't get out to the big, dumb action films as much as I used to. I needn't have fretted. G.I. Joe is just as big and dumb as the movies I watched in the '90s, with the added benefit of being based on a childhood cartoon I watched, as well as being incoherent, visually stunning, and super-fast, as only late '00 CGI movies can be.

That is not to say the movie is utterly without merit--though I will mention some additional demerits in a few sentences. Two of the big MacGuffins in this movie are nanotechnology and "accelerator suits," both of which are in development.

In this film, nanotech does a couple of different things, such as dissolving/consuming anything in sight, reconstructing faces/bodies, and changing body chemistry (up to and including suppressing "ethics"). I'm not a huge fan of nanotech, but even I knew some of the things the filmmakers had the stuff doing were a bit of a stretch.

The accelerator suits are armored and armed exoskeletons that allow soldiers to move faster, carry more equipment, and remain protected from a wide variety of threats. The movie shows a couple of soldiers tearing up cars, buildings, and streets in Paris with these getups, and the sequences are impressive. And what bears thinking about is that the Department of Defense is developing this equipment today.

On the other hand there are several physics- and technology-defying moments that even an English major had to chuckle at (random thoughts during the movie: "I didn't know ice could sink" "How do you weaponize a warhead?"). It can overload someone's common-sense filter, even if you have the sense to turn it off before you walk into the theater--which is a good idea, by the way.

The problem, of course, is that these technologies are being showcased in what amounts to a live-action updating of a comic book...and a gruesome updating, in some case. One of the laughable things about the cartoon I watched was that, Mirable Dieu, every time a tank or airplane was blown up, the crew always managed to bail out and not get killed. A cartoon about G.I.s without blood. Which was probably just as well for a kid's show. The point was to get you or your parents to buy the toys and play soldier, not freak you out. This movie can freak you out a bit, if you're under 13 or so. Lots of cussin', lots of explosions, some quick shots of bodies being maimed, shot, or burned. In all, some creepy stuff.

But this is a kid's movie, in nearly every sense of the word--or an adolescent's, to be closer to the point. The dialogue and characterization are laughable. The attempts at flashback or "back story" are not nearly as deft as the recent Batman movies. There's some hint at sexuality, but it's subsumed in quick montages or clumsy repartee. I guess I really didn't have high hopes for this film, but some of these efforts are better than others. Great effects do not overcome serious gaps in logic, and there are gaps a-plenty in G. I. Joe. Like you expected something better from a big, dumb action movie?

Additional Thoughts

I gave a glowing review to the Batman movies in the last couple years, so I had to ask myself why I was so hard on G. I. Joe, which is hardly more realistic. Part of it was that I didn't have quite the attachment to that old cartoon series that I did to Batman. Batman is one of the more known commodities in the comic world and has had some better stories told in his world. It's one brooding, smart, tough guy against the underworld. It's as illogical as a gang of super-competent soldiers fighting armies of bad guys, and yet Batman ends up in a better movie. Perhaps it's just because the Bruce Wayne/Batman character is much better developed, however fantastically.

No, I'm not giving up on comic book heroes or big, dumb action movies. I'm just getting more selective about the kinds of stories that are getting told. It is possible to tell a not-dumb story or have a not-dumb message, even in the big, dumb action movie genre. Batman has them, G. I. Joe does not--that's about as simple as I can make it.

A Conversation with Ray Kurzweil

Darlene Cavalier and Bart Leahy

The questions below were submitted by our readers. Some questions were edited or combined for content. We appreciate your participation in the ongoing discussion about the Singularity. (Note: Hyperlinks added by Bart for reference.) Our thanks to Ray Kurzweil for taking the time to respond to our queries.

General and Technical Questions – What Is the Singularity?

1. What is your “short version” definition of what the Singularity is?
–Bart

RAY: The Singularity is a future time when the pace of technological change will be so fast and transformative that you will not be able to follow it unless you merge with the intelligent technology we are creating.

2. Singularity University is clearly aimed at helping to shape the Singularity and hasten its arrival. Do exponential trends really need help and, if so, can we really expect to shape them?
–Jon

RAY: The exponential growth of information technologies will continue inexorably as it has for over a century. However, technology has always been a double-edged sword ever since we developed fire and stone tools. How we apply these technologies and whether constructive applications that overcome human suffering and extend our creativity predominate over destructive applications is not preordained. That is where we can help shape the Singularity.

3. How would we recognize the Singularity happening? Would the change be gradual, or would it be similar to the singularity around a black hole--so enormous, rapid, and widespread that we wouldn’t even realize what had happened until long after we’ve crossed the point of no return?
–Marianne

RAY: The pace of information technology is continual yet exponential. Exponential trajectories have no discontinuities but are nonetheless disruptive. You describe the changes well as “enormous, rapid, widespread,” and constituting a “point of no return.”

4. Given the slow and erratic progress in AI over the past 40 years, what makes you so confident that machines will become intelligent (in the commonly understood sense) in the next 40?
–Corey

RAY: I disagree with your characterization of AI. It reminds me of people who go into the rain forest and ask, “where all the species that are supposed to be here” when there are 25 species of ants within fifty feet of them. The species in the rain forest are not seen because they are hidden in the ecostructure. Similarly, AI is all around us yet hidden in our modern economic infrastructure. Every time you send an email or connect a cell phone call intelligent algorithms route the information. Pick up a product, it’s been designed at least in part by intelligent computer assisted design software, inventory levels controlled by intelligent just-in-time inventory systems, assembled in robotic factories. AI software flies and lands airplanes, guides intelligent weapons system, automatically detects credit card fraud, helps you find information on the web, diagnoses electrocardiograms and blood cell images comparable to trained physicians, and much else. If all the AI programs were to stop tomorrow, our modern infrastructure would grind to a halt. That was not the case just fifteen years ago. These were all research projects then. On the research front, AI programs can now play master levels of go, drive cars with no human drivers through complex terrains, recognize songs and images, and so on. Now that we can see inside the brain with very high resolution we are building models and simulations of brain regions. That will accelerate AI in the years ahead.

Ethical and Social Questions

5. Why do you think it’s a good idea for us to create machines that are smarter or more powerful than human beings? Can we expect singularity to shape itself or will we still hold charge of our technological creations?
–Bart/Jasmin

RAY: The machines are not an alien invasion from Mars. It is part of our civilization which is already a human-machine civilization. Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, our tools have been extensions of ourselves. We are the only species that changes who we are based on tools we create.

6. Suppose that things continue in much the way they are now, with increasingly powerful and miniaturized wireless devices making information available wherever we want it. Does that count as a “Singularity?” It is easy for me to imagine, for instance, a brain implant that allows me to conduct Google searches purely by the power of thought—but that merging of biological and digital intelligence seems distinctly different from what you mean by a Singularity.
–Corey

RAY: Accessing the web from inside our brains is one good example of what we will see in about twenty years.. The machine extensions to our brains will grow exponentially both in hardware and software capability. By the late 2030s, it will be the nonbiological portion of our intelligence that predominates.

7. How do you see the economics of the future working/changing if everything is free?
–Bart

RAY: Who said everything will be free? We will continue to have open source and proprietary sources of information. When we have nano desktop factories that can produce physical products from information files and very inexpensive input materials, we will be able to live very well on just open source information. But there will still be an edge and demand for proprietary information. Information technologies have had an 18 percent growth rate as measured in constant dollars for the past fifty years despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it for the same cost every year. This in fact has been the source of true economic growth.

8. How close are we to getting a Star Trek-like “holodeck?”
–Jonathan

RAY: In twenty years we will be able to produce physical products from information files using nano desktop factories. This is still short of the holodeck but it will turn virtually the entire economy into an information economy.

9. How far away are we from reaching the Singularity? Is 2045 still a reasonable estimate?
–Jason

RAY: According to my models, we will multiply our biological intelligence a billion fold through its integration with nonbiological intelligence by 2045. I consider that the Singularity.

10. How do you respond to people who claim that this is just “the geek Rapture?”
–Bart

RAY: This “criticism” is based on the notion that the “rapture” came first and that we just worked backwards to justify this religious notion. But that is not where the ideas come from. They come from a scientific analysis of technology trends. Religion emerged in pre scientific times and we do need to update our philosophies based on science.

11. What is to become of people who don't want to join your Singularity and just want to remain human as they are?
–Bart

RAY: First of all, it is human to change who we are. We didn’t stay on the ground, we didn’t stay on the planet, and we have not stayed with the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 a thousand years ago. We are the only species that changes who we are and extends our reach, both physical and mental, through our tools. So it is human to change who we are. There will always be early and late adopters, but people are not going to completely dismiss these changes. How many people today complete reject medical and health technologies? When there is a therapy based on blood cells devices that overcome a particular disease, very few if any people will reject it. People put computers in their brains today if they have Parkinson’s Disease. People do not reject this FDA approved therapy due to philosophical issues.

12. Are you pleased or disappointed with the progress made so far? What technologies are “ahead of the curve,” as you see it, which ones are behind?
–Jason

RAY: My team and I just updated the graphs that were in my 2005 book The Singularity is Near from 2002 through 2007. The exponential curves have remained precisely on track. It is pretty remarkable when you consider that what we are measuring is the innovation of millions of people.

13. Your book takes a very optimistic view of science and human nature, but neglects the problem of human evil. Given what we've done with previous “great inventions,” don't you worry that individuals or nations could do great harm with all this—accidentally or maliciously? What safeguards would be put in place to prevent this?
–Bart/Ned

RAY: I don’t know why people say I ignore the downsides when I was the one who initiated the debate about promise versus peril. Bill Joy’s WIRED cover story “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” was based on my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, as he acknowledges at the beginning of the article. My recent book, The Singularity is Near, has an extensive discussion of the downsides and what to do about them in chapter 8 (“The Deeply Intertwined Promise versus Peril of GNR”). The safeguards we need are twofold. We need ethical standards for responsible practitioners such as the Asilomar guidelines in biotechnology. And we need a rapid response system, basically a technological immune system, to deal with intentional abuse. We have such a system for software viruses. I am working with the U.S. Army on putting a rapid response system in place for bioengineered biological viruses.

14. What is/will be the relationship between ethics and The Singularity? The rapid growth of science/knowledge leads to many advancements via engineering, but how can/will ethics be applied when mankind can no longer keep pace?
–Paul

RAY: See my response to the previous question.

15. What are your foundational core values....specifically your belief about God and how that guides the limits of what you do?
–Rosalind

RAY: I believe that evolution is a spiritual process in that it leads to greater intelligence, creativity, beauty, and love, all of the attributes that God has been called without limit. I believe we have a responsibility to apply our ideas to overcome human suffering. We have made good progress on this. Just read Thomas Hobbes on what human life was like a few hundred years ago. He described it as short, brutish, disaster prone, disease and poverty filled. Human life expectancy was 37 just 200 years ago.

16. Space exploration is one technology you downplay in The Singularity is Near. Does your new venture with Peter Diamandis and NASA—the Singularity University—change this perspective?
–Bart

RAY: Space travel will be of key importance once we saturate the matter and energy in our midst at the physical limits of computation. We will then need to spread out to the rest of the galaxy and universe. But we will not sending missions of squishy creatures, but rather missions of nanobots swarms..

17. What is the purpose of “Singularity U?”
–Bart

RAY: The purpose of Singularity University is to bring together the most creative students and professors to study exponentially growing information technologies and to apply these ideas to meeting the grand challenges of humanity.

18. What should people do about scientific literacy so that everyone can understand, at least a basic level, the rapidly advancing technology?
–Paul

RAY: Indeed, scientific literacy needs to be a core goal of our educational system. Other countries are taking that more seriously than we are. About twenty years ago, the U.S. graduated about 60,000 engineers per year and China graduated about 10,000. Now, we graduate about the same level and China graduates about 300,000 per year.

19. What should we be *doing* about all this?
–Dan

RAY: Celebrate science and engineering as the cool subjects that they are. It is only the exponentially growing information technologies that have the scale to address the major problems of humanity.

20. In 1999, you created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies) which began trading in 2006 to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends" and eventually beat the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions. Did FatKat predict the market collapse?
–Darlene

RAY: The FatKat algorithms are designed to only predict a few hours or days ahead and to do that with an accuracy that is somewhat better than chance.

21. Between the Reading Machine and the newest pocket-sized device designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud, you’ve demonstrated a remarkable desire to help the blind. I’m curious: what sparked your interest in helping the blind?
–Darlene

RAY: In the mid 1970s I had developed a method that could recognize print in any typestyle. It was a solution in search of a problem. I happened to sit next to a blind guy on an airplane who said that his only real handicap was the inability to read ordinary print. That sparked my desire to apply this technology to build a print-to-speech reading machine..

22. You are making a movie due for release this year called The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future, part fiction, part non-fiction, in which you interview 20 big thinkers like our friend Marvin Minsky. I assume Marvin shares your vision on what Singularity is and will be. Do most “futurists” share your vision? Why or why not?
–Darlene

RAY: There is increasing awareness of my exponential view, but linear thinking is actually hard wired in the brain. So even otherwise sophisticated scientists often project current trends linearly into the future. They just have not studied technology trends. There is a profound difference between the intuitive linear perspective and the historically accurate exponential view. If I take thirty steps linearly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …) I get to 30. If I take thirty steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …) I get to a billion. The latter sequence describes what has already happened. When I was a student at MIT we all shared one computer. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper than the one we all shared when I was a student, and is a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion fold increase in price performance since I was a student and we will do it again in the next 25 years. This applies not just to computation but to any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties such as bits moved around on the Internet, genetic sequencing, brain sequencing, and much else.

23. The “part non-fiction” subplot in your movie includes a computer that saves the world from self-replicating, tiny robots. Are you concerned that such microscopic robots will pose a threat to the world?
–Darlene

RAY: Yes, that is called the grey goo scenario, and the narrative thread in the movie illustrates this danger.. I do think we can manage that through a combination of ethical standards to build in safeguards into nanotechnology, as well as a rapid response system that detects threats and immediately deals with them, just like our biological immune system is designed to do. But this is not something we should be sanguine about. We need to be very diligent about it.

24. I understand it had been documented that one of your goals is to bring back your late father using AI. How can that happen?
–Darlene

RAY: Future AI’s will be intelligent to gather all of the information about a deceased person (his DNA from his gravesite, memories of people who knew him, archived records) and create a person (say a virtual person in a realistic virtual reality environment) very similar to that person, basically someone indistinguishable from that person to the people who knew him or her. For this reason I have kept about fifty boxes of my father’s archives, all of his music, letters, photographs, movies, etc. Would this person be the same person as my father, or a new person that just happens to be very similar? You can argue that if my father lived, he would be very different anyway. We change our particles every six months or less, but there is a continuity of pattern. I discuss this philosophical issue in chapter 7 of The Singularity is Near.

25. Lastly, you were clearly influenced by your parents’ and uncle’s careers. Are your children working in science/engineering fields?
–Darlene

RAY My son Ethan, age 29, works as a venture capitalist for Bessemer Ventures in Silicon valley in the area of high tech business. I often talk to him about my business strategies. He is not an inventor but he is fostering technology innovation. My daughter is a writer and artist and is writing a graphic novel as her senior project at Stanford. Interestingly, I majored in both computer science and creative writing at MIT.

More Thoughts on the Singularity

I have a great interest in the political and ethical impacts of technology. Therefore, the Singularity, which promises everything from super-smart computers to an end to want via nanotechnology to immortality through biotechnolgy, is of keen interest to me. As a reader and amateur writer of science fiction, I have no problem with the probability of the Singularity, but I do wonder and worry about what it might bring about. The thoughts below are the result of two days' worth of journal entries. A bit long and convoluted, perhaps, but necessary to English majors like me, who think in prose, not equations.

*

"I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!"
--Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

"That is the exploration that awaits you: not mapping stars or studying nebula, but charting the unknown possbilities of existence."
--Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "All Good Things..."

Picard: "It's our mortality that defines us, Soren. It's part of the truth of our existence."
Soren: "What if I told you that I found a new truth?"
--Star Trek: Generations

"I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science."
--Vincent, GATTACA

And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!
--Ray Bradbury, "The Veldt"

For the last 200 years, strength (political power) has been determined by the ability to incraese material wealth. This is a radical change from previous eras, when leaders derived their powers strictly by agricultural abundance--or scarcity, military power, "divine right of kings," or clerical sanction. The power of money created a new dynamic, as it relied primarily on intellect and fair trade of value rather than sheer violence (or threat thereof).

One inevitable side-effect of this transition is that power shifted from those with weapons to those with money. Marxists criticized the "bourgeois" ethics of hard work and simple material comfort. Nevertheless, capitalism changed many assumptions that had stood for centuries by combining industrial machinery, scientific insight, mass production, and individual liberty. Slavery ended, and standards of living in industrialized countries rose. For the first time in human history, the goods of civilization could be made abundant and cheap enough for the majority of humanity to afford them--if available. Consider, even today, the difference between poverty in America, where individuals still have access to television, cellular telephones, computers, and a social infrastructure that ensures survival or recovery in the event of national disasters; and poverty in the developing world, where mass starvation, disease, and unsanitary conditions are common.

Another of the unsung triumphs of Western Civilization in the last 25 years has been information technology, which has progressed and expanded the extend of human knowledge exponentially every two years. Advanced computers are also allowing for exponential increases in knowledge about human genetics, cognitive psychology, and nanotechnology.

Biotechnology is giving humanity unprecedented insight into the processes of life itself. We are learning now to modify the forms and shapes of life, and even extend it.

Insight into our own psychology could enable us to overcome mental illness and the hostile madness that provokes us to war. We might eventually be able to translate the structure of thought itself from brain impulses to data sets capable of traveling through computer systems like "ghosts in the machine."

Nanotechnology will allow for mass transmutation of the elements, enabling individuals to overcome not just starvation, but powerlessness as well.

And computer technology itself, becoming ever more sophisticated and powerful, could eventually exceed the processing and intellectual ability of the humans that gave it birth. They will be able to generate artificial environments for humans that are indistinguishable from reality.

All these changes, technologists like Ray Kurzweil predict, will culminate in an event called the Singularity, where humanity (or its machines, or a combination thereof) might transcend mortality, scarcity, and ignorance.

It all sounds so grand, so impressive and utopian--what could possibly go wrong? We don't need to think too hard about it to come up with answers. Human nature is what it is: good and evil, truthful and deceitful, conscientious and wasteful, peaceful and violent, cooperative and competitive. All of these traits will be reflected in our technologies.

Take away scarcity, and what new things will human beings find to fight about? What will become of our cultures when everyone can be as rich as middle-class Americans today? Populations are likely to drop, and new problems of overindulgence and sheer materialism are likely. Eliminate sickness and death, and what need will there be for doctors, funeral directors, or priests?

Yet what more could humans beings ask of a utopia? An end to illness, want, ignorance, the sources of war, suffering, and death. But what of the consolations of philosophy? What will become of politics when decisions are made not just by the powerful few, but where every individual and every computer has a voice? Much of human technological and artistic progress has been driven by a desire to overcome limitations. Will that drive exist if we truly achieve an end to striving here on Earth? Why bother exploring other worlds if computers can create alien landscapes as realistic as the most vivid dreams? We need to think seriously about the outcomes of pursuing such a future. Again, for most of our history, the quest to seek beyond our limitations has ruled our lives. What will it mean to be "human" if all of the basic drives and limitations that defined the lives of our ancestors become irrelevant?

*

Since the late 1930s, we have had a literature that addresses the implications of our technological dreams: science fiction. Star Trek is merely the most popular flavor. You might not like everything you read in SF, but you might be less surprised by the future you find yourself facing.

Book Review: Accelerando

In response to my reading of The Singularity is Near and the opportunity with Darlene the Science Cheerleader to interview Ray Kurzweil, I thought I'd take a look at some Singularity-related science fiction. Charles Stross, a British SF writer, has written several books on this theme, among them Accelerando. This is a wild book, very serious and far-reaching in its implications despite its often-humorous or raucous character interactions. It is also much, much easier to read than Kurzweil's book and provides a dramatic representation of Kurzweil's ideas in everyday lives.

Starting around 2015, we begin with Manfred Macx, a roving hacker and business idea creator, who creates new money-making concepts for others, taking only favors as payment. Manfred is a neo-Marxist who distrusts capitalism and believes that the Singularity is going to create a society of plenty so great that money no longer matters. He follows the credo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cory Doctorow, who believe that information should be free. Stross realistically describes the financial difficulties that would arise if our worldwide economic system shifted from an assumption of scarcity and limited resources (which we mediate by using money) to an economy where nanotechnology-based "replicators" make all resources and products free by transmuting elements at the atomic level on an industrial scale. However, I didn't buy Manfred's belief that only a turn to full Marxism could cope with this change in resources.

Manfred's story begins when a group of dissident lobsters contacts him via an electronic package seeking asylum. Lobsters, you say? Right: lobsters. One aspect that is often hyped as part of the Singularity is the ability of computers to "upload" the contents of minds. Theoretically, one could start by uploading simpler minds first, then use what is learned from those uploads to increase computer capabilities, and moving up to faster computational systems. While finding an escape route for the lobsters, Manfred also tries to fight for the civil rights of computerized entities like the lobsters and dodge the IRS, his ex-wife (who works for the IRS), the mafia (who have taken over the music business), and someone who is mailing him dead cats. This is a lot of weirdness, and this is just the first part of the book.

Part two deals with Manfred's daughter Amber, who was born from his ex-wife, who became pregnant after capturing Manfred in a bizarre bondage episode in part one (this book is definitely rated R). Amber is an indentured slave aboard a ship orbiting Jupiter space after running away from her mother. The ship is out in space to use nanotechnology miners to build bases in that part of space. She gradually transforms herself into a queen in Jupiter space, and uses her considerable political powers to send a laser-sail-driven starship to a brown dwarf three light years away. This starship is not occupied by a typical flesh-and-blood crew, but a group of holodeck characters who incorporate uploaded personalities--including Amber and her electronic cat, another recurring character, like the lobsters. These electronic characters reach the brown dwarf, where they find an alien-built router. The remainder of part two deals with these "holodeck" adventures and their eventual return to the solar system.

While all this mostly human-based activity is going on, the computerized world has been busy, too. The super-intelligent computers, using nanotechnology in their own way, are dismantling planets and moons to turn "dumb" matter into matter that can be used for molecular computing. The electronic minds are trading in content and ideas forming "Economy 2.0" and eventually "Economy 3.0." All of this can quickly get over the merely human occupants of the solar system, but that's almost beside the point, as the electronic minds of the inner solar system also become hostile to human life. If there's a dystopian side to the Singularity, this would be it. And all of this takes place within the space of a century, more or less. This is a much different view of progress than some Golden Age SF writers created. Rather than massive changes in humanity and technology taking place over the course of ages, these changes occur in the space of decades or mere years.

To help the reader keep up on what's going on, Stross uses rather amusing omniscient summaries of activities in the humand and computerizeds world on Earth. It combines a little Heinleinesque snark, a little cyberpunk randomness, and a lot of Singularity- or IT-based technobabble. A short sample will suffice:

New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings--even if they are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.

Humanity?

Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba--and about as inhabitable.

Part three's human-viewpoint character is Sirhan, the son of Amber and Sadeq, a Shi'ite Muslim cleric who accompanied her on the starship. Sirhan was born while the virtual incarnation of Amber was in transit to the alien router. Amber and Sadeq never married on the starship, while their left-behind selves pushed Sirhan's personality through a series of holodeck-type environments to try to get his childhood "right." As a result of all this, Sirhan has a rather confused and tense relationship with his returned mother.

By part three, the inner solar system has become akin to a Dyson sphere made of "computronium," essentially "dumb" matter that has all been translated into computer surfaces to increase the ability of the computer minds near the Sun to expand their powers. Again there is tension between humans and computers, keeping the conflict moving along.

What I like and respect about Stross's work is his more realistic depiction of the problems of smarter-than-human computers. Ray Kurzweil, the lead prophet of Singularitarianism, is much too optimistic, in my view. But then if everything was an "upside" in the Singularity, there'd be no drama and no story. Stross also manages to strike a nice balance between the human character interactions and the bigger human-computer conflicts, though the human relationships become more and more difficult to sort out and understand as the technology that defines "humanity" changes the very nature of the species. I found the book well worth reading, and look forward to Stross's Singularity Sky.

What Would You Ask Ray Kurzweil?

For those of you who already know who Kurzweil is and what this is about, Darlene the Science Cheerleader and I have the opportunity to do an email interview with him and write an article on ScienceCheerleader.com. As you might imagine, I have a whole boatload of questions in my mind, but in reality, R.K. will probably answer, at most, a dozen. If you have a question you're dying to ask about The Singularity, forward it my way, and Darlene and I will include it in the list for consideration. I'll keep this open until Friday night (whenever I crash--usually around 10:30-11 p.m. Central Time).

For those of you who have no idea who Ray Kurzweil is or what this is about, you may continue reading below. RK's most famous book, "The Singularity is Near," talks about a fundamental transformation that is occurring in the world's technology--not just computers, but also nanotechnology (manufacturing things at the atomic level) and biotechnology (changing the human genome to overcome illness, disease, or defects).

RK proceeds from the idea that computers have been making massive improvements in processing speed and capability every couple years. The basic theory governing this advance is Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has been increasing by an order of magnitude once every two years. This is how you get computers with ten times the speed for the same amount of money. RK says that this ability to compute is allowing us to also better understand everything faster, from the human genome to climate modeling to the human bloodstream. Eventually, around 2045 or so, the world's computers will achieve a point where they become not only superfast, but superintelligent--faster than us and smarter. This condition, called the Singularity, will enable us to do anything from extending life more or less indefinitely to accurately predict the weather a year out, to "uploading" the contents of our minds into the internet--allowing our souls to more or less become "ghosts in the machine."

Kurzweil has even partnered with NASA and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation to create a "Singularity University" to help technical, business, and political leaders understand and cope with the changes the Singularity will bring. There are more links below. I'm sure all sorts of questions can come to mind. I've got mine, what are yours?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://singularity.com/
http://singularityu.org/
http://bartacus.blogspot.com/2007/11/review-of-singularity-is-near-review-is.html
http://www.nss.org/resources/books/non_fiction/NF_038_singularityisnear.html http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PWXrnsSrf0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSYyFqpS3U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYIj3VxSdzI&feature=related
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html