Who Is Afraid Of The Singularity?

Will the future look like us, or something completely different?

by MARCELO GLEISER

The Singularity Is Near is the title of a documentary directed by Anthony Waller and co-directed by Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor and author of the homonymous book. Here is the movie's synopsis:

The onset of the 21st Century will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

According to Kurzweil's analysis, the pace with which technology advances, and in particular, computing, memory, and data processing technology, is so amazingly fast (exponentially fast) that we will soon reach a point where machines will be able to emulate and quickly surpass the creative power of the human brain. Humanity will then reach a point of no return, whereby what we mean to be human will be no more: the singularity means the redefinition of our species, the creation of something else, possibly a hybrid of flesh and circuits, possibly simply circuits, dead matter imitating life in virtual animation.

The hope here is that ultra-fast computing speeds plus unlimited access to data processing will emulate a working brain: enough computational complexity will create an emergent ultra-smart machine.

Humans, prepare for thy end is coming.

The date for the big change has been set for 2045.

Kurzweil is no fool, and certainly not a crackpot. He built the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind (Stevie Wonder was his first customer), and invented a series of music synthesizers and speech recognition machines and software that made him wealthy. He has received the National Medal of Technology for his contributions to science and technology. Three years ago, he funded the Singularity University, co-sponsored by Google and housed at NASA's Ames Laboratory headquarters. A new documentary about Kurzweil, The Transcendent Man is just out. Serious people of different walks of life take him very seriously.