I was looking forward to “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”. About how several key areas of change that are continuing to accelerate simultaneously:
- Computing power is becoming cheaper.
- Human biology is becoming better understood.
- Engineering is becoming possible at far smaller scales.
Brain expansion
Eventually, nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in the direct expansion of our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In addition to increasing speed and memory size, augmenting our brains with nonbiological computers will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices—unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.
7 million times as many computations per second as the unenhanced human brain
The computation inside the human brain (at the level of neurons) is 1014 per second. As of 2023, $1,000 of computing power could perform up to 130 trillion computations per second. Based on the 2000–2023 trend, by 2053, about $1,000 of computing power (in 2023 dollars) will be enough to perform around 7 million times as many computations per second as the unenhanced human brain.
Singularity has become a sprint
That is the gist of the book: exponential change on steroids. Singularity. The first superhuman AI is near. Humanity’s millennia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint. We are moving from theoretical science to active research and development. Science fiction is becoming science fact. For example, during the coming decade, people will interact with AI that can seem convincingly human, and simple brain-computer interfaces will impact daily life much like smartphones do today. AR and VR will interact with your brain (no need for external interfaces).
Fourth, fifth and sixth epoch
We are approaching the Fifth Epoch, where we will directly merge biological human cognition with the speed and power of our digital technology. Human neural processing happens at a speed of several hundred cycles per second, compared to several billion per second for digital technology. The Sixth Epoch is where our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium, which is matter organised at the ultimate density of computation. Humans are now in the Fourth Epoch, with our technology already producing results that exceed what we can understand for some tasks. Passing the Turing test, which Kurzweil has been anticipating for 2029, will bring us to the Fifth Epoch.
Expanding our intelligence millionfold
In the 2030s, we will be able to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking. As this progresses exponentially, we will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045. Freed from the enclosure of our skulls and processing on a substrate millions of times faster than biological tissue, our minds will be empowered to grow exponentially, ultimately expanding our intelligence millionsfold. This is the core of his definition of the Singularity.
Some random snippets from the book
- Human neurons fire around two hundred times per second at most (with one thousand as an absolute theoretical maximum), and in reality, most probably sustain averages of less than one fire per second. By contrast, transistors can now cycle over one trillion times per second, and retail computer chips exceed five billion cycles per second.
- One dollar now buys around 1.6 trillion times as much computing power as it did when the GPS was developed.
- Within forty days, AlphaGo Zero surpassed all other versions of AlphaGo and became the best Go player in human or computer form. It achieved this with no encoded knowledge of human play and no human intervention.
- The next incarnation, AlphaZero, can transfer abilities learned from Go to other games like chess.
- The ability to apply learning from one domain to a related subject is a key feature of human intelligence.
- An AI that can consistently dominate Diplomacy games will likely have also mastered deception and persuasion more broadly.
- Supercomputers already significantly exceed the raw computational requirements to simulate the human brain.
- Once we develop AI with enough programming abilities to give itself even more programming skills (whether on its own or with human assistance), there’ll be a positive feedback loop.
- And because computers operate much faster than humans, cutting humans out of the loop of AI development will unlock stunning rates of progress.
- One thousand fourteen operations per second are taking place within the brain. To require 1016 operations per second, $1,000 of hardware will probably be able to reach that by about 2032
- Google Cloud TPU v5e chips are likely around 130 billion operations per second per dollar. In terms of price-performance (speed per dollar), this is a staggering two-trillion-fold improvement.
- The space of physically possible potential drug molecules has been estimated to contain some one million billion billion billion billion billion billion possibilities!
- The AI that is powering robotic surgeons will be able to learn from the experience of any surgery that the system performs anywhere in the world—potentially many millions of surgeries.
- AI can learn from more data than a human doctor ever could and can amass experience from billions of procedures instead of the thousands a human doctor can perform in a career. And since artificial intelligence benefits from exponential improvements to its underlying hardware
- A perfectly efficient one-litre nanologic computer would provide the equivalent of about 10,000 times 10 billion human beings (or about 100 trillion human beings) in terms of brain capability.
Consciousness
The book covers consciousness, exploring the realm of metahumans, anthropic principles, biocentric design, and panprotopsychism. Panprotopsychism treats consciousness as a fundamental force of the universe—one that cannot be reduced to simply an effect of other physical forces. This means consciousness and identity can span multiple distinct information-processing structures in the skull—even ones that are not physically connected.
You 2
In the early 2040s, nanobots will be able to go into a living person’s brain and make a copy of all the data that forms the memories and personality of the original person. You will then have a complete computerised replica of your brain that contains all the same information and can function in the same way. So is this “You 2” conscious?
You 2,3,4 and 5
At the stage of directly copying over the contents of living brains to nonbiological mediums, we transition from merely simulated replicants to actual mind uploading, also known as whole-brain emulation or WBE. Of course, the same technology that enables us to transition all our skills, personality, and memories to a digital medium would also allow us to create multiple copies of that information. This ability to duplicate ourselves at will is a superpower in the digital world that does not exist in the biological world. You 2,3,4, and 5. All conscious?
Replicants
One type of AI avatar that we can create, called a “replicant” (to borrow a term from Blade Runner), will have the appearance, behaviour, memories, and skills of a person who has passed away, living on in a phenomenon I call After Life. Replicant bodies will exist primarily in virtual and augmented reality, but realistic bodies in actual reality (that is, convincing androids) will also be possible using the nanotechnology of the late 2030s.
Cybernetically augmented biological bodies
Eventually, replicants may even be housed in cybernetically augmented biological bodies grown from the DNA of the original person (assuming it can be found). And once nanotechnology allows molecular-scale engineering, we’ll be able to create vastly more advanced artificial bodies than what biology allows.
The introduction of replicants will pose many other challenging social and legal questions:
- Are they to be considered people with full human and civil rights (such as the rights to vote and enter into contracts)?
- Are they responsible for contracts signed or crimes previously committed by the person they are replicating?
- Can they take credit for the work or social contributions of the person they are replacing?
- Do you have to remarry your late husband or wife who comes back as a replicant?
- Will replicants be ostracised or face discrimination?
- Under what conditions should the creation of replicants be restricted or banned?
Merging with superintelligent AI
Merging with superintelligent AI will be a worthy achievement, but it is a means to a higher end. Once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate, our self-modification powers can be fully realised. When you start thinking like that, you get into the realms of transhumanism and abundance, all caused by the law of acceleration returns. Imagine the acceleration in feedback loops when you combine AI with quantum computing, nanotechnology, genetics, synthetic biology and increasing computing power. The impact on energy, housing, water, food, agriculture, clothing, medicine, climate, health, space travel, education, etc. will be enormous.
3D printing
3D printing will revolutionise the creation and distribution of physical things. During the late 2020s, we will start to be able to print out clothing and other common goods with 3D printers, ultimately for pennies per pound. One of the key trends in 3D printing is miniaturisation: designing machines that can create ever smaller details on objects. At some point, the traditional 3D-printing paradigms, like extrusion (similar to an inkjet), will be replaced by new approaches for manufacturing at even smaller scales. Scientists are also currently testing techniques that will make printing of human body tissues and, ultimately, whole organs possible. Probably sometime in the 2030s, this will cross into nanotechnology, where objects can be created with atomic precision.
AR and VR
The VR and AR of the late 2020s will merge into a compelling new layer to our reality. At present, most media is limited to engaging two senses: sight and hearing. Current virtual reality systems that incorporate smells or tactile sensations are still clunky and inconvenient. However, over the next couple of decades, brain-computer interface technology will become much more advanced. Ultimately, this will allow full-immersion virtual reality that feeds simulated sensory data directly into our brains. Such technology will bring major and hard-to-predict changes to how we spend our time and the experiences we prioritise.
Solar
AI-assisted breakthroughs in nanotechnology will increase cell efficiency by enabling photovoltaic cells to capture energy from more of the electromagnetic spectrum. Putting tiny structures called nanotubes and nanowires inside solar cells can steadily improve their ability to absorb photons, transport electrons, and generate electric currents. Likewise, placing nanocrystals (including quantum dots) inside cells can increase the amount of electricity generated per photon of sunlight absorbed. Another nanomaterial called black silicon has a surface composed of a vast number of atomic-scale needles smaller than the wavelength of light. For example, companies like SolarWindow Technologies have pioneered thin photovoltaic films that can coat windows, producing useful electricity without blocking the view. And unlike the big, clumsy, rigid panels used today, cells built with nanotech can take many convenient forms: rolls, films, coatings, and more. This will reduce installation costs and give more communities around the world access to cheap, abundant solar power.
Complete coverage of world electricity needs by 2041
Fortunately, we are also starting to make exponential gains in the price efficiency and quantity of energy storage. Convergent advances in materials science, robotic manufacturing, efficient shipping, and energy transmission will also enable continuing exponential gains. The implication is that solar will dominate sometime during the 2030s. At this rate, renewables could theoretically achieve complete coverage of world electricity needs by 2041.
Decentralisation
In general, decentralised technologies will define the 2020s and beyond in many areas, including energy production (solar cells), food production (vertical agriculture), and production of everyday objects (3D printing). Decentralisation empowers consumers and local communities. This contrasts with the paradigm developed during the twentieth century, in which energy, agriculture and manufacturing are largely concentrated in giant corporations. Also, read “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”.
Health
We are beginning to use AI for the discovery and design of drugs and other interventions. By the end of the 2020s, biological simulators will be sufficiently advanced to generate key safety and efficacy data in hours rather than the years that clinical trials typically require. As the 2020s progress, AI-powered tools will reach superhuman performance levels at virtually all diagnostic tasks.
Medical nanorobots
The long-term goal is medical nanorobots. In the 2030s, we will reach the third bridge of radical life extension: medical nanorobots that can intelligently conduct cellular-level maintenance and repair throughout our bodies. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. To maintain our bodies and otherwise counteract health problems, we will all need a huge number of nanobots, each about the size of a cell. The best available estimates say that the human body is made of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we augment ourselves with just one nanobot per one hundred cells, this would amount to several hundred billion nanobots. They could also be used to adjust the concentrations of various substances in our blood to levels more optimal than what would normally occur in the body. Hormones could be tweaked to give us more energy and focus or speed up the body’s natural healing and repair. Eventually, using nanobots for body maintenance and optimisation should prevent major diseases from even arising.
Master our biology
Once nanobots can selectively repair or destroy individual cells, we will fully master our biology, and medicine will become the exact science it has long aspired to be. To do this, we would augment each cell’s nucleus with a nanoengineered counterpart—a system that would receive the DNA code from the central server and then produce a sequence of amino acids from this code. Thanks to these advantages, even our blood supply may be replaced by nanobots. Someone with respirocytes in his bloodstream could hold his breath for about four hours. Nanobots will also allow people to change their cosmetic appearance as never before. Yet the most important role of nanotech in our bodies will be augmenting the brain—which will eventually become more than 99.9% nonbiological.
Catapult
Humanity’s journey toward easier, safer, and more abundant life for all has been progressing for years, decades, centuries, and millennia. We truly have trouble imagining what life was like even a century ago, let alone before that. Our accelerating progress, with substantial gains over the past few decades and profound evolution over the next few decades, will catapult us forward in this positive direction, far beyond what we can now imagine.
AI is the pivotal technology
AI is the pivotal technology that will allow us to meet the pressing challenges that confront us, including overcoming disease, poverty, environmental degradation, and all of our human frailties. We are headed toward an era of abundance that will meet our physical needs, and the primary struggle will then be to satisfy higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. Kurzweil predicts that we will effectively have universal basic income (UBI) or its equivalent by the early 2030s in developed countries and by the late 2030s in most countries. That should counter a lot of the current social unrest…..
A few minor problems
Since AI is emerging from a deeply integrated economic infrastructure, it will reflect our values because, in an important sense, it will be us. We are already a human-machine civilisation, and history shows that society is better at adapting to even dramatic changes than we expect. The only problem will be our policymakers and our economic system (how do you base a GDP on abundance?).
Optimism
Kurzweil is a true techo optimist. A quote from the book; “optimism is not an idle speculation on the future but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy”. If you need any more convincing, pick up any book by Neal Asher. They will give you another fantastic perspective on where AI could bring us.
