The Singularity

The following post comes from WIRED magazine, a publication I read cover to cover every month. A subscription only runs about ten dollars per year and it's full of great articles that deal with diverse subjects, mostly science and tech.

I found the following article online today during a break at work. I assume it's in the hard copy I have but I haven't gotten around to that yet. This article explains one of my favorite subjects: the singularity. If you're not familiar with what the singularity is, this article is a great place to start. You can also go to the collective conscious repository (wikipedia) and check out a more formal, straightforward take on this somewhat slippery concept. Here's a direct link.

Essentially this guy Kurzweil wants to immortalize himself via software. Although there is something to be said for continuing our quest to improve the computational power of the machines we call computers, I couldn't help but feel bad for this guy, and all others, who are searching for answers to their most terrible fears, such as death, in man made machines.

The key to overcoming death and every other "challenge" lie within us as a gift from God and have been around since ancient times. The human brain, for example, and our very physiology, are the most advanced "machines" on the earth. Make sure to check out the link at the bottom of this post, after the first page of this article, for some information about how incredibly powerful the brain is. Indeed, the human brain is structure we're still unlocking and it's been around A LOT longer than our microprocessors!

The most wondrous machine (pictured above).

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This is only the first page of the article. The whole article can be found here at wired.com.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

By Gary Wolf 03.24.08 | 6:00 PM

Photo: Rennio Maifredi

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.

Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.

There are singularity conferences now, and singularity journals. There has been a congressional report about confronting the challenges of the singularity, and late last year there was a meeting at the NASA Ames Research Center to explore the establishment of a singularity university. The meeting was called by Peter Diamandis, who established the X Prize. Attendees included senior government researchers from NASA, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a pioneer of private space exploration, and two computer scientists from Google.

At this meeting, there was some discussion about whether this university should avoid the provocative term singularity, with its cosmic connotations, and use a more ordinary phrase, like accelerating change. Kurzweil argued strongly against backing off. He is confident that the word will take hold as more and more of his astounding predictions come true.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

Make sure you check out this link if you found the above interested. It goes into a brief explanation of some of the ways the brain is like a computer...or a super, duper computer rather.

Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science