THE MERRY PROPHET
Book Review
Title: The Singularity is Near, when humans transcend biology
Author: Ray Kurzweil
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come”
Victor Hugo
Ray Kurzweil should probably have chosen a different, more dramatic first sentence for his book. Somehow “At the age of five, I had the idea I would become an inventor” doesn’t do justice to the scope and power of his basic premise. Nor does it prepare the reader for the almost religious fervor that will permeate great lengths of his work.
Maybe something in the lines of “A spectre is haunting the world, the spectre of Artificial Intelligence” would have been more appropriate. It’s the kind of ominous drumbeat a book like The Singularity is Near, begs for. Its doubtful, however, if mr Kurzweil would be comfortable using the terms of the Communist Manifesto.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. In a book that argues that in a not too distant future, technology will transform us in what we would call by present standards…well…gods, the tone in which it is set, is largely irrelevant. The astute reader will be left with a deep sense of foreboding (plus a healthy dose of suspicion).
Accelerating technological change
To fully grasp mr Kurzweil’s point, it pays to take a quick glance at the history of Human kind. For the sake of the argument, let’s imagine that this entire history, from the emergence of Homo sapiens, through the Pyramids of Cheops up until the iPhone, took place in one single day.
For the longest stretch of this day, nothing much happened. Each generation lived its life essentially as the one before it, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, relying mostly on stone tools. In fact, when we finally stumbled on the relationship between seed and plant it was already 10pm. Needless to say, this insight profoundly changed our relationship with the material world.
Our next great accomplishment, however, took us no more than an hour. Around 4000 years ago, a couple of minutes past eleven by our reckoning, we came up with the written word, and essentially invented information technology.
After that, we became caught in an ever faster spinning whirlwind. Every other human invention, from the telescope to the combustion engine, is packed in the last hour of this marvelous day, the intervals between one innovation and the next getting progressively shorter as we approach midnight.
The point being?
“Well,” mr Kurzweil would answer, “technological change is accelerating, exponentially”. And he would do so with great force. Some critics claim that his choice of technological key events are arbitrary, but that criticism doesn't hold in front of the truckload of supporting data provided in Kurzweil’s book.