Last night I had the pleasure of attending a sold-out screening of Transcendent Man, a documentary film on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist and the author of a book called The Singularity Is Near. I owe a very special thanks to Ken and KT for giving me their extra ticket. Afterwards, Mr. Kurzweil and filmmaker Barry Ptolemy answered a number of questions from members of the audience, who had packed the Laemmle Royal Theater in West LA for this the first of two nights of screenings. It was a fascinating, enlightening experience, one which I will not soon forget.
The film features Mr. Kurzweil delivering his ideas to the camera, including his vision of technological Singularity, the point at which future technology will be advancing so quickly that humans will have to merge with technology in order to extend our own existence and potential. Doing so would give us greater means by which to solve the problems of the future. Kurzweil predicts a future in which humans will no long depend on their bodies, but on the incorporation of artificial intelligence in order to increase knowledge, reverse aging (and by extension achieve immortality), and solve issues plaguing modern society, such as poverty, disease, and the environment. Transcendent Man also features commentary from more than a dozen prominent politicians and scientists who either agree with or take umbrage with Kurzweil’s predictions. The narrative is also weaved together with Kurzweil’s life story, from his childhood and the death of his father to his proclivities and (depending on your interpretation) neuroses.
The underlying principle leading Kurzweil’s ideas is that of exponential growth (also known as the Law Of Accelerating Returns), or the idea that technology is changing and evolving not in a linear fashion (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…30) but an exponential fashion (2, 4, 6, 8, 16…1,073,741,824). For example, when the printing press was created it took 400 years for it to become a regular tool used by the public. It took three years for half a billion people to connect via social networking. In the early twentieth century the average lifespan for a human was about 30 years. Today it’s 78.3 years in the United States. Using current rates of technological advancement and anticipating similar levels of exponential growth, Kurzweil explains in the film that by 2029 machines will become self-aware and surpass human levels of intelligence, and within fifteen years of that date (he calls it 2045) humans and computers will merge in order to extend our lives. In Transcendent Man, Kurzweil describes these advancements as a series of bridges. Our understanding of biology as an information process, and our ability to update it as one would a computer should see us reach a second “bridge” in about fifteen years, at which time bio-technology will become the key to unlocking the third “bridge,” nano-technology, or the ability to integrate biological entities with non-biological ones like blood cell-sized computers. How would that benefit us? Well, one example would be that in humans, White blood cells do not attack cancer cells because they are mistaken as our own bodies’ cells. A nano-computer in our bloodstream would be able to recognize and destroy those cells, thus extending human life even further.
Truly, the man’s ideas are as intriguing as they are revolutionary. And Kurzweil has set some precedent for accurate future predictions before. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union due to new technologies disempowering authoritarian governments. He extrapolated data from computer chess technologies and predicted that in 1998 a computer would beat the best human chess player. That event actually occurred a year earlier than he predicted, in 1997. He also predicted the explosive growth of the Internet which began in the ’90s. At the time of his prediction there were only 2.6 million internet users in the world. He said not only would that number explode, but that users would be grated access “to international networks of libraries, databases and information services.” He predicted wireless Internet access as well, and how it would become widespread in the early 21st century.
So, there is a history of accurate and near-precise predictions on Kurzweil’s side, but there are also detractors and theories that attempt to debunk his ideas. All of these are presented in the film, and each one is presented clearly, and more importantly fairly, which is about as much as one can ask from a documentary film. Two of the most interesting characters were the professor in China who signed a three year contract with the government to build them the first artificial brain, and Kevin Warwick, who has experimented with cybernetic implants on two occasions before. One time he had a transmitter implanted beneath his skin that could control doors, lights, and other computer-controlled devices. A second surgery to install an electrode array that would interface with his nervous system. That system was connected to the Internet in New York City at Columbia University, and from there he was able to control a robotic arm across the Atlantic Ocean in the United Kingdom. Crazy stuff.
The Q&A session afterwards was equally compelling, as people in the audience asked questions ranging from environmental issues to ethical and moral implications of a human-machine civilization. Furthermore, as I sit here writing this blog post, Kurzweil is taking part in an interview on a local talk radio station, answering even more questions about his theories. Some interesting points he’s raised during this interview include:
– Watson, the computer which competed against (and dominated) two Jeopardy champions this week, was never spoonfed material, it went onto the Internet and learned the information and processed it itself. It was able to apply an almost-human level of intelligence, which was evident in the fact that it was able to understand natural language, jokes, irony and puns…the kinds of things some said computers would never be able to master. If one believes in the Law Of Accelerating Returns, this tremendous progress will only increase exponential in the future. Watson shows that machines don’t really have that much further to go as far as reaching human levels of intelligence. It can master data and information right now, but once machines reach human levels of thought they will inherently be beyond us due to their ability master new information so quickly.
– As far as replicating consciousness and emotion are concerned…Kurzweil sees emotion as a way of thinking, not something that is magical. Even Watson had some ideas about emotion or he would not have been able to play the game the way human competitors do. The 2029 date predicted by Kurzweil really means human emotional replication by machines. The logical aspects of the human mind are already in place and have been pretty much mastered. Machines can outthink humans on a logical level. Emotions, like the idea of getting up in front of an audience and telling a joke, that’s going to require about 20 years of technological advancement.
– When asked if Singularity means thoughts could be downloaded/uploaded into a machine and transferred into a computer, allowing the human body to die but the mind to exist, Kurzweil explained that it will be a gradual transition. We will start by inserting computers into our brains (people already do that, such as Parkinsons patients who use internal devices to improve functionality). There will be a rise in the amount of computerized organs implanted into humans. That will increase in regularity with the advent of surgery-free implantation. In short, we will become increasingly non-biological, and at some point the non-bioligical parts of our bodies will be able to understand the remaining biological portion of our bodies and replicate that.
– As far as the fear that computers will advance and realize they have no use for humans anymore, Kurzweil believes that we did not create computers to replace us, but to extend us. The invention of fire brought good and evil to the world, and it is his belief that our continued technological advancement and the coming Singularity will be more of the same. And while the ultimate goal is eternal life, we can never say that we will live forever. As far as technology destroying us, Kurzweil admits that we are right now a human-machine civilization. Technology has the potential to destroy us already. If all the world’s technology stops working tomorrow, how would we operate banks? How would we communicate? We are already too-deeply involved to cease advancement based on that fear. “It’s not us versus them,” Kurzweil just said, “It’s more like them becoming like us.”
Check out the Transcendent Man website for details about upcoming screenings, DVDs and digital downloads.
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[Image courtesy of Square Wave]
